Time & Perspective Quote by Elliott Carter

A single economic shock becomes, in Carter's telling, an aesthetic regime change. He’s not nostalgically pining for some lost golden age so much as marking a hard pivot in the social machinery that makes difficult art possible. The key move is how he slides from “the Depression” to “the entire public” as if one event rewired an audience’s temperament. That leap is the subtext: taste isn’t just personal preference; it’s a civic ecosystem, and when the money goes, the patience goes with it.

Carter is diagnosing the collapse of a particular kind of cultural patronage that early 20th-century modernism depended on: private wealth, adventurous institutions, and a class of listeners who treated new music as a public good rather than a consumer product. The Depression doesn’t merely shrink budgets; it changes expectations. “Support…in a direct way” hints at the loss of hands-on underwriting and social advocacy - donors commissioning, ensembles taking risks, communities organizing around premieres - replaced by more cautious, market-tested programming. In other words, culture moves from being sponsored to being sold.

Coming from Carter - a composer whose music often asks listeners to tolerate complexity, friction, and time - the line reads as both observation and quiet complaint. He’s tracing why the mid-century American audience and its institutions grew wary of contemporary music’s demands. Not because people suddenly got “worse,” but because economic trauma trained them to want art that reassures, not art that argues. The Depression becomes a filter that selects for immediacy and familiarity, leaving modernist ambition sounding, unfairly, like extravagance.