Wealth & Money Quote by Elliott Carter

Carter’s line reads like polite gratitude, but it quietly sketches the power map behind “new music.” He’s talking about moneyed patrons as cultural transmitters: not just buying tickets, but underwriting the machinery that makes difficult, uncompromising work audible in public at all. The word “diffuse” does a lot of work. It’s almost scientific, suggesting contemporary music as something that can spread through a social medium if the conditions are right. That’s a composer’s fantasy of circulation, but also a reminder that circulation is engineered.

The subtext is less about generosity than about infrastructure. Contemporary classical music in the 20th century didn’t travel the way pop did; it needed salons, commissions, foundations, presenters, universities, and critics willing to treat complexity as a civic good. “These wealthy people” becomes a discreet acknowledgment that modernism’s reputation for austerity was, paradoxically, sustained by privilege. Their “interest” isn’t neutral taste; it’s a form of gatekeeping that can protect experimentation from the market while also deciding which experiments count.

Carter’s tone stays measured, almost documentary, which fits his music: rigorous, unsentimental, engineered for attention. In context, it’s a snapshot of how an elite audience helped make an elite art form legible - sometimes out of genuine curiosity, sometimes because sponsoring the new is a way to sponsor the future with your name on it. The line flatters the patrons, but it also admits the deal: modern music survived by being adopted before it was widely loved.