In a recent interview Elliott Carter reaffirmed his commitment to ‘modernism’, a concept which he went on to define – with respect to music – as ‘the concern with an expanded vocabulary which Stravinsky, Varése and Schoenberg introduced before the first world war – and after’. This ‘expanded vocabulary’ involved ‘Not only the whole field of dissonance, but also new points of view about rhythm and new sonorities’. Carter's musical modernism was also bound up with an awareness ‘that we were living in a world… completely changed by the writings of Freud’ and that ‘the whole sense of the subconscious and the conscious were much more intricately involved that we had thought’.