Elliott Carter: On his 104th Birthday Anniversary

Elliott Carter would have been 104 today.

And while it’s true Beethoven would be 242 coming up on the 16th, Elliott Carter would’ve actually been 104 today if he’d lived a few weeks longer: he died on November 5th, 2012, at the age of 103, just five weeks and a day before his birthday. 

Over the years, I have collected numerous scores and recording of Carter’s music and have often thought about getting a copy of David Schiff’s “The Music of Elliott Carter” which everybody points to as “the” book about Carter’s music. The price aside, the main reason I kept putting it off was the fact it was written around the time Carter was turning 70: it seemed a reasonable time for a retrospective, I guess, especially one written by a composer who had studied with him at the time. Who knew he would live another three decades? So I guess I’ve been waiting for an updated version that would include the 40 pieces he wrote between the ages of 90 and 100, and then “over 14 more” composed since he turned 100.

When a composer dies young, we wonder about the possibilities of what has been left unwritten. Yet even at 103, Elliott Carter was still composing and had plans for other new works. Given the productivity of this “Post-Late Period,” I wonder what else we might have had from him?

His last completed work is a set of 12 Short Epigrams for Piano, finished on August 13th, 2012.

While browsing on-line for other books, scores or recordings of Carter’s music, I found a used copy of David Schiff’s book available through Better World Books in Indiana (Mishawaka and Goshen) and it arrived yesterday: I felt like a kid opening a present on Christmas Eve, the book about Elliott Carter arriving on the day before his birthday – or now, officially, his birthday anniversary…

The book, mostly written around the time Carter was turning 70, begins with a brief survey of his life (till then) – including many anecdotes or observations not found in the traditional “and-then-I-wrote” biographical summary.

For instance, this has to go down in the annals of music appreciation anecdotes about unsupportive parents, along with Handel not being allowed contact with musical instruments as a child because his disapproving father didn’t want to distract him from his application to more practical studies in law (but the boy smuggled a small keyboard instrument, probably a clavidchord, into the house’s attic where he would go practice once others in the house had gone to sleep and thus taught himself how to play).

In Carter’s case, his father and grandfather had been lace importers in New York City and he was being groomed at an early age for the international trade, learning to speak French before he could read English. There was little interest in music in the family but Carter, as a student, discovered modern music and preferred it over the standard classics of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. As Schiff describes it, the “family’s yearly business trips to Europe allowed him to purchase new scores unavailable in New York” (we’re talking 1920s, here) “ – his favorite composers were Scriabin and Stravinsky.”

It is a well-known story that hearing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring made him want to become a composer – he heard the New York premiere and, in several live interviews given around his 100th birthday, often told the story one of the things he liked about it was it was strong enough to literally drive people out of the hall: if he could write music that was that powerful, he would be happy. In a sense, Carter’s music has maybe not driven people out of the hall in the droves that the Rite of Spring did, then, but he has never been an easy composer to “like,” for a vast majority of listeners.

But Carter’s parents were not keen on the idea of his becoming a composer.

“[W]hen he bought a piano roll of Stravinsky’s ballet [in the days before recordings were available], his parents sold their player piano, and familial warfare was declared.”

That is only the beginning, apparently.

Though he studied and performed new music with Clifton Furness, a teacher of his at the Horace Mann School which he attended between 1920-1926 (he was 11-17), it was his decision to study in Paris that finally brought down the big familial guns: his father immediately cut his annual allowance down to $500 a year. “The punishment involved sacrifice if not squalor – Carter says his teeth never recovered from those years of neglect. The family, whose fortunes do not seem to have suffered in the Depression, further reduced Carter’s allowance after his return to the States in 1935” (in his mid-20s).

This, however, is the ultimate parental non-supportive slap:

“Friends of the composer say that his parents never attended concerts of his music. His father died in 1955” (the year he completed his Variations for Orchestra, his first major work after the ground-breaking 1st String Quartet); “his mother died in 1970” (the year before his 3rd String Quartet, certainly one of his most complex pieces).

No doubt, holiday dinners with the Carters must have been very chilly.

One thing Schiff mentions in this opening chapter made me think:

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“When a composer grows up in a cultured musical family he tends to be conservative. The family presents him with the classics of music, takes him to concerts, gives him the best of teachers, prepares him to enter the musical establishment. The young composer is rewarded for imitating the classics, an activity which is often confused with composition. When the family lacks musical culture, however, a young composer can develop without the prejudices of the past. Particularly in American society, where the past is apparently so unimportant and history scarcely seems to exist, it is far more natural for a young composer to be attracted to the latest thing. And if the latest thing offends the parents, so much the better.”
(The Music of Elliott Carter by David Schiff, 1st Edition, p.14)
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That composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert or Wagner began their lives in artistically aware families (Wagner’s step-father was an actor and his early background is primarily theatrical), that didn’t stop them from going beyond the musical status quo later in their careers. Certainly, Mendelssohn, who grew up in the lap of luxury, by comparison to most famous composers, never really became a ground-breaking avant-garde composer, but I had always assumed Elliott Carter, the son of a wealthy businessman with a considerable financial fortune, had been a kind of modern-day Mendelssohn, in terms of family wealth and, perhaps, support.

Not so!

And rather shockingly not so! at that. It amazes me even more that a young boy could continue under such lack of support – in fact, downright “warfare” – from his parents. This goes a long way to explain why Carter was adamant about being his own composer and not caring whether people liked his music or not, as that famous quote I mentioned in a recent post, which refers to a rather epiphanic moment from the 1940s:

“As a young man, I harbored the populist idea of writing for the public. I learned that the public didn’t care. So I decided to write for myself. Since then, people have gotten interested.”

This is not the arrogant “Who Cares if You Listen?” attitude (the unfortunate title some copywriter gave a newspaper article by fellow composer Milton Babbitt) thrown at so many modern artists who appear to deny pleasure to the general audience (the same could be said of Beethoven and his late quartets). It is a more practical realization that, in order to write music that is true to the artist’s creative intent, it needs first to interest the artist.

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As used books go, my ‘new’ copy of David Schiff’s book looked brand new: it was a library copy withdrawn from the Unger Memorial Library in Plainview, Texas, and judging from the looks of it had probably never been signed out.

It is a first edition, published in 1983 by Eulenburg Press, and basically ends with the “Night Fantasies” composed in 1980. An updated second edition came out in 1998 in time for his 90th birthday.

Some of my favorite works by Carter have been composed since that first edition: 

String Quartet No. 4 (1986)
Oboe Concerto (1986-1987)
Three Occasions for Orchestra (1986-1989)
Violin Concerto (1989)
Quintet for Piano & Winds (1991)
String Quartet No. 5 (1995)
Clarinet Concerto (1996)
Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei (1993-1996) (originally issued as three separate works as each movement was completed)
Piano Quintet (1997)
What Next? opera (1997)

These, then, are just some of the works he composed after his 90th birthday and therefore were probably not included in Schiff's second edition:

Two Diversions (for piano) (1999)
ASKO Concerto for 16 players (2000)
Retrouvailles (for piano) (2000)
Cello Concerto (2001)
Oboe Quartet (2001)
Boston Concerto (2002)
Dialogues for Piano & Orchestra (2003)
Mosaic (for Harp & Ensemble) (2004)
Two Thoughts about the Piano (2005-2006), especially Catenaires
Clarinet Quintet (2007) (I'd heard the world premiere of this)
Horn Concerto (2007)

And several recent works that I’ve not heard yet or been able to get recordings of:

Interventions (for Piano & Orchestra) (2007)
Flute Concerto (2008)
Nine by Five (Wind Quintet) (2009)
“What Are Years” for Soprano & Chamber Orchestra (2009)
“A Sunbeam’s Architecture” for Tenor and Chamber Orchestra (2010)
Two Controversies and a Conversation for Piano, Percussion & Chamber Ensemble (2010-2011)
Three Explorations for Bass-Baritone, Winds & Brass (2011)
String Trio (2011)
Double Trio (for Trumpet, Trombone, Percussion, Piano, Violin & Cello) (2011)
Instances (for Chamber Orchestra) (2012)
and of course, the last piece he completed,
12 Short Epigrams (for piano) (Aug. 13th, 2012)

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As I get ready to reconnect with my composing side (even before I finish the novel, The Lost Chord), I am continuing to sketch out some ideas for a piano quintet which, I suspect, I will dedicate to Elliott Carter’s memory.

I only talked to the man once, as I’ve told the story before, standing on-line for tickets to an all-Carter concert with all three of his string quartets back when he was turning 70. He was very approachable and talked easily and with interest in who I was and when I said I had taught at the University of Connecticut, he said "Then you must know Charles Whittenberg [a composer who also taught there]. He's a very fine composer!" (when I told Charlie that, he was floating on air for a week).

Yet I never had the courage to go up and say hello (not that he would remember me) when I saw him at that concert when the Pacifica Quartet played all five of his string quartets. He was, at the time, two months shy of turning 100 and his assistant, Virgil Blackwell, had escorted Carter into the lobby and sat him down on a bench while he went to pick up the tickets.

There was an immediate hush from everybody around me and when I turned around, I was only a few yards from Elliott Carter, my favorite living composer, soon to be 100! And yet I couldn’t go up and say hello or congratulate him.

Nor could anyone else.

We all stood around in respectful but silent admiration, literally gazing upon him as he sat there, unaware of those around us, unconcerned about being the composer he was in our eyes.

And then Virgil came back, helped Carter up and led him into the hall. He could have been any frail old man coming out to hear a concert.

I feel sad that he is gone, even though he lived to be almost 104. I mean, how amazing is that? And that he wrote all this music since he’d turned 70? But I still wish there had been more time for more music – no 6th Quartet, apparently, alas – but after reading those paragraphs in Schiff’s book about Carter and his parents, what better revenge, if you wanted to think of it that way, to have lived that long and produced that much music, to be regarded as one of the most important living composers of your time?

Like Beethoven’s deafness or Schubert’s health, I wonder how different Carter’s music might have been if his parents had supported him? Perhaps he would be more popular, perhaps he would already have been forgotten.

It is what it is and we have what we have.

And I, for one, am glad at least of that much.

- Dick Strawser

Elliott Carter, On His Passing

Elliott Carter died yesterday afternoon at the age of 103.

So I suppose it shouldn’t have come as such a shock to me when I decided, going to bed after the local 11:00 news (which of course would never mention such an item in all the election hoopla), to check my e-mail and find something there from the publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, announcing his passing.

I haven’t felt this bereft over the death of a living composer since Benjamin Britten died on Dec. 6th, 1976. He had been ill for some time – he had heart surgery postponed so he could complete the opera Death in Venice – and his recovery was not very hopeful. But still, the news came as a shock mostly because, now, I knew there would never be another new work by a composer who had been my favorite living composer.

In the past 36 years since then, Elliott Carter has become my “favorite living composer.” It’s ironic that, with the Britten Centennial coming up a year from this month, Carter attended his Centennial Celebration and in fact had written several new works for the occasion. There was something of an expectation, having made it to 103, he would make it to 104. He was about five weeks shy of his next birthday.

I remember sitting in a friend’s apartment when I was a senior in college and the news on the radio announced the death of Igor Stravinsky. As a student, I was still unfamiliar with a lot of his more recent music beyond the three great ballets which began his career – ironically, the Centennial for the premiere of his most famous work, The Rite of Spring, is also next year. I had been disappointed in many of his neo-classical works in the 1930s and ‘40s, by comparison, and though I liked works like Threni and the “Huxley” Variations, I didn’t quite understand them or their significance in his catalogue of works. I can’t say I grieved after Stravinsky’s death – saddened by it, yes, but it was different. I was not yet 22, Stravinsky was 88 – it seemed such a ripe old, nearly unattainable age – and though I was conscious the man called “the world’s greatest living composer” was not the most popular living composer during his lifetime, certainly not for the works he composed in the last 50-some years of his life, I was aware his death meant a loss for a world that was so important to me.

The one thing that struck me was someone being interviewed – I don’t recall who – was asked in typical interview fashion, “So who do you think is now The World’s Greatest Composer?”

It made me think of a record collection of 12 LPs (if you remember them) which was called “The Music of the World’s Greatest Composers” and which ranged from Bach’s 1st Brandenburg Concerto (1720s) to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) which, even in the ‘60s when I was given this for Christmas, seemed to leave a considerable lapse with no representative music from anyone writing in the last fifty years.

Listening to the radio interview, I tried to think who that composer might be who would inherit Stravinsky’s crown. I didn’t know of that many “current” composers – after all, the way most of us discover music is through recordings, going to concerts, listening to broadcasts on the radio or television (at least in those years): the living composers I was most familiar with would have been Britten or Samuel Barber, I guess.

So I was surprised when the respected figure being interviewed said “I would have to guess it would probably be Elliott Carter.”

And I said, basically, “Who?”

As I’ve broadened my musical tastes after being able to broaden my musical experience as a more voracious listener, I came to understand why he thought Carter might be considered “The Greatest” though that didn’t necessarily mean “The Best” or, certainly, “The Most Popular.” All of these elements are fairly meaningless and impossible to define: the No. 1 Novel on most lists of Greatest Novels Ever Written (whoever determines these) has usually been James Joyce’s Ulysses though it would never qualify as one of the “Most Often Read Novels.”

But does that mean it can’t be a “Greatest” Novel? Sometimes, the more enduring art is that which is respected more than it is loved.

I can’t say I like every piece of music Carter ever wrote but as I became more familiar with it and heard many live performances – I’ve written a great deal, here, about some of these: the string quartets, the world premiere of his recent Clarinet Quintet, for example – I came to understand something behind the music that made it speak to me far deeper than many other composers’ works.

His 1st String Quartet was probably the first work of his I heard that I enjoyed and, after a few hearings, came to love. His concept of space and time – the independence of each instrumental line in terms of both content or character as well as perceived tempo – resonated with me a lot more than many other composers of the day, though stylistically, as I was looking around for my own voice, I would say Britten on the one hand and Messiaen and Penderecki (then still in his more avant-garde ‘70s mode) on other stylistic hands were more significant for my own sound.

But eventually, I found that more and more Carter’s music resonated with me much more deeply, especially after I had a chance to hear the then all-three Carter Quartets in 1979, meeting the composer in front of me at the line for tickets the day before the concert – he was then 70 and was considered to be close to retirement age for a composer. More recently, I’d heard the complete string quartets of Elliott Carter: he had, only a few weeks earlier, turned 99 and written two more. There was hope he might get around to composing a sixth before too much longer...

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1/4

2/4

3/4

4/4

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Unfortunately, the poster at YouTube does not mention which recording he’s using, but if you don’t have time to listen to the whole quartet, listen to the opening few minutes of clip 1, and also the opening 20 seconds of clip 4 which reminds me of a tribute to an early mentor of his, Charles Ives, not to mention a brief “swing” section beginning at 1:31 (which reminds me that Carter, rather than listening to Beethoven, might more often be found hanging out in the jazz clubs in The Village) in addition to the ending, beginning around 5:10.

At the moment, I don’t have the time to write as much as I would like (or could), but whoever inherits the mantel of “World’s Greatest Living Composer” is a moot point, for me, not because by this time I’m now forty years younger than Mr. Carter was, such things are – like the invention of “The Three Bs” – more about marketing than music.

Ironically, I am finishing up a novel in which the villain (Tr’iTone) is trying to find the Fountain of Inspiration so he can become The Greatest Composer Who Ever Lived. One of the characters is an American composer named Howard Zender (the name is a play on E.M. Forster’s novel, Howards End with its famous epigram, “Only connect!”) who is clearly modeled after Elliott Carter (though he is only 90-something, here). In fact, in the original draft of The Lost Chord he was Elliott Carter and I even imitated many of his speech patterns, initially, having listened to numerous interviews of his over the last decade, but then decided it was, perhaps, too much an invasion of privacy to turn him into a novel’s character outright as it might be a misuse of intellectual property absorbing his ideas and his personal sound. (I’m still debating, given the Forster connection, about changing his name to Howard Zenn, especially amusing (to me) considering his music is anything but Zen-like.)

But now, I wish to go compose again, something I have not done for over a year – spending most of it working on this revision of The Lost Chord. In the past, his music inspired me to start composing again in 2000 after a long hiatus and I feel the resonance stirring again (speaking of that lost inner chord).

At the moment, I don’t know how it will surface but I am sure, once again, I will discover that the public, frankly, doesn’t care.

One thing Carter and his music have taught me: write for yourself. By sticking to his convictions and what mattered to him, he has written music that is above all sincere, not meant to appeal to any particular –ism in our very –ismatic society.

And no artist can do more than that.

- Dick Strawser

Elliott Carter: Happy 103rd

Today is Elliott Carter’s birthday.

Yesterday, I was talking to some students of mine at the State Street Academy and mentioned that the compositions most people consider the first major works of the new 20th Century Style – Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – were composed around 1911-1912. Pointing out that, here we are in 2011-2012, perhaps the first “great” works in what may become the new 21st Century Style have yet to be heard, when it occurred to me Elliott Carter is actually older than Pierrot Lunaire and The Rite of Spring.

He was born in 1908.

Last Thursday, several musicians played three world premieres of works by Elliott Carter plus three additional works that had received their premieres in Europe earlier in the year. They had all been composed in the past year.

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Correction: Reports I'd read in the new music press indicated three world premieres and three American premieres on the program. Since I was unable to attend, this was all I could go by. As it turned out, one of those works mentioned in the Sequenza21 post (see below) talked about the Double Trio which seemed to be a world premiere. When I've since found the 92nd Street Y's page about the concert, it indicated the Double Trio was one of the American premieres. Then, to add to the confusion, two short works composed in November were added to the program and announced from the stage! So in actuality, there were four world premieres! Thanks to Joe Barron for the correction: he was there and you can read his review here: love the bit about getting a chance to meet Carter afterwards.
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And Mr. Carter, looking frail but with a twinkle in his eyes, was in attendance and accepted the audience’s applause and birthday greetings, though his 103rd Birthday isn’t officially until today.

(You can read the New York Times review, here. The photograph of Carter (see above) taken at the performance is by Times photographer, Richard Termine. Carter is seated with Carol Archer who produced this program at the 92nd Street Y.)

There is, of course, the amazement that anybody is 103. More amazing is that he’s out and about, attending concerts in New York City. Still more amazing is that he’s sharp as a tack. Perhaps most amazing is he’s still composing.

Follow this post at Sequenza21 by cellist Fred Sherry, a musical collaborator with Carter and long-time champion of his music and, not coincidentally, a close friend.

Basically, Carter called Sherry at various times asking him about playing a certain combination of chords on the cello (“good, they’re in my new Double Trio”), if a viola could hold a high F-sharp for two slow measures (“good, that’s the ending of my new String Trio”) and telling him he’s thinking of setting the poetry of e. e. cummings for tenor and chamber orchestra.

That’s when Sherry decided these new works should be heard to celebrate his impending birthday, No. 103.

Two other new works were brief – a duet for cello and bass clarinet (for Mr. Sherry and Virgil Blackwell who has served as Carter’s secretary and assistant over the past several years) was composed on Nov. 5th, 2011; and “Mnemosyné,” composed on Nov. 17, written for solo violin. World premieres, these were added to the program and announced from the stage.

UPDATE: Elliott Carter (lower left corner) accepting the audience's applause at the end of the concert, following the world premiere of "A Sunbeam's Architecture," composed earlier this year (you can see what a substantial chamber ensemble this is). Photograph by Cory Weaver and posted at Sequenza21.
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In a separate interview reported (unexpectedly) in the New York Daily News, Carter mentioned how in the ‘70s he was writing this vast orchestral works with huge complex scores (and I mean physically huge) that might take him a whole year to compose. But now, due to physical limitations among other things, he prefers smaller combinations and shorter works, producing a series of miniatures, pointing to an even newer piece he'd been working on as a Christmas present for oboist Heinz Holliger which he says took him three days.

When I met Elliott Carter, standing in a box office line at the 92nd street Y in 1978 – he was celebrating his 70th birthday with a performance of all three of his string quartets there – most people then would’ve assumed he’d be ‘retiring’ soon, as old composers often do. So his newest works then – like the mind-blowingly complex vocal piece Syringa which I heard at its premiere – were considered music of his Late Period (you know how Beethoven is divided into three parts, Early – Middle – Late?) but Carter just kept composing and producing a whole range of new works headed in a less dense but rarely less complex direction which, for lack of a better term, people started referring to as his “Late Late Music” or “Post-Late Music.”

Since his 100th birthday, as one recent interview reported, he has completed 19 new compositions.

In 2008, on the verge of his Centennial Birthday, I heard the Pacifica Quartet play all five of his string quartets (see photo, left) and was cheered to see, after the Pacifica commissioned him for another quartet, a sixth, he said “well, in a few years I should be about ready to write another string quartet.”

And yet it’s still possible. 2012 will be a “few years” after his 100th birthday, after all…

(Incidentally, joking recently with the guys from the JACK Quartet when they were in town, their bio says the oldest original work in their repertoire is Charles Ives String Quartet No. 2 which was written between 1911-1913 which means Elliott Carter is also older than their "oldest" piece. Yet they haven't played any of Carter's quartets yet, though they've wanted to work with him. "I wouldn't wait too long, you know... but maybe by then, there'll be a sixth quartet to work on.")

There are two song cycles being premiered this week – the Cummings poems on the 8th and three new songs setting poems by T.S. Eliot for bass baritone and chamber ensemble. These are not miniatures but fairly substantial works given their scope, length and instrumentation.

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For this birthday post, I thought I’d check out a few piano pieces. I'd recently posted the early Cello Sonata (1948) with the Cello Concerto (2000) so this time I want to post the Piano Sonata, another mid-1940s piece, with three short, more recent pieces.

Here is Ursula Oppens, long associated with Carter’s music, playing a piano sonata in the “grand style” that could belong in the repertoire of any pianist who plays the huge B Minor Sonata of Franz Liszt or comparable sonatas by Samuel Barber or Aaron Copland. It may not be what Carter sounds like now but it is one of Carter’s great early works and an incredibly imaginative one that has a lot of Carter’s later fingerprints already evident.

One of these stylistic traits is the juxtaposition of time, something that is fluid as a psychological experience. Like counterpoint in which one independent melodic line is pitted against another independent melodic line, Carter does this with two strands that seem to move in different tempos. It might be easy to explain it as 16th notes moving against quarter notes in Bach except in Carter, the pulse of one strand might be dotted quarters and the pulse of the other strand could be dotted eighth notes. One could be metronomically strict (clock-time) and the other one more fluid, more varied, less “ticky.” That’s basically the distinction in the Cello Sonata where the clock-like piano part (very logical, clean and architecturally Left Brained) is pitted against the rhapsodic cello part (unexpectedly varied, by comparison, emotionally Right Brained and, in a way, “messy”). While not as overt as the later cello sonata, you can still hear this in the Piano Sonata, in addition to the strongly contrasting ideas that are differentiated by, for instance, the opening blocks of sound and the subsequent scurrying passages (one of Carter’s favorite descriptors is the Italian scorrevole).

#1 - First part of Piano Sonata, 1st Movement.

#2 - Second part of Piano Sonata, 1st Movement.

#3 - First part of Piano Sonata, 2nd Movement.

#4 - Second part of Piano Sonata, 2nd Movement.

There are many things that may sound “traditional,” particularly the development and restatement of material (themes, if you will) which is not much different than you’d hear in a Beethoven or the Liszt sonata. Compare the very opening of Clip #3 (on a D moving to a D/C) with the very opening of Clip #4 (where it’s now E-flat and D-flat) which, at 2:00, sounds like a recapitulation on D but instead of a C-natural, it’s now a C-sharp which means the tension is still not yet resolved until, at the end, it reaches a broad and beatific B-major chord, the tonality in which the sonata began.

There’s even something as “academically traditional” as a fugue (Clip #3, beginning at 3:49) which is primarily in B-flat Minor.

Now, fast forward through the next fifty-three years to 1999 and two short pieces written for Ursula Oppens, called “Two Diversions.”

In this first clip, the performer (Marc Hannaford) sets a metronome to the “pulse” of the one time-strand, a slow but steady ticking line of intervals, against which Carter juxtaposes another more varied and often wildly contradictory, rhapsodic line (not very different from what he was doing in the Cello Sonata of 1948) but here, just single notes usually against the clock-like intervals. Even though the metronome you hear has nothing to do with the rhythmic or metric notation of the piece (trust me!!!), it’s a way to help you focus on one aspect of the piece.


Here is the piece in performance (without metronome) by Thorsten Kuhn, recorded on Carter’s 100th Birthday.



Then, one last short, recent piece, a brilliant barrage of notes (mostly single notes one at a time but all over the keyboard), called Caténaires, about 3 1/2 minutes of constantly cascading 16th notes premiered by Pierre-Laurent Aimard on Carter’s 98th Birthday just a few days after he’d received the manuscript in the mail. Here, it’s performed by Sean Chen.


This has been described as “the unlikeliest piano piece” by Elliott Carter who, on the verge of his 98th Birthday, was still experimenting with the idea of how you create sounds and constantly discover something new to say.

We should also be so lucky, at that age.

At any age…

Happy 103rd Birthday, Mr. Carter – and many more!

- Dick Strawser

For additional posts about Elliott Carter and his music, please follow these links:
Hearing the Five String Quartets with the Pacifica Quartet in 2008.
Hearing the world premiere of the Clarinet Quintet in 2008.
The Cello Sonata and the Cello Concerto.
New Works at 102.
Carter at 102.
Carter at 101.
Carter at 100.

Elliott Carter and the Cello: Sonata, Concerto

If you've followed this blog for any period of time, you're probably aware one of my favorite composers is Elliott Carter who will turn 103 in three months. His publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, had posted three short films from an interview recorded last year in which Carter discusses his life, his music and what motivated his creativity over the years.

Film No. 1 -- The Early Years
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Film No. 2 -- Symphony and Opera
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Film No. 3 -- Poets and Composers

Thanks to John Clare for pointing these out to me.

I've been wanting to post these two videos from YouTube for a long time and just haven't gotten around to it (as I've put off so many things: procrastinatus sum), so here are two works by Carter written for the cello during different periods of his career.

The Cello Sonata, written in 1948, was a breakthrough piece, leaving his populist style behind and establishing many of the ideas that would identify his future musical voice, especially the rhythmic complexities as well as the contrapuntal layering of textures. Here, the cello plays a rhapsodic, emotional line (very "right-brain") against the severely logical piano part with its almost metronomic regularity (very "left-brain").

The argument, whether in Bach's day or Brahms', concerned the role of the brain versus the role of the heart which were usually considered to be mutually exclusive. Carter combines the two in an on-going dialogue to create a unified work of disparate elements.

This video includes the score, but as often happens with YouTube postings, the performers are not credited.
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For some reason, this poster apparently did not get around to the 4th Movement, so here is a different (and likewise uncredited!) performance recorded by students at McGill University in 2009.
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Here is Elliott Carter writing for the cello 52 years later. The Cello Concerto, written for Yo-Yo Ma, was composed in 2000 and premiered September 27th, 2001. This video was filmed at the dress rehearsal for a performance by Juilliard student Dane Johansen with the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by James Levine. Mr. Johansen won the Juilliard's Concerto Competition that year and had since gone on to become a member of the Escher Quartet.

Recently, I posted about more recent works by Mr. Carter, one completed and premiered in November, 2010, and another premiered this past June.

- Dr. Dick
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Header photo credit: screen-capture from opening of Boosey&Hawkes documentary film directed by Tommy Pearson of Red Ted Films.

The Latest from Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter’s 103rd Birthday may be less than six months away – is it more cumbersome to refer to someone as 102½? – and even though he is writing less than he’s been in the past few years (there was a veritable flood of new works leading up to his 100th birthday), he is still composing even if they’re “short” works. But what Carter packs into a piece in ten minutes can still make a major statement.

There have been two recent premieres of works composed in 2010 and both with orchestra – which means there are a lot of details involved, more than writing short pieces for just a few instruments.

You can read Joe Barron’s account of the Concertino for Bass Clarinet & Orchestra, receiving its American premiere in New York City earlier this month (it received its world premiere in Toronto last November).

Composed for Virgil Blackwell, one of the best bass clarinet performers on the planet, who has long been Mr. Carter’s assistant, the work apparently came as a surprise: his first awareness of the piece was a fax from Carter with a few measures of music for bass clarinet and the typical composer’s query, “is this possible?”

Boosey & Hawkes, the publisher’s website, wrote:
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“One of the centenarian composer’s most recent works, the Concertino received its world premiere this past December in Toronto in an all-Carter concert celebrating the composer’s102nd birthday. The world premiere performance also featured Blackwell as soloist. In his review of the concert, Robert Everett-Green of Toronto’s Globe and Mail said ‘the Concertino...conjured a magical passage of deeply resonant sound that was much more than the sum of its parts.’”
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There is also another work for soloists and chamber orchestra that was premiered on June 26th, just two days ago, at the Aldeburgh Festival in England, a work they commissioned and the third recent work they’ve premiered.

The review in the Guardian, posted yesterday, refers to the double concerto for piano, percussion and a chamber orchestra of 20 players as “Dialogues” which is confusing, since Carter called a 2003 work for piano and orchestra written for Daniel Barenboim “Dialogues” (and there is a “Dialogues II” in the works, for Barenboim, as well). The Boosey & Hawkes website refers to this new work as “Conversations” (close but no cigar).

This review, posted at the Telegraph (which contains a generic you-tube video interview with Carter), gets the name right.

[Updated 6-29: ...and this review, from London's Financial Times.]

Joe Barron’s blog, “Liberated Dissonance,” also mentions, in a response to a reader’s comment, there are other works in addition to “Conversations” in the Carter Pipeline: “Dialogues II, written for Barenboim; a sextet (for unspecified instruments) that is also rather reminiscent of the 70s; and a brief string trio that was described to me as a tiny viola concerto.”

Incidentally, Mr. Barron has also initiated a Facebook Campaign to get Elliott Carter to host Saturday Night Live.

- Dick Strawser

Elliott Carter: Music at 102

Elliott Carter turns 102 years old, today. His plan had been to attend a celebratory all-Carter concert in Toronto that featured works all composed in 2008-2009 including a world premiere.

According to this article in the Toronto Star, the New Music Concerts ensemble, led by flutist and long-time Carter advocate and collaborator Robert Aitken, Carter was unable to attend the performance but for what reasons, I'm not sure.

Talking with Aitken several weeks ago, the composer had said "If I feel then as well as I feel now, I'll go anywhere!" But many things can happen at this time of year – weather, transportation as well as health issues. (I'm also trying to imagine Carter dealing with the TSA scans and pat-downs...)

This past June, Carter attended the world premiere of his recent song cycle, setting poems of Marianne Moore, "What Are Years?" at the Aldeburgh Festival.

The world premiere in Toronto last night was the Concertino for Bass Clarinet and ensemble, written late last year for his long-time assistant, Virgil Blackwell.

Here is an interview recorded with Carter a month ago – Blackwell is also present for some of it. The production uses a lot of un-Carteresque ambient sound as well as clips of works by other composers who've influenced him as well as tantalizing snippets of his own works plus a kind of time-line where you might hear a bit of a piece Carter wrote in a certain year followed by something from Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" written that same year, or a historical speech or announcement about some major news event.

In all, it's a very good introduction for people who are not familiar with his style, may not in fact like his style but could understand his approach to his music – how he writes it but more importantly how he thinks about it as he's writing it.

Despite its legendary complexity, his music does not start out to be "complicated." As I've tried to explain to people who are put off by the fact you can't tap your toe to it, the "complexity" is a way of approximating what he's hearing – how the instruments, for instance, are expressing their personalities (he often talks about how the players are characters who have ideas and reactions, who may discuss things and who may change their ideas and opinions over time), how these elements overlap in time and how their rhythms interact with each other sometimes by seeming not to interact, the way we normally think of it, but often exist on separate planes simultaneously.

And if you think about it, despite his well-known way of expressing himself which often sounds much like his music – playful, often tangential, sometimes stuttering to find the right word or idea – he doesn't sound bad for a man a month shy of turning 102!

That fact alone is enough for people to take notice of him – "wow, the man's 102 years old, imagine that!" – but the fact he's also busy composing and looking forward to the next piece is also amazing. Since his late-80s, he has become even more prolific than he had been when he was considered on the tail-end of his career after 70.

His earliest music reflected a lot of what was going on around him in New Music before World War II. The "Holiday Overture" and the two ballets "Pocahontas" and (for me, especially) "The Minotaur" as well as his "Symphony No. 1" would all be typical of the American Scene between the wars – sounding like a mix of Copland and Ives, perhaps – but there are lots of fingerprints of the more mature composer already in these works.

After the war, with the Piano Sonata – to me, a work that would fit into any recital program as well as Liszt's monumental sonata – things started taking on a different turn. The Cello Sonata plays off this "time-counterpoint" where the cello is flexible but the piano more rigid and often moving at a different "pace" than the sound of the cello. Also, in one sense, the cello is "romantic," emotional and varied, while the piano is more "classical," stricter sounding and structural, the bones of the piece whereas the cello is the skin, the heart, the soul of the piece.

It wasn't until the First String Quartet that Carter reached his "true voice." This work, composed famously in the isolation of the Arizona desert where the sense of time – an all-important facet of his style – is very different from living in New York City. Not only is it his most expansive work, the quartet flows with an organic quality that is like life itself.

By this time, he was in his early-40s, considered a "late-bloomer" compared to other composers who'd found their voice at a much younger age.

The music he wrote in the '60s and '70s – like the Concerto for Orchestra or the Third Quartet (which is really two duos playing two often different but simultaneous pieces, each duo even playing a different number of movements) – is his most complex and was viewed at the time as "Late Carter." The man, after all was in his mid-60s. Most commentators, looking for a pigeon-hole description, referred to these pieces as his "Late Period," as Beethoven's "Late Quartets" are Beethoven at his most complex.

I met Carter by accident standing on line to get tickets for a performance celebrating his impending 70th Birthday which included all three of the string quartets. He was there to pick up some tickets for friends of his – rather than calling and having them reserved. We talked briefly – when I told him I had been teaching at the University of Connecticut, he said "Oh, UConn – Charlie Whittenberg teaches there. He's a very fine composer." (When I told Charlie that, later – he was always having severe self-esteem issues – I remember him sitting back and sitting up straight with an expression that really struck home with him. I can only hope it helped him in his final years – he died not long after that.)

So the general attitude was, Carter, now 70, would do what most composers do when they reach retirement age – write less, rest on his laurels, and perhaps focus more on teaching or being an Elder Statesman in the New Music World.

But not so with Carter. Since the 1980s, when he was 75, he began a whole new wave of creativity, probably the most prolific period of his life. While many of these may be "miniatures" and solo pieces, there are several concertos, a few large-scale orchestral works, two more string quartets, songs and song-cycles, and, most surprisingly, his first opera, "What's Next?" which he composed for performances during his 90th Birthday celebrations!

Carter's biographical entry at Wikipedia has a partial list of works, of which over 75 were written after he turned 75.

Not many composers have a "Post-Late" Period...

Elliott Carter has long been a favorite composer of mine and his birthday is something I celebrate the way other music-lovers might observe Beethoven's or Mozart's birthdays. Today and over the next few days, I will be listening to several recordings – some of them, with scores – starting with another of my favorite works, his "Variations for Orchestra" – the full score I ordered last week through Barnes & Noble On-Line arrived in the mail just an hour ago, just in time to help me celebrate the composer's 102nd Birthday.

In the next few days, I will try to post some video-clips (the wonder of YouTube) of some of his works, including an exciting performance of his Cello Concerto (written in 2001) by Dane Johansen, a Juilliard student who chose it for his Concerto Competition Diploma, recorded at a dress-rehearsal with the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by a long-time Carter champion, James Levine.

Or this performance by Pierre-Laurent Aimard of a brief solo piano piece, "Catenaires" which Carter composed as one of many works to be premiered during the world-wide celebration of his 100th Birthday.

The vitality of this music is stunning regardless of its complexity – and then when you consider Carter was 92 when he composed the Cello Concerto and 97 when he wrote "Catenaires," it is even more stunning.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Carter – and ||: many happy returns :||

- Dick Strawser

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Photo credit: The header photo of Elliott Carter, which I found unattributed on a few different internet posts, was probably taken during a pre-concert interview, I suspect from the DVD accompanying Naxos' 100th Birthday Celebration disc featuring Robert Aitken and members of the Toronto-based New Music Concerts Ensemble.

Elliott Carter's B'day 101

“When I decided to become a composer, my parents were very much opposed to this – I talked it over with them and I think on the whole they were probably right because to be a composer in America especially at that time, was a very difficult thing to do, impossible to make a living as a composer of serious music. I was very determined to do this and my parents were very determined to stop me. However, I did succeed in doing it in any case and they relented a little bit and began to help me, especially my mother who felt that if I was SO determined to do this, I would be very unhappy if I didn't...”

(The composer, Elliott Carter, reminiscing, in Frank Sheffer's A Labyrinth of Time - see below.)

It's been a quiet year for Elliott Carter, apparently – no daily tread of interviewers pounding their beat to his door for an interview with the revered master in the year leading up to his 100th Birthday, no almost constant coverage in the arts press, keeping us posted on every new piece he had been composing, that was being premiered or performed somewhere in the world in advance of the centennial of his birth.

(see photo, right, taken at the Carnegie Hall Celebration on his 100th Birthday with conductor James Levine and pianist Daniel Barenboim. Photo posted by New Music Box at Facebook.)

In fact, since then, I've seen nothing in preparation for his birthday today – he turns 101 today and while that is not as significant to most people (I suppose they'll wait until he turns 110 or 125 for the next one), I find it surprising that, on his “B'day 101” I can find nothing in the press on-line regarding what he's been up to this past year: is he still composing? What has he written? What has been premiered? I'm still hoping for the 6th String Quartet which I remember reading was being commissioned by the Pacifica Quartet (who recently recorded “all 5” of the quartets for Naxos – I had heard them play "all 5" of them last year, just as I had “all 3” of them when he had turned 70 and most people felt the 3rd was likely to be his last quartet - one can still hope!).

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UPDATE: 12-14-2009
Someone at New Music Box told me, through their Facebook page, 'rumor has it he just completed a new wind quintet.' Jerry Bowles, at Sequenza 21, commenting on a post that said Carter was 'hale, hearty and busily composing,' mentioned that Bridge Records will be releasing Vol. 8 in their Carter series with some of his most recent works, each of them a premiere recording!
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You can read my previous posts about Elliott Carter: about the Carter Quartets here, and about hearing the premiere of his Clarinet Quintet here, about his 100th Birthday, here, and a friend's report of a birthday concert, here.

So here are some new links to some “old interviews” and programs.

For those who are new to Carter, here is a very good radio documentary from 1983 though I think the newest music dates from 1978 or so, the time I was living in New York and sat behind the composer to hear “all 3” of his string quartets and heard the world premiere of his vocal work, “Syringa,” which is included at the end of this broadcast, recorded with the same performers I'd heard at its premiere.

It's almost 2 hours, divided into two parts, proceeding chronologically, containing several excerpts as well as complete performances of works like the Sonata for Flute, Oboe Cello and Harpsichord, the 2nd String Quartet, the Symphony of 3 Orchestras and Syringa, a fascinating work setting the words of John Ashberry in the mezzo-soprano's voice and Greek texts (in Greek, no less) in the bass's voice.

An important biographical documentary is the film A Labyrinth of Time by Frank Sheffer, released in 2004, which is available here from Naxos.

You can see the whole 90 minute film in these 4 clips at this Chinese web-site: if you get the page with all the various anime ads and distractions, click on “full screen view” (the rectangle icon within single quotes).

Part 1 
Part 2 
Part 3 
Part 4 

Happy Birthday, Mr. Carter – I hope this day finds you well and happy.

Hangin' with Elliott Carter: Interview at 'Studio 360'

A friend sent me this link for WNYC's Studio 360 that includes Kurt Anderson's recent interview with Elliott Carter who'd celebrated his 100th Birthday back in December. While I've heard and read a number of such interviews with the composer - "so, what's it like being 100?" and reminiscing about hearing The Rite of Spring when he was 15, &c &c - this one includes him talking about his work day, how he enjoys reading Shakespeare and listening to recordings of Mozart in the evening.




Here are a few comments I transcribed from the second half of the interview:

Kurt Anderson - In the last 50 or 60 years, since the war, do you have a sense of what was the single most surprising or adventurous turn you took in your music, that you did something risky...?

Elliott Carter - Well, I think everything is pretty risky... I wrote my 3rd String Quartet, it’s probably the most difficult to play - it carried out the ideas of many different layers of music going on simultaneously, different rhythms, different harmonies... it carried it to a great extreme. You like to go to the end of one idea and see where it lands. The Pacifica Quartet seems to get around, playing it a lot which surprises me a little bit.

KA - How does aging change your process as a composer?

EC - Well, I don’t think it’s changed... I compose just as I always have. As I said it’s always an adventure so I’m constantly trying to find new things I haven’t done... but I also am aware that I would like to have pieces finished... and so I’m a little impatient. Before I could have patience for a piece for a whole year but now it’s more like a week.

KA - And when you’re working, how many hours a day are you writing?

EC - I work 2 hours in the morning, about 2 or 3 in the afternoon... take a nap, go out for a walk... and read a book. And then at night after dinner, I can’t do anything, I’m too like a zombie... so I read Shakespeare, it keeps me awake.

KA - ...do you listen to CDs...?

EC - Oh yeah, but I stick to my Mozart operas - I love those and I play them over and over... The thing that interests me about Mozart is the thing I have tried so often to do in my life is to make music that is constantly changeable. Mozart must have gotten that largely from writing operas, having the people change their character, and I like that. I’ve tried to write music that is very flexible and goes from one thing to another rather quickly... which is rather contrary to what most people do now, who stick to one thing for a long time... in fact they don’t even have to write it out, they just write ditto signs.
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Carter has often described his music in terms of dramatic or theatrical encounters where individual instruments or layers of music have specific characteristics or personalities. It’s interesting to think of these pieces – something like the 3rd String Quartet – having some genesis in, say, the constantly changing “first finale” of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro!

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

There were also some photographs taken during the interview which you can see: one of Carter talking w/Kurt Anderson during the interview; a candid portrait of Carter; the clutter at Carter's piano which clearly indicates a composer busy on a new piece; and a sketch Carter was working on, showing rhythmic placement where notes will later go. Unfortunately, they didn't say what it was he's working on at the time.

Incidentally, the Pacifica Quartet’s second volume of Carter’s complete string quartets – including the 3rd – was recently released on the Naxos label. Their first volume which included the first and the latest (“last” sounds so final) won a Grammy last month. Now with any luck Carter will feel like writing a 6th String Quartet for them to fulfill the commission they offered him for it in 2003. He said at the rate he gets around to writing quartets, he might be ready for another one after he turns 100. Well?

One can only hope!

- Dr. Dick

A New CD of Elliott Carter's Music

If Thoughts on a Train had a Pick-of-the-Month CD, this would be it. An all-Carter disc from Naxos with eight short works (each between 2½ and 6 minutes long) and two rather more substantial pieces (12 and 14 minutes long, respectively), it is an excellent collection from Carter’s most recent catalogue, five of them composed in the last decade, the earliest dating from 1984 when he was a mere 75 and when most people would have been enjoying their retirement.

There are solo works for flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, violin and cello but also two concerto-like works: one for piano and 18 instruments (“Dialogues,” written in 2004) and another for harp and 7 instruments (“Mosaic” from 2005). The excellent performers are members of the New Music Concerts Ensemble based in Toronto and conducted by flutist Robert Aitken.

If you shop on line, take note of this special offer. And as they say on television, “but wait, there’s more!”

I hadn’t been aware of it when I snatched it from the racks at my local Border’s store, surprised (and delighted) to see it in stock, but it also contains a DVD with a 22-minute documentary that includes part of an on-stage conversation between conductor Robert Aitken and composer Elliott Carter recorded at the Toronto performance in 2006, as well as the concert’s performances of “Mosaic” and “Dialogues.”

Carter’s music is often regarded as formidable and forbidding, terribly complex (so complex that some critics have said you’d need a slide-rule to appreciate it) and as challenging to listen to as it is to play. Granted, it’s not easy-listening and it may be challenging and off-putting on first hearing for its lack of stylistic familiarity, but like any music that you leave your mind open to, it speaks more directly to the mind and heart than a lot of contemporary music of the past fifty years if you approach it on its own terms. If you’re looking for tunes, no, it’s not going to work, but then there’s very little on the opposite end of the spectrum with its simplicity of minimalism that would attract you, either.

There are a few points this DVD-interview-documentary point out that I think might help someone approach this music. First of all, Carter is a comfortably amiable man who is fascinated by the music that is the result of the process, not by the process itself, where it comes from. Aitken points out that in all the years he’s known and worked with Carter – this concert was Carter’s sixth visit to Toronto and the New Music Concerts series – “not once had he ever complained about the metric relationship between one tempo and another,” what most performers consider the most problematic issue in figuring out how to play his music (the transition from one tempo to a successive tempo is called metric modulation but often he’ll write two simultaneous tempos where the parts may be written out in ratios of, say, 5 notes to the beat in one part to 7 notes in another). “He’s more concerned with the color, the dynamic and the meaning” of the music rather than all these other, more technical details.

Being a flutist, Aitken had, on several occasions, asked Carter about writing something for solo flute. Acknowledging that Carter’s style requires counterpoint, he still pressed the idea on him. Even though Carter hemmed and hawed, Aitken suggested “why don’t you write the last movement for the Bach Solo Sonata?” Three week later, Carter called him and said “It’s just about done.” It was inspired by a Petrarch sonnet and entitled “Scrivo in vento,” loosely translatable as “writing in the wind,” serendipitously premiered by Aitken on Petrarch’s 687th birthday, not far from where the poet lived.

There are other literary allusions in Carter’s works, at least in their titles: speaking of “Winds,” he explains he had already begun working on his Concerto for Orchestra when he started to read the poem by St. John Perse entitled “Winds” (Vents, in the original French) and Carter said it struck him “this is so much like what I’m writing, I thought I would shape the piece similar to the poem,” though the idea for the music existed before he had read the poem.

Asked what he was reading now, Carter replied “Rabelais. I’ve never read him before and I’m finding it surprising and very entertaining.” In Old French, Aitken asks? “Well, I have an edition that is Old French on one side and New [Modern] French on the other,” though he can understand much of the Old French fairly well, except some of the “rather indecent words” are not very clear. “You know them in New French?” Aitken chides him as the audience laughs. Carter replies with his own laugh, “more or less!”

For a piano piece written for Peter Serkin, he was inspired by the memories contained in Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (or “Remembrance of Things Past” in the old translation), a chapter called “Intermittences of the Heart” when the narrator, as a child, recalls his grandmother and all the kindnesses she had done for him, especially that one magical yet disappointing summer they went to the beach at Balbec. The memories are brought about by buttoning his shoes which she used to help him with (“in those days,” he explained, “they used to button their shoes”) and he thought these associations – this beautiful paragraph that goes on for pages and pages – was suitable for a piece of music, “not,” he concludes, “that it actually buttons the shoes...”

The conversation about “Mosaic,” the most recent piece on the program (written the year before this concert) is also insightful for anyone who thinks of Carter as a purely abstract intellectual. It wasn’t a pre-conceived form: “you have to allow the composer some freedom, you know - I don’t know why I wrote it that way.” Designed to feature the harp, that was what he focused on, but he knew “there were these poor people [the other musicians] who ought to have something interesting to play, too... I hate to have all these people sitting around not doing anything and I like to give them something that will entertain them or interest them to play – that’s something in my mind, too, like many other nutty things.”

You would think somebody who writes music as precise and detailed as his music is would be very strict about how a piece is performed. But he say “there’s Hamlet which can be interpreted in 20 different ways, perhaps, but it’s still Hamlet.” The variables and possibilities of interpretation intrigue him: the score is basically “a message to the performer of certain intentions of the composer’s imagination: the performer then has to add his own imagination.” Of course he wants them to play it as closely as possible to the score as he’s written it, but “I do think even so it’s possible to have it interpreted in many different ways.”

And where does a new piece begin for Elliott Carter? Surprisingly, much the same way one would have begun for Beethoven. Often, he says a new piece comes to him “when I’m walking on the street” (this, by the way, from a man who was 97 at the time). He thinks about texture, how the instruments might sound together – maybe there’s some literary idea or association that gives him a spark, but not themes, at least not themes as people normally think of them today (a very 19th Century concept). Carter deals more in “fragments of themes,” a few small shapes he might expand into longer and longer lines. But basically, he admits “I think it’s different each time.”

One of the technical problems in writing for the harp, getting back specifically to the new piece, “Mosaic”, is the fact this is basically a diatonic instrument in a chromatic world. Unlike the piano which has strings and keys for every pitch in the chromatic scale, a harp would be too vast and cumbersome an instrument for that, so it has strings only for, basically, the white keys of the piano and then a series of pedals bristling around the base of the harp, foot-level, for each pitch. The D Pedal, for instance, will affect all the D Strings on the harp and depending on whether the pedal is up, down or in the middle will determine whether it will be D-sharp, D-flat or D-natural. Consequently, playing something that is as intensely chromatic as Carter’s music involves a lot of fancy foot-work.

As he said, even though it took less time to write this piece than many other pieces of comparable length (“why, I couldn’t tell you”), he was “trying to keep the lady from pedaling on every note.” To which Aitken responds with a chuckle, “You did a very bad job, I have to tell you.”

“Well, it’s almost as if she’s driving a car,” the composer replies. If it made it difficult to play, you wouldn’t know it from the performance or for that matter, from watching the video.

The only problem with the video, though, is the frequent reliance on kaleidoscopic special effects playing on the title, “Mosaic.” The video for “Dialogues” is just straightforward and therefore less distracting to the music. Not, however, a big concern considering the quality and seeming effortlessness of the performance along with the opportunity to hear and see a piece by a composer like Elliott Carter. There is something about having a “document” like this interview, however, that is so incredibly special. What would our appreciation be of, say, Beethoven’s or Bach’s music if we could have a video of an interview with them, watching and listening to them talk about what inspired them, what they thought about when writing the music we know, and discovering in general just what normal people composers really can be?

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Extracts transcribed from the interview between Robert Aitken and Elliott Carter produced by Moving Headshot Productions, Inc, from the Naxos CD/DVD “Elliott Carter 100th Anniversary Release” (which is not called a “100th Birthday Release” because, recorded in 2006, who knew for sure, you know...)

Concerts with Carter: The Birthday Celebration Continues

Since I was unable to attend any of the concerts this past week in New York celebrating Carter’s 100th Birthday, I was glad to receive an e-mail from my friend Dan Guss (on the right in the photograph taken by John Clare last January when the Pacifica Quartet played the five Carter String Quartets in one concert), especially about one program I didn’t even know was happening, an all-Carter concert that took place in Zankel Hall the night after the official 100th Birthday (Zankel Hall is a smaller recital hall in what would be the basement of Carnegie Hall: real estate being what it is in New York City, these days you either go up or down if you’re going to build an addition...).

UPDATE (12-16-08): Here is Steve Smith's review in the New York Times.

Here is Dan’s report from the festivities which he has allowed me to share with you:

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On his actual birthday, in the main hall upstairs, the Boston Symphony had celebrated by playing the NYC premiere of his "Interventions" for piano and orchestra (Barenboim as the pianist, Levine conducting), completed in 2007, and they had rolled out a huge birthday cake afterwards, with a sparkler in place of the customary 100 candles... Carter mimed swiping his finger through the frosting and tasting it... he was clearly in good spirits.

But [the next] night, as part of the "Making Music" series, where composers are present and interviewed during the course of a concert of their music, he sat on stage before the start of the concert with Jeremy Geffen (Carnegie's Director of Artistic Planning) interviewing him, and one could see he was wearing red socks. My first thought was to flash back to the musical "Damn Yankees", where the character of Mr. Applegate (a/k/a the devil, a role I played in a summer camp production at the age of 11) wears red socks, the only betrayal (at first) that he might have something diabolical about him (that, and being able to snap his fingers and light peoples' cigarettes). But then I decided that, for my 100th birthday, I want a pair of socks just like that.

[There's a women’s group, “The Red Hat Society,” partly inspired by the poem “When I am an old lady, I will wear purple.”] A friend of mine who is an active member told me about it, and it has turned into something of a national movement. Well, recalling that last night, I decided that there are three charter members of "The Red Socks Club" [not to be confused with a certain baseball team – ras] only one of whom is actually alive (much less actively composing): Elliott Carter, Leo Ornstein and Irving Berlin (the latter two will receive their membership posthumously, of course). And we have a pair on order for Milton Babbitt...

Carter seemed to enjoy himself last night. He told some amusing stories, including one about how Nadia Boulanger, upon hearing he was going to hear Salome that evening and didn't know what to expect, took down the orchestral score from the shelf and played and sang through the entire thing at the piano, interspersing comments about how ugly it was ("C'est terrible!") while her other students waited outside and wondered what all the noise was about.

There were a couple of moments that actually made me laugh out loud. In one of them, he referred to the Ravel Duo, which he studied in preparation for writing one of the pieces being played that evening (Duettino for violin and cello, given its world premiere), as being a piece that was very good... mostly.

Even better was the moment when Geffen recalled to him his attendance at the New York premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps back in 1924, which he has acknowledged was what made him want to be a composer. Geffen mentioned that a large portion of the audience walked out that evening, and questioned Carter about why he found that attractive.

"Well, you know how young people are," Carter quipped.

And then, Geffen cheekily asked him how he felt about all the appreciation he had been receiving over the last season of celebratory concerts. Carter's response: "Well, you know, after experiencing the opposite for so long, I begin to wonder if somehow I had made a mistake." And then went on to say it was gratifying nonetheless.

He didn't reappear on stage for a second interview before the second half of the concert, but filmed interview segments were shown periodically throughout the evening, obviously done at different times (here he seemed to be in his late 80s or early 90s; there, much closer to his current age). But they served to humanize the instinct behind some very abstract music, as he explained how (for example) the flute was a woman and the cello a man (Enchanted Preludes) [the work was commissioned by Harry Santen as a tribute to his wife, Ann, both ardent supporters of American music - ras]; how he was interested in the challenge of balancing the harp in an ensemble (Mosaic, here given its NYC premiere); how, as Stravinsky once said, the music is about the music, and that he doesn't strive to convey emotion, although he assumes it's in there; how various dedicatees influenced his choices (many of the works were homages - Lutoslawski, Boulez, Calvino, etc.) and so on.

It really would have been a good program for people unfamiliar with his music, as it tried to provide a frame of reference. But, of course, the hall wasn't full (though the concert still was well attended), and those who came were the converted anyway.

There were eight works on the program, only one of which (Esprit rude / esprit doux) I had heard before. There were nine players in total, four of whom played in many of the pieces (cellist Fred Sherry, clarinetist Charles Neidich (once my downstairs neighbor) and violinist Rolf Schulte each played in five; flutist Tara Helen O'Connor played in four). One piece (Mosaic) required a conductor, Donald Palma.

The oldest work on the program dated back to 1974, when he was a stripling of 65, but most dated from the last three decades:

Canon for 4 (1984; fl, cl, vln, vc) [dedicated to Sir William Glock]
Enchanted Preludes (1988; fl, vc) [birthday present for Anne Santon]
Duettino (2008; vln, vc) [homage to Milton Babbitt]
Mosaic (2004; fl, ob, cl, vln, vla, vc, cb, hp) [influenced by Carlos Salzedo]
Con leggerezza pensosa (1990; cl, vln, vc) [homage to Italo Calvino]
Gra (1993, cl) [80th birthday present for Lutoslawski]
Esprit rude / esprit doux (1985; fl, cl) [60th birthday of Pierre Boulez]
Duo (1974, vln, pno) [dedicated to his wife, Helen Carter]

The oldest work was the thorniest; there's something to the idea that his more recent music is a little more transparent (though he's having none of it).

As I listened, I realized something that hadn't quite hit me before: there are certain instruments I like more than others, and when he uses them, I like the piece more than those of his when he doesn't. Those instruments include flute, clarinet and harp. So I found a lot to like on this concert, in that the flute is used in four of the pieces, and the clarinet in five (the harp was only in one, but it was featured). At one point, it also occurred to me that some of the music reminded me of Webern, with some of the rests filled in.

All in all, whether one liked the music or not, it had a tinge of historical import about it, as did Thursday's BSO concert, which dragged out until nearly 11:00 p.m. despite there being only about [appropriately enough] 100 minutes of music. It opened (late) with Barenboim and Levine performing the Schubert Fantaisie in F Minor for piano 4-hands (Barenboim upper, Levine lower), which was sort of slapdash (Levine's performance with Kissin only a few years earlier was more deliberate). There followed one of the best performances of Beethoven's C Minor Piano Concerto I had ever heard. Lots of applause, a long intermission, then the Carter work... and by the time they started Le Sacre, it was later than most concerts let out. Excellent performance of that, too (and I was sleep deprived going into the concert, and stayed awake for everything), and quite different from the Boulez/London and Salonen/Los Angeles performances I've heard in the last few years.

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Dan and I have been close friends ever since we met in the mid-70s at the University of Connecticut where I was on the faculty and he was a graduate composition student and teaching assistant. I was amused by Dan’s response to the Duo for Violin & Piano which he felt was the thorniest (and oldest) of the pieces on Friday night’s program. While I imagine it will be a long time before anyone comes up with “The Most Relaxing Elliott Carter Disc Ever,” it took me a bit to warm up to the Duo after a first hearing back when it was new, but with repeated listenings, it quickly became a piece I could say I loved. Even today, it’s probably still my favorite work by Elliott Carter. On the other hand, I also remember another of our teaching assistants who dismissed the Duo as “the most obvious piece Carter ever wrote”: certainly it was less technical than the 3rd Quartet with its two duos each playing a different number of movements (if I recall, they were both on the same LP). But I’ve just heard “Mosaic” for the first time and find it a very striking and completely different kind of work, whether it’s a more distilled or transparent style or not (I’m not sure I’m buying that concept, either). There’s a new recording of it on Naxos with several other pieces which I’ll blog about it, with any luck, later today or tomorrow.

Another fond memory – when I’d go into New York, I’d stay at Dan’s apartment in upstate Manhattan and at the time, one of his neighbors was a young clarinetist named Charles Neidich. I was very impressed: I’d heard him playing with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. In the past, there had been new neighbors who would assure me, when I told them I was a pianist, “oh, I love classical music, you can play all day, if you like” who do not realize “playing all day” is not the same as “practicing all day.” Especially if they’re expecting Beethoven and Mozart and I’m composing my own music instead. So here I was, listening to Neidich practice the Weber Concertino (as I recall) and thinking after a couple hours, “okay, I think I’ll go out for a walk, now.” After hearing him most recently performing Carter’s “Gra” for solo clarinet and the new Clarinet Quintet written specifically for him, I can’t imagine what it would be like for his neighbors to have been listening to hours and hours of his practicing Elliott Carter. Except for me – I would have preferred that over Weber any day...

Elliott Carter Begins His Next Century

Elliott Carter is probably (and rightly) tired of answering questions about what it feels like to be 100. He says he's just going on day by day thinking about the music he wants to write today and the next day and the day after that.

So yesterday, knowing there were things on-line about Carter’s birthday I wanted to hear, I finally broke down and bought some new speakers for my computer, to replace the two sets the kittens had chewn through in the past, particularly Freddie the self-appointed Director of Wireless Technology (he has also chalked up several mice – not the usual ones you’d associate with cats – a couple of power packs, an old headset which I was going to throw out anyway, an antique high-intensity lamp from the ‘70s plus various phone cables).

New speakers allowed me to partake of two things last night: doing more than lip-reading the Charlie Rose interview with Elliott Carter, James Levine and Daniel Barenboim, recorded before the Boston Symphony performance at Carnegie Hall of Carter’s new “Interventions” for Piano and Orchestra, which aired on Wednesday. And what WNYC was broadcasting on-line, called Carter@100.

I managed to get through the whole evening without getting the wires chewed (more discreet placement seemed to do the trick, placing them in areas the cats are now too big to get into: in the past, when I had a wire-chewing cat, someone told me to rub a paprika-and-barbecue sauce mixture on the wires which, aside from being quite the antidote to the usual eau de cat-litter box, the cat developed a taste for, sitting there licking the wires clean and eager for more...)

At the moment, I don’t have time to write a more extensive post * (as one expects here...) so I’ll just point out a few links:

The New York Times article which, this morning, included a photo taken on the stage of Carnegie Hall with the composer, conductor and pianist and a huge 100th Birthday cake (fake, it turns out), also includes a side-bar (on the left) with a three-minute excerpt from Interventions as well as bits from the interview audio between Daniel J. Wakin and Elliott Carter.

It’s easy to imagine the composer, bombarded by requests for interviews from everybody on the planet all asking the same questions over-and-over again, getting exasperated, here – at one point, he loses his cool when asked “what it is about your music that appeals to such top-level interesting musicians” and responds “because it’s top-level music, what else could I answer?!,” softening it with a chuckle – that Wakin concludes the printed interview,

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With the interviewer out of the apartment, Mr. Carter was heard on the other side of the door saying to an aide, “I’ve got to rest a little after this nonsense.”

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Anthony Tommasini’s New York Times review of the concert describes the work as well telling the story that Carter, having been commissioned for a piece to be played on the occasion of his 100th Birthday, finished in and had the score to Levine by May of 2007, wanting to finish it right away rather than put it on a back-burner since the event was a year-and-a-half away: after all, Tommasini says, “who could count on his being around and active on his 100th birthday?”

Tommasini also points out what it might have been like if Beethoven had lived to see his 100th birthday rather than dying at the age of 56, what music he may have heard – attending the premiere of Tristan, for instance – well, let’s forget the fact that Beethoven was deaf if we’re going to play “What If...?” – and then ends the article by saying, after Carter returned to his seat to listen to the orchestra play Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, “surely, Mr. Carter was the only person in attendance who had also heard the Carnegie Hall premiere of the piece nearly 85 years ago.”

Steve Gregoropoulos, in writing his reminiscences of attending masterclasses with both Messiaen and Carter in 1978 – when both composers turned 70 – also mentioned that “someone who was 5 years old when Beethoven died would only be 91 when Elliott Carter was 5 years old (and lots of people live to be 91).”

NPR's All Things Considered had a great segment on Carter's Birthday with lots of great comments and reminiscences, not to mention the usual side-bar of goodies! One of those includes another 3-minute excerpt from Interventions, starting at the beginning.

Carter has always been more regarded and more frequently played in Europe than in America: here’s Anastasia Tsioulcas’ article from the British magazine Gramophone which I’d seen before but just located again this morning looking, of course, for something else: it’s called “Who Gets Carter?”

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Listening to Terrance McKnight on WNYC last night, the evening dedicated to Carter’s birthday, I expected in the first hour, called “Elliott Carter: the Early Years” to hear music Carter composed before he developed his signature voice in the 1950s but instead heard music by composers who would have influenced him – Ives (something from 3 Places in New England, though I didn’t catch the back-announce), Stravinsky (the 3 Pieces for String Quartet, not the Rite of Spring which he heard in Carnegie Hall which prompted him to decide on composition as a career), some innocuous cello and piano piece by his future teacher Nadia Boulanger (composed in 1915 which was so annoying, I wondered how she could go on to become the inspirational teacher she would become – what talent was exhibited in this piece was thoroughly pedestrian compared to the music her sister Lili was composing), and then, for some reason, Samuel Barber’s lovely lyrical Violin Concerto – all of it – which though lovely and lyrical and probably more fashioned to the kind of listener who’d be tuning in to hear some pleasant classical music while watching their fishtank after a hard day’s work, had nothing ostensibly to do with Elliott Carter, the topic of the program. The fact that it was composed during Carter’s early lifetime doesn’t make it topical. So I switched over to watch the Charlie Rose interview instead.

The 8:00 program, billed as a tribute to Carter, brought in as guest Nadia Sirota, the over-night host on WNYC, who is also a violist and, as daughter of composer Robert Sirota, someone who grew up with all kinds of modern music in her life, including Carter’s. There was music by Conlan Nancarrow – some of the fascinating player-piano pieces that explore the same kind of temporal relationships that Carter would start exploring in the ‘50s – and some fascinating music by 14th Century Flemish composer Johannes Ciconia with a “choral“ piece in which the vocal line is sung in several different tempos at the same time, just to prove that Elliott Carter’s use of contrapuntal tempos is neither his own idea nor something even relatively contemporary.

There was, as well, something by the Grateful Dead since Phil Lesh of the band has been very public about finding inspiration in Carter’s music and that both found Jazz from the ‘20s and ‘30s to be a major influence. Carter often talks about how the band would set up a steady tempo and then someone, say a clarinet, would improvise a line that had little immediate relevance to the going tempo (it always makes me chuckle to hear something in one of Carter’s String Quartets where the cello plays steady beats exactly like a jazz “walking bass” while one of the other instruments starts a riff that just takes off in complete independence from that pulse).

And finally there was also some Carter – an excerpt from his String Quartet No. 1 and Fred Sherry’s performing the Elegy from 1939 (ooh ooh, incidentally, the same year Barber wrote his violin concerto) which has become known through a version for viola and piano or for string quartet or string orchestra (where it does sound like Carter’s own version of Barber’s Adagio for Strings). The story goes that it was originally written for a cellist – Carter couldn’t remember who or for what occasion, if the Elegy was specifically dedicated to someone’s memory – and the manuscript had become lost. But Carter wasn’t pleased with the viola version and Fred Sherry, a frequent performer of Carter’s music, was hoping somehow, during the last decade, to talk Carter into reconstructing this early work. And in a couple of days, he did, going back to a style he had not composed in for some fifty years to try remembering a work written perhaps 60-65 years earlier. (On the station’s website, it was billed as “a new Carter work written specifically for him” – no cigars, there: it would be a revision of an old piece, not a new one.) They then played it. Okay.

At one point, McKnight and Sirota, in their pleasant bantering, pitted something by Philip Glass against Carter’s Duo for Violin and Piano, both works composed around the same time to highlight the fierce dichotomy between “Downtown” Music and “Uptown” Music in the ‘70s. Downtown was the hot-pot for the new Minimalism while Uptown was the cerebral intellectual stronghold centered around Columbia-Princeton and the followers of Schoenberg and Webern. The competition was very fierce and only now, as a new generation of composers and performers manage to enjoy both without feeling the need to be either/or about it, music in New York may be becoming more “Midtown” by compromise. But it was a very real divide, back in those days – I lived in NYC between 1978-1980 and I can attest that it was just as bitter then as Blue States and Red States are today. (Incidentally, I did more than just live Uptown...)

Eventually, they got around to playing the premiere performance of Carter’s Clarinet Quintet which had been completed in September of 2007 and played at Juilliard in April 2008 (I loved how Carter, in his conversation about it, had fun with how long ago that seemed, hearing it now: “and I’ve written several newer pieces since then,” he added with his impish chuckle). It was great to hear it again – for the third time, actually: they played it twice at the premiere, before intermission and again afterward, following a conversation and show-and-tell with the composer, the performers and the dean of the school.

And that was basically it after another performance of Ives’ 3 Places in New England (complete, this time).

Most of the music that I would have wanted to hear – music BY Elliott Carter – was going to be played on Sirota’s overnight show, segregated into the X-Rated Hours after midnight when the listenership is so low, statistically, who cares if you offend people with modern music, though I’m sure her regular fans are probably not likely to be those wanting to hear Pachelbel’s Canon to wile away their insomnia. But I digress...

So, tonight, after I get some more copying done on my Aria & Chaconne, I’ll sit down and listen to some of Carter’s own music to begin the celebration of Carter’s next century.

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Incidentally, I want to acknowledge Meredith Heuer who took the photograph of Carter in my side-bar - I've seen it everywhere but rarely credited.

* Okay, so it's 1,853 words...