Elliott Carter, who died on November 5 a little over a month before his 104th birthday, wrote music that is tough to love: it can be thorny, knotty, dense, complex, brainy,
abstract, atonal, harsh, jagged, and sometimes genuinely off-putting. It has no intention of seducing listeners, of attracting love through flattery, cajolery, putting on a song and dance, of singing “let me entertain you.” It is also prismatically colorful, rich in varied gestures, dazzling, continuously stimulating, full of the liveliest contrasts, always connected to human utterances, capable of suggesting a complete personality in microseconds. Its complexity is layered, and every layer speaks in a different voice, each voice constantly modulating itself in response to the others in ways that often seem all-too-human, reacting defensively, opposing, ignoring, or criticizing, harping, deploring, chuckling ironically, cackling, and on occasion, agreeing. Here is a sampling of titles of some of his later works: Dialogues, Soundings, Interventions, Two Controversies and a Conversation, Illusions, Instances, Con leggerezza pensosa, Explorations, Diversions, Epigrams, Figment, Retracing. Carter is a supreme dramatist/psychologist: he has translated human interactions into abstract musical conversations without taking sides, without imposing an agenda or ideology. For his eighty-plus years of composing, he remained eternally fascinated with the way humans interact not only with each other but with time itself, and he has anatomized and catalogued the ways of experiencing the passing of time.
Stravinsky was the modern composer Carter revered the most, even though his music
would be unthinkable without the important influences of Charles Ives and Arnold
Schoenberg. In “The Poetics of Music,” Stravinsky (through his ghost writer Pierre
Souvchinsky) wrote about music’s existence within ontological time and its ability to
shape psychological time. Carter’s music lives within the tension between these two,
the one constantly pulling the other into new shapes like atomic particles traveling at
great speeds through highly charged electrical fields. And Carter’s music is never less
than highly charged. Its intensity demands an equal intensity of attention from both
performers and listeners. This is where listeners may get turned off—I have gotten
challenged a number of times—or at least found myself in a situation akin to being in
the center of a very robust blackberry patch.
The locus classicus of the thorny Carter piece is his Third String Quartet, premiered early
in 1973. I heard this performance, by the Juilliard Quartet at Tully Hall, and came away
wondering what had hit me. I also marveled at the ability of the four players to saw
away at their incredibly virtuosic and chaotic-sounding parts with little apparent order
or relationship for over twenty minutes. It was like listening to a roomful of overexcited
people all speaking at once in four different languages), often at top volume,
going on and on endlessly. Talk about psychological time!
Having discovered Carter initially through his Second Quartet, which I listened to
countless times, I knew that with repeated listening, Carter’s music can start to open up
and let my ear inside with some sense of space within which I can direct my attention
intelligently. So I went to the next performance of the Third Quartet by the Juilliard a
few months later, this time at Amherst College. The programming for this second
concert was much more appropriate. In New York, the new work had been surrounded
by Mozart and Ravel, which made it feel like a briar patch in the middle of a flowery
meadow. In Amherst, the context was provided by quartets by Bartok (no. 6) and Ives
(no. 2), which proved perfect for preparing the audience to pay the kind of attention
Carter’s work demands. And indeed I did start to be able to parse out some of the
structures. After purchasing the score and following the recording, however, I
concluded that I really was having a hard time loving this obviously extraordinary work.
The Third Quartet was composed during what I will call Carter’s central “epic” period.
This began with the path-breaking but very lyrical First Quartet of 1951, continued with
the “Variations for Orchestra” (1955) which sounds both epic and American, connecting
to the rhetorical tradition of grandiose orchestral works of Ruggles, Copland, Harris, and
William Schuman but adding elements of layering and metric flexibility that had
appeared in the quartet. The series of break-away works really hit its stride with the
intensely concentrated Second Quartet of 1959, followed by the fiercely complex
“Double Concerto” of 1961 which is violent, delicate, wonderfully exciting, and
amazingly colorful. A single vast structure which is incredibly difficult to perform
(problems of balance and lyrical shape must be solved by the conductor and musicians
through many rehearsals), it is, if performed well, a powerfully rewarding experience for
listeners. The last recording made, under Carter’s supervision, is the best available, but
the performance I heard at Tanglewood in the summer of 1972 conducted by Gunther
Schuller with Ursula Oppens and Gilbert Kalish as soloists surpassed it in coherence. (I
asked Schuller how he did it, and he said that he had rehearsed it with the New England
Conseratory instrumentalists for a whole year!) It is not a piece that you have the
opportunity to hear in any given year, or possibly in any given decade, but if it is being
performed, it is well worth seeking out. Hearing it might be the beginning of a very long
love affair.
What I am calling Carter’s “epic” period continued with similarly ambitious, large-scale
orchestral works, the Piano Concerto (1964), the Concerto for Orchestra (1969) inspired
by an epic, Whitmanesque poem, “Vents,” by St. John Perse, and the Symphony for
Three Orchestras (1976) based on an epic vision of Hart Crane. It also included the
powerful “Brass Quintet” (1974).
These works were the products of mighty labors, great architectural monuments which
required the construction of scaffoldings of musical languages and processes, some of
which are unique to each work, and some of which were absorbed into Carter’s
formidable compositional technique. (These are well described in David Schiff’s
important book, “The Music of Elliott Carter.”) The “epic” compositions made great
demands on listeners and performers similar to those of the Double Concerto.
Ironically, Carter has written that he composes with an awareness that his music will
most likely be encountered on recordings, where the fierce complexity means that each
hearing of the identical performance will be a new and different experience for the
listeners as their ears become familiar with the intricate surfaces and begin to delve
below to the emotional and dramatic scenario and then finally to the overall structure,
which have all been fully planned out and meticulously executed. And yet the works
really come alive in (good) concert performances.
In the early 1980’s (around the time of the chamber works “Penthode” and “Triple
Duo”) there came a change. Carter began a series of chamber and solo works of more
modest proportions. Critics heralded a “late style” for the 72-year-old composer. Little
did they suspect that this “last phase” would last for more than thirty years, a time-span
longer than Schubert’s or Mozart’s entire creative lives. As we get to know more and
more of the music, we will undoubtedly discern further sub-styles and trends. In the
‘90’s, there suddenly emerged an opera and the longest, most elaborate orchestral work
yet, a full-blown, three movement symphony (Symphonia, 1993/6). During this same
period, a series of concerti or concerto-like works began to appear, eventually including
works for oboe, violin, clarinet, cello, French horn, piano (multiple late works), flute,
harp, and bass clarinet, as well as two chamber concerti (Asko Concerto and Boston
Concerto). These works were composed on a smaller and more transparent scale, and
some of them were wholly or partially light-hearted and humorous. The Fifth (and last)
String Quartet from 1995 turned out to be the most whimsical of that genre: it is as if
Carter around age 90 fully developed his wry, playful, light-hearted manner into a
consistent approach toward life and toward his creative project.
But it is impossible to pigeon-hole Carter. Yet a third trend began to manifest itself even
more recently: a series of song-cycles, each devoted to a favorite modern American
poet, set for solo voice and chamber orchestra, chamber ensemble, or piano. The first
such cycle, “A Mirror on Which to Dwell,” on poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, was actually
written at around the same time (1975) as the “Symphony of Three Orchestras,” proving
in retrospect to be a pivotal work. The small scale of the structures, the individual
instrumental color combinations of each song, the personal diction and expressiveness
emanating directly from the poetry makes Carter seem, if not warm and fuzzy, at least
an accessible, familiar personal voice. These songs embody the conflicts and
ambiguities of the modern condition articulated by the poetry, amplified by Carter’s
spontaneous-sounding interactions of musical layers which lend expressive shape to
each song. These qualities were to reappear later in the cycles devoted to poetry of
John Ashbery, T. S. Eliot, John Hollander, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert
Lowell, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, e. e. cummings, and Wallace Stevens, all of
whom were known by Carter personally. And the musical settings have a corresponding
sense of personal presence and connection to the poetry. The poems themselves are
challenging and rewarding for their readers, among whom Carter is peerless. His cycles
are almost love letters to the poets, and his settings are fantastically sensitive to values
of sound and sense as well as of drama. Myself a life-long lover of the poetry of Wallace
Stevens, I was instantly drawn into his very individual imaginative space by Carter’s
settings, “In the Distances of Sleep,” which were heard at the Tanglewood Centenary
concerts in the summer of 2008. Brilliantly performed, I instantly found them to be
gorgeous in a way parallel to Stevens’ use of imagery.
Here’s what Carter wrote about his setting of Robert Lowell’s poetry: “What attracted
me about these texts were their rapid, controlled changes from passion to tenderness,
to humour and to a sense of loss. The music reflects these very human qualities and
their constant shifting qualities, and as in other recent scores, I have tried to write music
of a continuous but coherent change, which to me is the most evocative kind.” To
connect with the beauty and meaning in Carter’s music is to connect with the specific
expressive qualities of each moment in a piece, and then to notice how such qualities
are dynamically and continuously transforming through interaction with other qualities.
This is not always an easy task for the listener.
Music, especially Carter’s music, does not and cannot stand still. Many styles of music
try to fight against the fleeting nature of time and of human consciousness. (In 1925,
Stephan Wolpe, another composer who influenced Carter, composed a work called
“Stehende Musik”—standing music. It is an exercise in trying to do the impossible.)
Music of the baroque tends to slow time down so that individual states of being can be
contemplated at leisure. Classical era music attempts to bend the arc of time into a full
circle so that all events within a time-span seem to constitute a whole, a complete and
bounded experience. In our time, John Cage and Morton Feldman ask us to immerse
ourselves in a continuous present tense, without the distractions of memory or
anticipation. From 1951 on, Carter dedicated himself to an aesthetic stance that
acknowledges the true nature of the human experience of time: it is essentially linear
and unrepeatable; this has profound emotional consequences; and music is an ideal
medium for exploring the variable nature of psychological time and of our relations with
the past. At first, such a task required tough-mindedness; in the first part of the
twentieth century, it went against the grain of our cultural heritage to re-think human
experience in such volatile terms. Carter shared a tough-minded stance with many
great modernists (he was always an avid student of poetry and painting) in his
rethinking the aesthetic experience, and he needed to ignore the demands of audiences
in order to break through to his own unique voice and vision (as he recounts in his
narrative about the genesis of his First Quartet, which almost sounds like a version of
the Founding Myth of Modernism). After a while, it was no longer necessary to shake
the listener loose from dependency on strategies of orientation and comfort. Carter’s
modernism, it turned out, never lost touch with romanticism and lyricism, and this
became apparent in the miraculous thirty year coda to his career, which produced forty
works (and counting, since we have not heard them all even now that he is gone).
These works all focus, one way or another, on individuals, either composed for specific
performers or based on the words of specific poet-friends, or both.
The astonishing longevity of Carter’s mind, the unfailing resourcefulness and clarity of
his (inner) ear, and his ever-renewing creative impulse turns out to have been fueled by
his love of people, of music, and of the world. But it is a love which eschewed
sentimentality, and insisted on clear vision. His music portrays with astounding realism
and vivid projection the way humans actually feel things and experience the events of
their lives, buffeted by the lives of those around them, as individuals and as parts of
groups of all kinds. While this is sometimes conveyed to the listener by music of
irresistible color, humor, and drama, it is also true that at other times the listener is
plunged into a chaotic scenario in medias res, as in the opera “What Next?” which opens
the instant after a car crash. It takes a while for the characters and the audience to
figure out what happened, and we really never figure out whether the action is in this
world or the next. We need to accept the suspension of disbelief, to cultivate tolerance
of ambiguity, to pay careful attention to detail, and to embrace complexity. Carter
expected this of his listeners but was always surprised to learn that some of them were
actually up to the task. He knew that what he was expecting was challenging, but he
returned the favor with his own brand of tough love.