elliott carter

My review of the new disc of late works by Elliott Carter is up at Burning Ambulance. As always, be sure to peruse the rest of the site while you're there.

miranda cuckson

My review of Miranda Cuckson's new recording, Invisible Colors, is up at Burning Ambulance. As always, Phil Freeman does a great job of posting reviews/articles, including videos of some of the music on the album.

here and there

Flower

Carter: Boosey & Hawkes have posted an interview with noted composer and Elliott Carter scholar John Link, who has some important insight on how and why the composer developed his “late late” style. In addition, Mr. Link lives up to his name with several Carter resources:

www.elliottcarter.com/ 

www.facebook.com/chronometros

twitter.com/Chronometros

amphionfoundation.org/

#musochat: On Sunday evenings at 9 eastern, any interested party may join in a virtual gathering at twitter under “#musochat” to discuss contemporary classical music[1] and related subjects. Even if you can’t participate in the discussions in real time, the chats are available under the hashtag. Molly Sheridan has more at newmusicbox.

Quote:

This demure woman . . . declared that "making even one colored mark on a blank piece of newsprint should be an act of moral revolt." More than a revolt: an appeal for grace. All human beings were due a full accounting, but they had to ask for it. Art was a way of asking.

--Richard Powers, Prisoner's Dilemma, p54

---

[1] It happens that much of this past Sunday’s (16 Aug 15) discussion centered on what to call this thing of ours,* whether that matters, and why it probably does.

*The Sopranos reference is intentional, because another art form, filmed televisual entertainment, often presents its best work on Sunday nights and I believe that one way for us to engage with the contemporary world is to engage with other, more popular, art forms.

happy birthday!

Some music for the day:

Bonus track:

carter sessions eckardt

My review can be found at BurningAmbulance.

elliott carter, 1908-2012

Leonard Bernstein (l) and Elliott Carter at a rehearsal for the premiere of Carter's Concerto for Orchestra (1970)

As I'm sure most of you know, composer Elliott Carter passed away this past Monday at a very young 103. I've written more about Carter over the years than about any other subject, I can't begin to express what his music and his example have meant to me over the years, but I'm going to continue to try.

In the meantime, Phil Freeman has posted a lengthy excerpt from an article of mine that appeared in Burning Ambulance. Please give it and the rest of the site a read.

EC103

Happy 103rd birthday to Elliott Carter, one of my favorite composers and an important influence on me in so many ways. My posts about Mr. Carter and his music can be found here.

Burning Ambulance 4

The fourth issue of Burning Ambulance magazine has just been published. It includes my article on concert music in 1968. Here's a taste:

. . . the events of May had a lingering effect on life in France and throughout the West[3], in terms of attitudes towards youth, the relationship of the State to its citizens, and the very nature of cultural life in democratic society. Never again[4] would cultural values—including means and modes of expression, artistic, sexual, and otherwise—be handed down from on high.

To read the whole thing, including the thrilling footnotes, click here.

 

Carter 102

Today is Elliott Carter's 102nd birthday. Readers of this blog are acquainted with my abiding interest in this composer and his music. On the occasion of his 100th birthday I posted a series of short notes on the pieces that have meant the most to me over the years, beginning here. Other posts on Carter, including links to CD reviews, can be found here.

For today, I leave it to Carter himself with a performance of Tintinnabulation (2009), for percussion ensemble, performed here by the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, under the direction of Peter Jarvis:

Carter: 16 Compositions

CD review, Sequenza21.

EC101

Today is Elliott Carter's 101st birthday. To commemorate this day and what this composer's music has meant to me, here's a link back to a series of posts I wrote last year on the occasion of the composer's 100th.

Carter: A Nonesuch Retrospective

CD Review, Sequenza21.

Carter: Quartets 2-4

CD Review, Sequenza21.

Elliott Carter on Naxos

Review, Sequenza21.

Carter at 100: Part 11

Bonus Tracks

There are lots of notes in Carter’s music. Lots of them. But for my development as a composer and listener, the passages (or entire movements) where Carter allows one note to carry the entire musical argument or at least the expressive content have been most telling.

The seventh Etude of Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (woodwind quartet, 1950) is a study on one note. The expressive arc of the piece is described through dynamics, accents, and changing instrumental colors. After composing his Brass Quintet for the American Brass Quintet in 1974, Carter gave them a Christmas gift called A Fantasy about Purcell’s “Fantasia upon One Note”. Carter’s arrangement of Purcell’s viol piece emphasizes the drone that sounds throughout the piece with changing colors and dynamics.

Carter’s Piano Concerto (1964) is a dramatic work exploring the relationship between an expressive individual (the soloist) and an oppressive group (the orchestra). Late in the Concerto’s second, and final, movement, the orchestra gradually builds a chord that leaves only one note in the middle silent, and the piano is “forced” onto that note at the climax of the work. In the Oboe Concerto (1988) the orchestra keeps coming back to the somber, sustained music that it plays at the beginning. Eventually the soloist repeatedly honks her lowest Bb (the lowest note on the instrument) repeatedly, in an attempt to get the orchestra on to another expressive mode.

Carter’s use of one-note passages in widely divergent expressive contexts has been a valuable lesson to me, not only in technical terms, but as a direct lesson in how important context is in determining the meaning of musical events. Additionally, I’ve thought of it as something of a bridge to my equal love of music that is more thoroughly built on limited means, like that of Morton Feldman and John Luther Adams. The commonalities between seemingly incompatible styles is often much more important than the differences.

Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Part 7: A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Part 8: String Quartet No.5 (1995)

Part 9: Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961)

Part 10: Concerto for Orchestra (1969)

Carter at 100: Part 10

1. Concerto for Orchestra (1969)

By the last part of the 19th century, the make-up of the symphony orchestra was largely standardized. The core of the orchestra was a large body of strings. The woodwinds and brass were in pairs, sometimes three, and the percussion consisted of a timpanist and maybe one or two additional percussionists, depending on the piece being played.

The music composed for the orchestra naturally reflected its make-up (and vice-versa), with the chief melodic burden carried by the strings. More specifically, the violins carry the melody most of the time because tonal harmony was built from the bass up. The orchestral music of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss shook this model up some, as they frequently put the winds in the role of melody-carrier for the bulk of a piece, with the strings more in the background. Much of the orchestral music of the first half or so of the 20th century was cast in the strings- or winds-centric tradition or treated the orchestra as a collection of chamber groups, rarely using the whole orchestra.

Claude Debussy went further than many composers in imagining an orchestral sound not based on strings, or on the opposition of strings and winds. He proposed seating orchestras so that winds sat near the strings that were in their same register—for example, flutes would sit near the violins. When Carter was asked to write a piece for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic, it seems appropriate that he took that particular occasion to rethink the orchestra along those Debussian lines.

Carter wanted to celebrate the ability of the modern orchestra with this commission. (One of the salient facts of the history of the orchestra in the 20th century is its explosive virtuosity. There are some effects in Strauss’ music that were written to be blurs; he knew the orchestras of his day could not play them precisely, whereas today’s student orchestras can and do.) Accordingly, Carter wrote a concerto for orchestra, rather than symphony. He wanted to portray the orchestra as a group of individuals—highly skilled, expressive members of a functioning society—so almost every member of the orchestra gets a solo or at least a prominent moment.

Given that Carter’s music was no longer thematic in nature nor was it composed along tonal lines, he took Debussy’s notion and used instrumental register as the organizing basis of the form of the Concerto for Orchestra. The Concerto is in four sections (the music is continuous), each one featuring instruments in a given range. The first section is scored for tenor-register instruments (cellos, trombones, bassoons, etc). It is written in decelerating phrases that start faster and get slower at each appearance. The second is written for soprano-register instruments like flutes and violins. It is fast music in even note values that slows down over the course of the piece. And so on.

Not surprisingly, the sections don’t appear one after the other in order, though it is true that the first one dominates the first quarter of the piece, the second the second-quarter, etc. Rather each movement is briefly interrupted by the other three according to a structural polyrhythm of 10:9:8:7. There is something cinematic about how Carter cross-cuts between different kinds of music, music that develops over the course of the entire piece.

The Concerto came near the end of Carter’s exploratory period. Writing an orchestral work with fairly thick textures presented a problem for the composer—how do you write chords for substantial groups of orchestral instruments without resorting to octaves? (Octaves tend to emphasize a pitch and make it sound like a tonal center.) In the Second Quartet Carter assigned intervals to each instrument. In this Concerto he assigned intervals to each group, and piled up these intervals into chords of as many as seven notes. In this way each group has a large repertoire of chords that are used to give each section its own distinctive sound.

Each orchestral group has a particular three-note chord fixed in its characteristic register—the four trichords add up to a twelve-note chord that represents a kind of home base for all of the harmonic materials of the Concerto. This chord appears at important structural points like the cross-cutting of the sections.

Midway through composing the Concerto Carter read Vents (“Winds”) by the French poet St. John Perse. Vents is an epic poem about America being swept by great winds of change. The colorful, ebullient music Carter was writing seemed to him to fit the broad ideas of the poem as well as the tenor of the times. The Concerto fairly sings of the turmoil and passions of the 1960s and places them and American concert music, in an artistic and cultural context.

The first several measures of the Concerto for Orchestra are concerned with setting the stage for the work. The percussion plays long rolls on drums and cymbals while the notes of the “home base” chord are introduced. Once all of the chord’s notes have appeared, a harp glissando triggers the whirling activity that leads up to the beginning of the first section. After the winds sweep through the orchestra during the main body of the piece trombone glissandos (only the second glissandos of the piece) signal the beginning of the raucous Coda. The Coda is marked by ringing bells, as if heralding the new world the winds have brought to life. The bells die away, the piece ends quietly. We have our new world, what are we going to do with it?

Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Part 7: A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Part 8: String Quartet No.5 (1995)

Part 9: Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961)

Carter at 100: Part 9

2. Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961)

Between his 80th and 100th birthdays, Carter completed some 40 compositions, from occasional pieces for solo instruments to two of the biggest pieces of his career, the Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (47 minutes) and the composer’s only opera to date, What Next? (1997, ca. 40 minutes). Between his 40th birthday in 1948 (the date of the Cello Sonata) and his 60th in 1968, he completed nine works.

Those 20 years found Carter exploring the nature and potential of musical materials—especially those relating to pitch and rhythm. In the Cello Sonata, the First String Quartet, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, the first six of the Eight Pieces for Four Timpani, the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord, and the Variations for Orchestra (all of which were composed between 1948 and 1955), Carter conducted these explorations in a mostly tonal environment, and where the rhythmic innovations could still be readily heard within the context of a beat or of multiple underlying beats.

Carter’s explorations bore decisive fruit in the two works he composed at the same time in the second half of the 1950s: the Second String Quartet (1959) and the Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961). In the Second Quartet, as we have seen, Carter applies his researches to the idea of establishing a distinct musical character for each instrument.

The request for a piece for harpsichord and piano immediately presented Carter with problems of a distinctly sonic nature. The piano is much louder than the harpsichord and has a much wider dynamic range; the harpsichord, through the use of stops, has a wider range of colors available; the piano sound can resonate for quite sometime, while that of the harpsichord cannot. The solution that Carter chose was to give each instrument a small orchestra that would soften the differences between the soloists—for example, three of the four brass instruments are assigned to the harpsichord’s orchestra, to make up for the difference in volume.

Each orchestra includes two percussionists playing a large battery of unpitched instruments. Both solo instruments have an element of percussion in how they produce sound, so the narrative of the Double Concerto comes, in part, from the soloists bridging the gap in their own ensembles between pitched and unpitched instruments. The music moves between extremes of percussive noise and pristine chords in the winds and strings.

The Double Concerto begins in noise. Carter’s research into pitch and rhythm led him to link them in ways very different from those adopted by the serialist composers working at about the same time. The cymbal and drums rolls of the beginning move in waves whose durations are related to specific intervals—in this way pitch and rhythm are tied together but not in a mechanical way. As the intervals are gradually introduced the waves of percussion meet in works first climax, which dies away and joins to a movement featuring the harpsichord, with piano commentary.

At the center of the work is a chorale for the winds and strings. At the same time the soloists and percussion whirl around the chorale in phrases that accelerate and decelerate against the steady music of the winds and strings. The climax comes at the end of the chorale with single high notes on antique cymbals (the only pitched percussion in the entire piece).

Carter has described the Double Concerto as being analogous to a world coming into being from chaos (the noise at the beginning) and functioning as a working living organism. After final spectacular solos from both the harpsichord and the piano, the music pauses. Then a great percussive crash signals the beginning of the Coda, which is really an extension and composing-out of that crash. The music moves back towards noise while quietly dying away. Carter has said that he took inspiration from poems by Pope and Lucretius about the beginnings and endings of worlds, but the music is really much more direct: From noise you came and to noise you will return.


Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Part 7: A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Part 8: String Quartet No.5 (1995)

Carter at 100: Part 8

3. String Quartet No. 5 (1995)

One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is art about art. There has always been meta-art, though more often than not the references to art-about-art were localized within a given work, but recent decades have seen the idea raised to a controlling principle in a great number of works in all artistic media.

The string quartet, as both medium (the combination of two violins, viola, and cello) and as genre (pieces for string quartet that make full musical statements, as opposed to occasional pieces), has been an important part of Carter’s development for most of his career. In the Second (completed in 1959) and Third (1971), Carter pushes the genre in new (for him) poetic directions.

The four players in the Second Quartet are given distinct musical characters and expressive styles, which are derived from individual interval content and rhythmic characteristics. The drama inheres in how these four individuals communicate—and how they don’t. In the Third Carter reconfigures the ensemble into two duos and asks that they be seated as far apart on the stage as possible. He then gives them a different number of movements to play (one of the duos has six movements, the other has four) and arranges them so that each movement of one duo is played simultaneously (at some point in the piece) with every movement of the other duo.

In the Fifth Quartet Carter takes this idea of anthropomorphizing the instruments into characters acting out what Carter has called “auditory scenarios” to the meta-art level. Here the instruments/characters are members of a string quartet in rehearsal. The Quartet is structured along lines that are a familiar part of Carter’s late late style—a kind of returning music alternates with contrasting movements, which are more or less fully developed. In this piece, as opposed to the returning “rain music” of Boston Concerto, the links between movements consists of fragments. The fragments consist of snippets of previous movements, hints of what is to come, and brief improvisatory phrases based on each instrument’s interval repertoire.

The links convey the feeling of being in a rehearsal. As the ideas are tried out and lines “practiced”, agreement is eventually reached on what kind of music to rehearse. The Quartet’s six movements are examples of most of Carter’s characteristic textures and modes, especially from his quartets. These include “scorrevole” (“scurrying”, one of Carter’s favorite, regardless of medium), energetic, slashing chords, and serene chorale phrases.

A favorite narrative strategy of Carter’s is overlapping forms. This is a natural outgrowth of his interest in structural heterophony. I mentioned that the duos in the Third Quartet have different numbers of movements and that all possible combinations of movements between the duos occur over the course of the piece. The most telling moments of the piece happen when a new movement starts in one duo while the other duo continues playing its own movement.

This strategy is pervasive in the Fifth Quartet. The fifth, and final, Interlude is dominated, for the most part, by the fantastic, aggressive phrases of the first violin, while the rest of the group attempts to “rehearse” other parts of the piece. Finally, the rest of the ensemble begins the last movement (“Caprriccioso”) several measures before the first violin finishes her own capricious playing.

This final movement is a dance played entirely pizzicato (plucking the strings instead of bowing them)—the pizzicato playing in the other instruments is one reason the overlap is so apparent here. The strumming and plucking continues to an exuberant climax and a brief relaxation, only to suddenly build to another climax. This is followed by a very brief (less than three measures) bowed section—it moves to a kind of resolution. The rehearsal ends.

Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Part 7: A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Happy Hundredth

As you may have heard, today is composer Elliott Carter's 100th birthday. If his appearance on Charlie Rose last night is any indication, he will be around writing music for quite a while longer.

My series on Carter's pieces that have meant the most to me over the years begins here, and will continue shortly.

Carter at 100: Part 7

4. A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Carter has always been a literary composer. He majored in literature as an undergraduate, and read and studied the works of the first wave of 20th century American Modernists (including, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens, and Williams) as they appeared. He was friends with some of the poets of the second wave, Robert Lowell in particular.

More directly, many of Carter’s major works from across his entire career have literary backgrounds. Carter’s note frequently point to literary works and images that either guided his work or came to him after a composition was completed, and the allusion could performers and listeners find their way into a piece. Carter’s early career is filled with choral works and pieces for voice and piano. It’s a little surprising then that nearly thirty years elapsed between vocal works, after the appearance of Emblems (chorus) in 1947.

A Mirror on Which to Dwell was commissioned by Speculum Musicae (“mirror of music”) for soprano Susan Davenny Wyner. Since the commission was for a woman’s voice, Carter wanted to set the words of a female poet. Lowell pointed Carter to the work of Elizabeth Bishop, a rough contemporary of Lowell’s whose poetry turned out to appeal to the composer very much.

Bishop’s language is precise and abstract, much like Carter’s music. By “abstract” I don’t mean that her words and images are untethered to experience. Quite the opposite, in fact—her images are very much grounded in the world as we observe it. Her images reflect the way an observant mind works; she puts together things and ideas that would seem not to go together. After she has shown us that they do, we wonder how it was we never connected them ourselves.

One of Bishop’s lifelong concerns was with the borders that separate us, one from another, and from fully experiencing the world. This seems to me to parallel Carter’s interest in simultaneous streams of music—streams that occur at the same time, but something keeps them apart.

The six poems Carter sets in Mirror are not connected; this is not a song cycle as such but a collection of lyric pieces. Carter has arranged them so their focus narrows from general at the start to more specific at the end. The collection nature of the piece is emphasized by the instrumentation, which is different for each song. The vocal line tends to be angular, but the words come through clearly, as the rhythms are very much like those of spoken American English.

Carter’s settings are really more like expressively annotated readings than they are song or recitative. The musical materials are directly related to the poetic content of the poem, from the skittering oboe music in “Sandpiper” to the musical entropy that mirrors the diminishing energy that characterizes “Anaphora”.

Music in performance is an intensely collaborative artistic endeavor. Composing is much less collaborative, though working with a given performer or an ensemble when writing for them is certainly a collaborative effort. Setting pre-existing texts written by someone whom you may never have met, who in fact may have lived long before you read their work, is a special kind of collaboration. When there is artistic sympathy, a deep understanding of the words and what can be done with them, borders are crossed; connections are made.

Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)