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AguidetoElliottCarter'smusic|Music|TheGuardian

A guide to Elliott Carter's music

Tom Service has surrounding contemporary music and now, in part one of a new series, he takes a
close listen to the amazing work of the 103-year old Elliott Carter
Tom Service
Monday 30 April 2012 15.12BST

If there are any composers writing more profoundly joyful, or youthful, music than the
American Elliott Carter, I've yet to discover them. He's the closest any of us will probably
ever experience to new music's Haydn. He's also, incidentally, 103: old enough to have
become his own style, his own musical world. Carter's recent music and there's a truly
astonishing amount that he's written since his 80th, and even his 90th, birthdays is
witty and acerbic, energising and lyrical, but he owes this explosion of creativity to hard
decades of compositional labour in the 1950s and 60s, when he refined a language of
teeming, vitalising, mind-bending complexity.
Carter still lives in the downtown New York apartment where he has watched the city
where he was born grow, develop, and teem beneath him since the second world war.
But New York is not the place where he discovered the musical language that would fuel
more than 60 years of phenomenal creativity that continues even now, in his 104th year.
It was in the desert of Arizona in 1950-51 that Carter made his breakthrough discoveries
in musical time and space. After a year of compositional soul-searching, Carter finished
his First String Quartet, a 45-minute musical dreamscape, whose structure was
suggested, Carter says, by a Jean Cocteau film, Le sang d'un pote. In the quartet, you
can hear the key to Carter's later music, from the way the piece melts four main
movements into one gigantic superstructure, to how the music moves from one speed to
another so seamlessly that you don't notice it happening until you realise you're in a new
musical dimension (listen to the opening minutes of the quartet's fourth movement to
hear his mastery of the technique known as "metric modulation". The sounds this
quartet makes are thrillingly varied, from torrentially fast music to lyrical intensity, and
yet the whole thing is made coherent by the use of a new harmonic device that Carter
had found (a chord dauntingly called the "all-interval tetrachord"; basically, a collection
of four notes say, C, D flat, E flat and G that contains the potential to generate every
musical interval you can think of, the ultimate composer's toolkit).
Before the Quartet, Carter's music was a brilliant, ambitious vision of New Deal neoclassicism, music that was influenced by his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. But
Carter's early life in New York (in the 1920s and 30s) had also introduced him to the
music of Charles Ives who championed the younger composer, Alban Berg, George
Gershwin and, his biggest single musical influence, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which, in
the 20s, was still sending shock waves.
But nothing any of these composers had written prepared the musical world for Carter's
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music of the later 50s, 60s, and 70s. He composed in those days painstakingly slowly,
and he had to, because in pieces such as the Double Concerto for harpsichord and piano
("a masterpiece, and by an American composer", Stravinsky somewhat patronisingly
said), or the Concerto for Orchestra, the Second and Third String Quartets or the
Symphony of Three Orchestras, he explodes the ideas he discovered in his First Quartet
into mind-bending musical regions. Instead of one stream of musical time and texture,
Carter puts several on top of each other. In his Third Quartet, the four players are split
into two duos who play different music at different speeds simultaneously which the
players, have somehow to co-ordinate (listen to how the heroic Arditti Quartet do it),
and in the Concerto for Orchestra, written in 1969, Carter splits the ensemble into four,
each associated with a different harmony and a different kind of motion. It took Oliver
Knussen's brilliant recording of the piece with the London Sinfonietta in 1992 to fully
realise the Concerto's enormous poetic power. Carter was inspired by the imagery of
Saint-John Perse's 1946 poem, Vents; to listen to the Concerto for Orchestra is to
experience all of the drama of a seasonal year, a whole cycle of birth, death, and renewal,
in a mere 20 minutes.
Carter told me not far off a decade ago, when he was a mere slip of a lad approaching his
95th birthday, that he didn't know how he had the patience to write down this
teemingly, ferociously compositionally demanding music. But thank goodness he did:
it's music whose secrets only get richer the more you listen. My favourite of the pieces
from Carter's heroic period is the 1964-5 Piano Concerto, partly because it makes an
extraordinarily energetic and sometimes terrifying noise such as the moment when the
orchestra attempts to suffocate the pianist with a vapour-like veil of sound, but also
because it's a piece whose labyrinthine depths of meaning and motion could sustain a
lifetime of listening and are quite possibly unplumbable.
Since the 1980s, something has happened to Carter's productivity. He has got faster and
more productive rather like what we now know is happening to the universe, as the
stars and galaxies spin faster and faster away from each other the older they get. He has
been able to harness the discoveries of his earlier music so that he doesn't have to start
from scratch every time he puts pen to paper, and he now inhabits his own musical
world so completely that he knows every blade of grass, every boulder, and every lifeform on planet Carter, and he can call on all of them to do his bidding. As Daniel
Barenboim commented, "Carter's music is always in good humour, you feel its high
spirits, the tongue-in-cheek, the recklessness". Each of the pieces he has written in the
last 20 years is an explosive highlight, from the miniatures he has composed for his
friends, to the concertos he composed for the Boston Symphony and the Asko Ensemble,
the works for voice he has increasingly written, or another personal favourite, a piano
concerto in miniature called Dialogues, written for Nicolas Hodges. Whether you start
with the Quartets or with Dialogues, with the Concerto for Orchestra or his opera, What
Next?, enjoy getting Carter. (Had to get that in somewhere)

Five key Carter links

* A Celebration of Some 100x150 Notes
Carter virgins start here this distils all the authentic Carterian life-enhancing energy
and richness into three jam-packed, irresistible minutes.
* First String Quartet
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The work that opened the door to Carter's musical universe

* Concerto for Orchestra
Complex, yes, but an incandescent blaze of musical poetry.
* Carter in interview
The composer talks about his early years
* Oboe Concerto
A fantastic performance from Nicholas Daniel and the BBC Symphony Orchestra of
Carter's most lyrical concerto.
Next week: Pauline Oliveros
More blogposts

Topics
Elliott Carter
Classical music

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