Elliott Carter ou le temps fertile (review)

Elliott Carter ou le temps fertile. By Max Noubel. Genève: Éditions Contrechamps, 2000. [321 p. ISBN 2-940068-17-8. FS 35.] Music examples, lists of works, discography, bibliography, index.

European musicians and new music enthusiasts have a special fondness for the music of Elliott Carter. Indeed, of the fifty works written since 1980, thirty-four have been premiered in Europe and three more in the United States by European performers. The composer has also received some of Europe's most prestigious musical honors, among them Germany's Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and Monaco's Prince Pierre Foundation Music Award. France has also named him Commandeur de l'Ordre des arts et des lettres. It should thus be no great surprise that the second full-length book on Carter's music has been written by a French musicologist.

The first monograph was David Schiff's The Music of Elliott Carter (2d ed. [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998]), a great achievement that will remain the most useful reference on its subject. In French, one can find a collection of translations of sixteen essays by the composer, La dimension du temps (Genève: Contrechamps, 1999), as well as an anthology of interviews by Allen Edwards, Charles Rosen, and Heinz Holliger, Entretiens avec Elliott Carter (Genève: Contrechamps, 1992). There is also an article by Swiss musicologist Étienne Darbelley, "Continuité, cohérence et formes de temps: À propos des Night Fantasies d'Elliott Carter" (Il saggiatore musicale 2 [1995]: 297-327) and others by European and American musicologists in the journals Contrechamps and Entretemps. Max Noubel, the author of this new book, has written his doctoral dissertation on Carter's music (Dramaturgie de l'écriture dans l'œuvre d'Elliott Carter [Ph.D. diss., Université de Provence, 1997]). He has also published an article on the composer: "Expressivité et structure chez Carter: Les caractères musicaux et les formes de la composition" (Dissonance 58 [1998]: 11-17). In fact, many sections of this book seem to come directly from Noubel's dissertation.

A foreword by musicologist Philippe Albèra is followed by a preface in the form of an interview with Pierre Boulez, who talks about his interest in Carter's music, and especially in its formal aspects. Actually, one does not learn much from this interview, which contains, as is unfortunately so often the case with Boulez, many reckless judgments, such as "I would even say that [Carter] is one of the very few composers who interest me" (p. 16). Not "one of the very few twentieth-century composers," not even "one of the very few American composers," but one of the very few of all composers. One can only conclude that Boulez's interests are quite limited.

The monograph itself is divided into five chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter covers Carter's pre-1936 biography and works, possible musical and extramusical influences, and some general stylistic aspects of his music. Among the latter, Noubel singles out the instrumental character, the important role of texture, the significance of spatial placement of performers, and the composer's obsession with innovation. Noubel's array of possible influences include Alfred North Whitehead, George Balanchine, Sergey Eisenstein, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Conlon Nancarrow, Ruth Crawford, Nadia Boulanger, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg. One wonders about the appropriateness of mentioning Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, especially since the author concludes that they had no particular influence on Carter. The presence of their names in this discussion (p. 41-43) seems a little bit artificial, as if it had been required by some sort of modernist dogma.

Chapter 2 concerns the period from 1936 to 1955, with brief sections on the First Symphony (1942), the Holiday Overture (1944), The Minotaur (1947), the Woodwind Quintet (1948), and the Sonata for flute, oboe, cello, and harpsichord (1952). There is more thorough treatment of the Piano Sonata (1946), the...