Elliott Carter by James Wierzbicki (review)

To write a short book about any composer poses special challenges. Even when the life and work in question have passed into the realm of the safely historical (better yet, into another era altogether), allowing its commentators a certain perspective upon them, the decisions that must be made concerning what to emphasize, where to gloss over, can hardly be automatic. But when the subject of such a book is a composer with a long and prolific career who at the time was still very much with us, the difficulty of the task increases appreciably. In the case of Elliott Carter, it has seemed for quite a while now that no book of marketable dimensions would ever be long enough to cover even a representative sampling of his works in appropriately detailed fashion. This was already true thirty years ago, when Carter's reputation for writing rhythmically and harmonically complicated, densely textured and virtuosic music, held together according to the tenets of a formidable technical apparatus, had become well established; with each passing year, as Carter has added to an already considerable list of works—at a scarcely diminishing rate of production, to boot—the prospect has become ever more hopeless.

James Wierzbicki's Elliott Carter, at a neat 100 pages exclusive of end matter, is thus notable as much for what it does not attempt as for what it accomplishes. The reader who seeks in-depth analytical exegeses of even a few of Carter's compositions need not look here: there is not a single musical illustration in these pages. But while some pieces receive much more attention than others, the author focuses not so much on the pieces for their own sake as on the context of a career quintessentially American in certain ways, utterly unique in others, culminating in the marvel of a composer who in his extreme old age—102 when this book was published—was still finding the energy to get up every morning to compose.

Wierzbicki gives us four chapters of roughly equal length that split the book evenly between Carter's development up to the time of his first international recognition (early 1950s) and the sixty years since, during which his reputation grew steadily and the musical style slowly shifted from the take-no-prisoners complexity of the 1960s and 1970s, through a burnished yet still daunting "new classicism" in the 1980s and 1990s, to the relatively spare, even transparent idiom of the last fifteen years, which made his music seem in some ways more "accessible" than ever before. In setting these proportions, Wierzbicki certainly is not claiming that what is most interesting about Carter is his formation, but he does give it more emphasis than it gets in David Schiff's monograph The Music of Elliott Carter (even its first edition) or in the critical and scholarly literature on Carter in general. This approach is likely to be helpful to most people who might pick up this book, whether musicians (if non-Carter specialists) or those drawn from a more general readership, who will know who Elliott Carter is but not how he came to be that way, or why the details of this development are essential to an understanding of the shape that his later artistic life took.

Much of the ground gone over in chapter 1, "Foundations (1908-45)," is familiar enough: Carter's upbringing in a home where little interest was taken in the arts; the friendship of Charles Ives, which broadened the boy's musical horizons considerably; the years at Harvard and in France under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger; the early years of Carter's career back in New York, when he struggled to make his musical voice heard and to make a living without sacrificing too much of the time he needed to compose. Nevertheless, there is room for the occasional original insight, such as the possibility that it was Carter's lack of preparation for college-level...