Elliott Carter

Introduction

1 Introduction for any musically trained person who has grappled with the intricacies of a Carter score, surely the temptation is great to focus largely on technical matters. After all, Carter’s music demands extraordinary attention and precision of its performers, and for at least six decades it has been replete with “learned devices” (all-interval tetrachords, architectonic polyrhythms, metric modulations, etc.) of the sort that whet the appetites of academically inclined commentators. Whereas music of any sort is fundamentally abstract, Carter’s devices seem appealingly concrete, capable not just of being identified in the “texts” of the scores but also of being rigorously analyzed and more or less easily demonstrated. The devices are in and of themselves intriguing, and they have generated a raft of commentary that purports to unravel their complexities. Elliott Carter’s music is complex. But it has never been music about complexity . In a 1976 essay titled “Music and the Time Screen,” Carter reminded us that pitch and rhythmic structures form merely “the outer shell, the wrapping of the music.The reason for writing [the music]—for developing it in the way described, for weighing every note, chord, rhythm in the light of their expressive intention and their living, spontaneous interrelationships, and the judging of it all, almost unconsciously, against a private standard of what gives me genuine sensuous pleasure , of what seems fascinating, interesting, imaginative, moving, and of urgent 2 e l l i o t t c a r t e r | Introduction importance—cannot be put into words.”1 Carter was right to dismiss his famous technical apparatuses as the mere “outer shell” of his music, for at least since the 1945–46 Piano Sonata the essence of his work—what makes it truly imaginative and moving—has surely been something more profound than the likes of metric modulation. The impact of a typical Carter composition derives in part from the solidity of the work’s large-scale structure and the dynamism of its small-scale fluctuations of tension and resolution. But the impact that likely strikes listeners as most immediate results from the shape and movement of the composition’s various phrases. No matter how intellectually controlled are their content and design, and regardless of how well they might fit into a composition’s overall plan, the individual musical statements come across as gestures that seem to spring not so much from Carter’s brain as from his spirit. They declare themselves openly and eloquently; they clash with and complement one another, and they ebb and flow as forcefully as do the tides of raw feeling. If the dynamic qualities of these gestures are analogous to human emotional states, the emotions they convey—except in those relatively few compositions that involve settings of poetry—are not at all specific. Indeed, it is precisely their ambiguity that lends Carter’s gestures their potency. The amount of graspable “information” they contain is great, especially for the first-time listener. But even the first-time listener, so long as he or she remains attentive, likely senses that the received information has multiple “meanings,” many of which promise to remain forever elusive. The better one knows a work by Carter, the more one realizes how much in it there is yet to be discovered. Familiarity with the music perhaps makes certain of Carter’s compositional techniques seem all the more patent; at the same time, familiarity makes the real substance of Carter’s music seem all the more ineffable. Carter has often and eloquently expressed opinions about music in general and about the music of his contemporaries.2 It is interesting, if not altogether surprising, that most of what Carter has to say about his own work in fact deals with technical matters. One of the few paragraphs in which he explains not the mechanics but the “meaning” of his music is found in his liner note for the Nonesuch recording of his 1948 Sonata for Cello and Piano. But even here one is reminded that creative persons are typically reluctant to probe too deeply into their own psyches. Although Carter is candid enough, his statement is less an independent declaration than a simple response to the observations of another 3 writer. In his 1964 book Music in a New Found Land, British critic Wilfrid Mellers prefaced his chapter on Carter with these lines from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Esthétique du Mal...