Elliott Carter

1. Foundations (1908-45)

5 1 Foundations (1908–45) an unfortunately enduring myth has it that Elliott Carter was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth and that this good fortune somehow related both to Carter’s intellectual grounding and to his work as a composer. Often echoed and paraphrased, the misleading idea likely stems from 1957, when Richard Franko Goldman—in one of the earliest biographicalcritical studies of Carter—wrote that “as the son of a well-to-do New York family, [Carter] was not faced with the economic necessity of choosing a career, and was able to pursue an education in the leisurely fashion no longer common.”1 It is true that Elliott Cook Carter Sr., sustaining a business launched by his father (Eli C. Carter) shortly after the American Civil War, in the early decades of the twentieth century was a successful New York–based importer of French and Belgian lace. It is not at all true, however, that Elliott Cook Carter Jr.—the composer—lived his creative life in the lap of luxury. The firm of E. C. Carter & Son was one that Elliott Carter Sr. had to buy from his father at a considerable price, the loans for which Carter Sr. was still repaying when his son (his only child) was born on 11 December 1908. The firm prospered only until the mid1920s , when the American market for handmade lace curtains in essence dried up; after that, the composer’s father shifted the focus of the business in turn, and 6 e l l i o t t c a r t e r | Foundations (1908–45) always with a struggle, to knitted draperies and such relatively déclassé items as inexpensive perfumes and breath fresheners. That Carter Jr. expressed little interest in devoting his adult life to peddling drugstore commodities caused his entrepreneurial father no end of chagrin.Carter Sr., in fact, was openly contemptuous of his son’s commitment to such an impractical field as music, and in the late 1930s, when compositions by Carter Jr. began to get hearings in the New York area, Carter Sr. set a policy of not attending performances. More to the point, the always hardworking Carter Sr. never gifted his musically minded son with anything more than a modicum of independent income. The family’s relatively secure financial status in the twentieth century’s early decades indeed afforded Carter Jr. with what might be called a “good” education , first at the Horace Mann School in New York and then—from 1926 to 1932—at Harvard University. Carter’s living expenses while at Harvard were of course paid for by his family, but after Harvard the young composer, in terms of finances, was pretty much on his own. When Carter set off for Paris in 1932 primarily for the sake of studying with Nadia Boulanger, his family granted him an allowance too small for anyone to live on. Upon his return to the United States in 1935, Carter discovered that in the severely depressed economy teaching positions were almost impossible to find, and so he felt himself lucky to be able to cobble together a small income by writing reviews for the journal Modern Music and serving as music director for a dance company—Ballet Caravan—run by his Harvard classmate Lincoln Kirstein. He felt even more lucky to be offered—in 1940, a year after his marriage to sculptor/ art critic Helen Frost-Jones—a full-time teaching position at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Carter taught at St. John’s College for only two years, his stated reason for leaving being a desire to devote himself more fully to composition. He continued to write for Modern Music until the summer of 1946, at which time he embarked upon his second academic appointment, at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore . Following his resignation from St. John’s College in 1942, Carter eagerly applied for paid positions with the war-embroiled U.S. government. His efforts to find meaningful employment (i.e., employment not just remunerative but arguably patriotic) as a translator or cryptologist all came to naught. Early in 1943, however, Carter was offered a modestly paid position as musical advisor for the New York office of the government’s Office of War Information. However little it paid, this was a job that Carter took quite seriously. But it was not so time- or emotion-consuming a job that it prevented Carter from focus- [3.17.162.247] Project...