Elliott Carter

Epilogue

97 Epilogue in a review of the 1988 reissue in paperback of David Schiff’s book, H.Wiley Hitchcock remarked, almost casually, that “it is difficult to generalize about Carter’s music and what makes it tick.”1 Such a statement might apply to any composer, but it seems especially true when applied to a composer who has lived as long and has been as productive as Carter. Still, generalizations about Carter abound. Schiff’s most sweeping generalization comes in the 1998 second edition of The Music of Elliott Carter, and with it he stands virtually alone in suggesting that Carter’s music,especially from the twentieth century’s last two decades and perhaps some of the earlier music as well, is darkened by shades of bitterness and isolation . Likewise focusing on Carter’s recent music but hearing in it large measures of brightness, Leon Botstein writes that “the dense complexity of [Carter’s] music of the mid-century has given way to a clarity and translucence,” and John Link generalizes that Carter has lately “developed a lighter comic touch” that is balanced by “a clear-eyed, though poignant, wistfulness.”2 A similar idea is found in an account by Arnold Whittall of Carter’s 2008 opera, but it is expressed in such a way that it fairly nails the governing spirit of almost all of Carter’s mature work. Comparing Carter to Pierre Boulez,Whittall suggests that the music of both composers for decades has been profoundly affected by the “abiding influence” 98 e l l i o t t c a r t e r | Epilogue of their “Gallic mentors,” in Boulez’s case Olivier Messiaen and in Carter’s case Nadia Boulanger. Messiaen and Boulanger were in many ways as different as are Boulez and Carter, yet the two of them “shared an aesthetic ethos that resisted the projection of alienated melancholia.” For all its seriousness, Whittall writes, Carter’s music since the middle of the twentieth century has maintained a tone that is “predominantly upbeat.”3 Of course, not all Carter commentators have been so generous. As noted earlier, Richard Taruskin has described Carter’s works (and also the serial works of Milton Babbitt) as “absurdly overcomposed monstrosities.” Trying perhaps too hard to make his point, Taruskin sets up Carter as the target of an entire chapter of the fifth volume of his huge Oxford History of Western Music. Whereas Benjamin Britten for Taruskin personifies the socially aware, socially engaged twentieth-century artist whose music appeals to large audiences and in almost every way reflects on or responds to the world around him, Carter (like Babbitt) personifies the opposite, the aloof artisan whose deliberately “difficult” work has nothing at all to do with the real world and primarily serves “fellow composers, performers, scholars, and academically inclined or affiliated critics” as “a touchstone of self-congratulation.”4 To lend extra ammunition to his favored side in the Britten-Carter “standoff,”Taruskin quotes out of context one of Carter’s most stalwart champions, pianist Charles Rosen, in a way that makes it seem as though Rosen is claiming that the worthiness of Carter’s music is proved by the fact that so many people find it incomprehensible.5 And this is exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a performer,Taruskin says, who like Carter has long been both a willing participant in and beneficiary of the “prestige machine.”6 However one views Taruskin’s invocation of Rosen here and elsewhere, it is true that Rosen has often professed the belief that when complex music is also good music it behooves serious listeners to make an effort.7 Only when the language of music so knotty as Carter’s is thoroughly learned can it be adequately heard, Rosen wrote in his 2009 belated centennial tribute to his friend; only when “one understands how the music works” can one “perceive the [music’s] emotion.”8 Just as Taruskin’s generalization has it that the music of Carter is cold and bloodless, so Rosen’s standard generalization describes the music as impassioned and deeply meaningful. But Rosen has also generalized about Carter in a more objective way. Remarking not on the expressive content of Carter’s music but only on its treatment of pitch and rhythm, Rosen told the Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer that Carter is the only composer who actually synthesizes the two great traditions of the earlier part of the twentieth century, . . . the first composer to...