Elliott Carter by James Wierzbicki (review)

Imagine, as a biographical subject, a creative artist whose career spans more than three-quarters of a century—from the 1930s to the 2010s, who was mentored by Charles Ives, drank with Edgard Varèse at a Greenwich Village speakeasy, sang in the choir at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Perséphone, studied with Gustav Holst, Walter Piston, and Nadia Boulanger, and who has counted among his friends and colleagues not only Stravinsky and Varèse but Sessions, Cowell, Copland, Barber, Nancarrow, Babbitt, Boulez, Gielen, Barenboim, Levine, and Knussen. Then add a body of work that is unsurpassed in the annals of late modernism, and that now extends with equal energy, insight, and wry comedy well into our own postmodern age. Surely one would think the Henry-Louis De La Granges of the world (if not the Robert Caros) would be clambering to take up such a remarkable figure. But for the American composer Elliott Carter (b. 1908), that kind of biographical attention has not been forthcoming. The books on Carter that have so far appeared—including David Schiff ’s The Music of Elliott Carter (New York, 1983; 2nd rev. edn. 1998), Max Noubel’s Elliott Carter ou le temps fertile (Geneva, 2000), and Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler’s Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents (Woodbridge, 2008)—have greatly enriched our understanding of Carter’s long and eventful career, but a full-fledged biography has yet to be written.

Though the aims of the University of Illinois Press’s American Composers series keep it well shy of Caroesque proportions, James Wierzbicki’s Elliott Carter is, at least in part, a biography, and in that respect it makes a much-needed contribution to a neglected area of Carter scholarship. Limited ‘by contractual necessity’ (p. 99) to a low word count, Wierzbicki mixes a summary of notable events in Carter’s life with brief discussions of his music—the latter, for the most part, deftly assembled from quotations of other authors in order to showcase the views Wierzbicki finds most illuminating or in most need of qualification. The book is written in a lively and readable style and should appeal to nonspecialists, while giving die-hard Carterians plenty to think about as well.

The book is arranged chronologically: chapters 1, 3, and 4—‘Foundations (1908–45)’, ‘Maturity (1950–80)’, and ‘New Directions (1980–2010)’—cover large chunks of roughly thirty years each. The second, somewhat shorter chapter—‘Three Seminal Works (1945–51)’—deals with the six-year period during which Carter composed his Piano Sonata, Cello Sonata, and First String Quartet. There is a four-page introduction, fifteen pages of endnotes, and a six-page index of names and titles, except for entries on ‘pitch-class set’, ‘metric modulation’, and ‘cybernetics’ (!).

The most valuable part of the book covers Carter’s early life and education. Wierzbicki’s boldest claim is that Carter changed his field from Music to English after his first semester at Harvard not because of his frustration with the Music Department’s conservatism (as Carter usually has claimed) but because ‘the department’s rigorous demands were simply over Carter’s head’ (p. 13). Although clearly meant to provoke, this conclusion has at least the ring of truth. Carter’s family was not terribly encouraging of his musical talents and his early training was not extensive. Like many late bloomers, Carter threw himself into his chosen field with a special determination to master its craft. While concentrating on English he took classes and lessons at the nearby Longy School (a private conservatory), then went back to the Harvard Music Department and earned a Master’s degree before setting out for Paris (in the footsteps of his teacher Walter Piston) to study with Nadia Boulanger. But Wierzbicki does not dwell on Carter’s early need for remediation. In fact, he cites with approval Jonathan Bernard’s observation that Carter’s liberal arts training was both unusual for a composer...