Carter by David Schiff (review)

One of the longest-living composers, Elliott Carter (1908–2012) had a career that spanned nearly the entire length of the twentieth century and went into the first decade of the twenty-first. The leading chronicler of the works of Carter to date is David Schiff, who has just written what he calls his third book on Carter. He regards it as such because he wrote his previous monograph, The Music of Elliott Carter, during Carter's lifetime; since Carter was still composing, that book required substantial revisions between the first edition (London: Eulenburg Books, 1983) and second, revised edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

Published just six years after Carter's death, this new biography is Schiff's first opportunity to describe the entire arc of the composer's lengthy life and career. The new perspectives Schiff provides in this book came in part because he had access to the Paul Sacher Stiftung's vast collection of Carter's letters and materials, which were previously unavailable. Through these documents, Schiff was able to gain a better understanding of Carter's character, family relationships, and friendships—information that Carter had carefully guarded during his lifetime. Although it was not Schiff's purpose, by writing this book he continues to promote Carter and his music. In chapter 1, Schiff avers that we may not know the full extent of Carter's impact on music history for some time, because his works have only been performed and discussed by a limited circle of musicians and scholars. By starting his book with this statement, in a way Schiff lays down the challenge to the rest of us to explore, write about, and perform Carter's music so that he can be better situated among his peers.

Compared to his earlier writings, Schiff takes a different tack here by avoiding lengthy theoretical analyses of Carter's works. In essence, this new book is part listening guide and part tribute to the man and his legacy. As such, it focuses on the influences and environment from which key works sprang and their reception in contemporary society. Schiff gives little time to the usual focal points of writings on Carter's music: metrical modulation, all-interval tetrachords, and the all-triad hexachord. Instead, Schiff's focus in this book is on a single thesis: to challenge the delineation of Carter's works by stylistic periods such as "early Carter" or "late Carter." Schiff's argument is that there are "career-spanning resemblances" that require us to pay attention to his entire works as being guided by two elements, "psychological dualisms and pre-compositional calculation" (pp. 4–5). The former Schiff notes as a recurring polarity between darkness and light in all of his works and the latter as the proclivity for Carter to work out compositional ideas with numbers and calculations ahead of putting notes on paper.

Schiff divides his book into sections that reinforce the idea of early, middle, and late Carter, which presents an interesting paradox given his premise that Carter should not be viewed as having two careers. Chapters 4–6 outline the works that Carter wrote before the First String Quartet (1951)—a work that the composer has espoused as the beginning of his true style (p. 59)—chapters 7–9 outline his central period, and 10–13 his "very late style" (p. 158). Despite these divisions, in the earlier chapters Schiff attempts to prove his idea that Carter's signature style was always present. He explains that Carter used precompositional methods all through his career, noting that this type of compositional style represented a conflict within the budding composer who "questioned 'mechanistic' approaches to composition" (p. 45). Schiff also sheds light on evidence of the second aspect of Carter's style: the dichotomy of styles and influences showing the "Light and Dark components of Carter's creative process" (p. 60). The author uses these three...