Elliott Carter: A Centennial Celebration, and: Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents (review)

These two books were produced to celebrate the hundredth birthday (11 December 2008) of the renowned American composer Elliott Carter. Physically these books couldn't be more different, one being a relatively concise paperback, the other a larger and lengthier hardback. Both are excellent works celebrating Carter's life and legacy.

Elliott Carter: A Centennial Celebration is a Festschrift, containing short essays, interviews, compositions, poems and even artwork done by Carter's fellow composers, former students, colleagues, and friends. The volume begins with an interview of Pierre Boulez about Carter. Boulez gives a properly broad perspective by saying that Carter "represents a resume of the century" (p. 1). They are close friends in spite of an almost twenty-year age difference and have written compositions for one another as birthday gifts. Boulez considers Carter the "most European cultivated" (p. 6) American composer and describes the gradual evolution of his style, his development of rhythmic modulation, and his impact on contemporary music.

Fred Lerdahl explains Carter's influences on him as a composer. These include Carter's "interplay of multiple tempi as a structural and expressive device," his "predilection for two or more kinds of music, or 'characters,' that unfold in overlapping and intricate patterns," and finally the fact that "he constantly renews himself exploring new ideas with each piece" (pp. 17–19). He includes an excerpt from his own Oboe Quartet (2002) to illustrate these points.

Paul Griffiths writes about "the composer in his library." He believes Carter to be among the most well-read of leading composers, having a thorough knowledge of French, Italian, and German literature, as well as the Greek and Latin classics. This familiarity shows in Carter's vocal music, in which he sets a wide variety of literary texts. Griffiths gives detailed descriptions of how Carter's musical settings complement the texts in his vocal works.

Alvin Curran honors Carter as a teacher and mentor. He considers Carter's Harmony Book to be "the Rosetta Stone of the Music of our Time" (p. 41), and was fortunate enough to have studied with him at Yale. Carter treated his students with respect, like young professionals, and encouraged them not to imitate his music, but to find their own way in composition. Curran includes an excerpt from his own composition E Poi as a tribute.

Louis Karchin writes about preparing "Anaphora" from Carter's A Mirror on Which to Dwell for performance. He brings many insights to Carter's music from the perspective of both a conductor and a composer. He believes that Carter maintained a traditional attitude towards performance: "the composer might write complicated music, but he should nonetheless help the performer as much as possible to execute the work with fluidity, so that it might 'sound easy'" (p. 53). Karchin ends with an excerpt from his own Songs of John Keats (1984).

The renowned pianist and scholar Charles Rosen includes a brief essay on "the sustained line" in Carter's works. He shows how several of Carter's piano works feature "expressive arabesque lines that reach eloquently from bass to treble, covering almost the entire musical space with an irregular and seemingly improvisatory continuity of developing musical structure" (p. 59). He explains that Carter's response to the acoustic character of the musical material is not so much theoretical as intuitive, which explains the affective variety and complexity of his work.

Frederic Rzewski's essay "Souvenirs" offers reminiscences of his friendship with Carter and his wife Helen. The Carters were more like family than friends. Again we learn of Carter's library and extensive...