The Challenge of Elliot Carter

Elliot Carter at a young age

Tom Service's excellent series on the symphony continues this week with an article devoted to a late piece by the American composer Elliot Carter (1908 - 2012). Yes, he lived to be 103 and was hugely productive in his last two decades when he was in his late 80s, 90s and even after he was one hundred! It certainly gives me hope! But at the same time the music of Elliot Carter poses, for me, a big aesthetic challenge.

Why is that? Well, just to trace out a bit my own aesthetic journey, I began by playing the music of my immediate environment, which was rock and pop. As soon as I encountered classical music (in the form of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto) I became a convert. I devoted several decades of my life to being a classical guitar virtuoso. But alongside this I was always a composer. As a pop musician I had written over forty songs before I was twenty years old. Then, after becoming a classical musician, I adopted the stance of a progressive 20th century composer, that is, I wrote avant-garde music. The one big exception was that I never had any interest in twelve-tone music. But I wrote moment form and process music as well as other pieces that were too intuitive to be classified. However, at some point perhaps a decade ago, I became an apostate. That is, I came to see the basic ideological assumptions of the 20th century avant-garde and rejected them. Of course, this didn't come all at once and in fact, I am still uncovering the aesthetic assumptions underlying modernism. It is one of the ongoing themes of this blog.

Once I got started and began to understand how aesthetic judgement works, then I discovered that I could critically evaluate not only modernist music, but any music. We all do this all the time, but I was becoming a bit more conscious of it. So now I feel perfectly free to say critical things not only about composers like Stockhausen, Cage and Boulez, but also about composers like Mahler and Brahms.

Elliot Carter followed almost the opposite course. In his early years he composed tonal, neo-classic, music. But later on, his music became atonal and rhythmically very complex. So what do I think about Elliot Carter? He is posing a real challenge. It is not terribly hard to look at the music of John Cage and come to the conclusion that a lot of it is simply not serious, despite Cage's own assertions. But Elliot Carter is much more difficult to evaluate. He has a pretty solid following and his music certainly is taken as being serious and important. He won two Pulitzer prizes.

Ok, let's listen to some. Here is his Changes (1983) for guitar:

Let's listen to a different performance:

If you read the Wikipedia article on Carter you will certainly get the sense that his music is structured in very complex ways.

But one of the ideological assumptions of modernism is that complexity is a Good, that is to say, an end in itself. This is something that I rejected. Complexity is often not of any aesthetic benefit whatsoever, but merely results in confusion and loss of interest in the listener. I started to work this out in studying the music of Milton Babbitt when the realization came that there was simply no way to determine if the score contained misprints. All scores do, of course, but the complexity of a Babbitt score means that you will never be able to decide which notes are wrong! The aesthetic consequence of this, from my point of view, was that music should have a kind of audible coherence to it. I was encouraged in this view by reading the writings of Steve Reich who said that he had no interesting in writing any music where the process and structure were not clearly audible to the listener.

So what is going on in the music of Elliot Carter? I don't know, which is the challenge. I plan to look at some scores and see if anything is evident. But in the meantime, let's listen to some more. Here is the only available clip of the piece that Tom Service is presenting, Symphonia:

This is just a small excerpt from the longer piece.

I'm afraid I just don't hear much coherence. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that there is, but apart from little things here and there, I don't hear it. The aesthetic significance of music like this, which sounds jagged and unconnected, is that it superficially resembles the ravings of a madman, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting but with no apparent reason. The word "apparent" is carefully chosen. As I say, the music purports to be complexly structured. But it sounds rather random. So that's the challenge for me. What is the aesthetic status or quality of this music? I really don't know. What do you think?

About ten years ago a rather unusual book was published which is a compendium, compiled by Carter himself, of all possible pitch permutations. It is available from Amazon.

The very useful Cambridge "Studies" series has a volume on Carter, but the Kindle edition costs $65.60!! I'm not sure that the insights contained therein would be worth quite that much.

Elliot Carter: Criticism and Collegiality

This blog often wrestles with the problems of musical aesthetics and criticism. Sometimes it is on the relatively trivial level of which current diva is least annoying, but other times we dig into some knottier problems. One of the knottiest is that of musical high modernism, the maximal complexity of one trend in 20th century music. This musical world is inhabited by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and the recently-deceased American composer Elliot Carter.

Elliot Carter is widely respected and one example is this recent article by Tim Page. He talks about the Oboe Concerto of 1986 as some of the "warmest, most direct and intimate music of his career". Let's put part one of that piece up to listen to while you read on:

The article is full of praise for Carter. Another article, this time by composer Daniel Asia, is critical throughout. Here is a sample:

And while never a serialist, Carter's music has similar surface and pitch qualities in its complete rejection of any relationship to tonality and its avoidance of any notions of dissonance and consonance, and their relationship to each other. In other words, his usage of intervals in relationship to these concepts is almost nil. The compulsion to join in must have seemed overwhelming, as it affected Stravinsky and Copland no less. Carter used a different note technique but he arrived in a very similar terrain, one void of a predictive quality, and rather bleak and barren.

His approach to time and structure is similarly obtuse. Differing rates of movement in different parts of the orchestra, or the simultaneous creation of different architectural shapes, while an interesting and intriguing idea, just can't be realized with his musical materials. It is like trying to play with the onward rushing of different streams of colored water; sooner or latter they mix into a very boring shade of continual grayness.

The point he is making is that maximally complex music, that presents us with intricate atonal pitch structures and similarly intricate and jagged rhythmic structures, after a while simply sounds like chaos. Any structure that you can't actually hear is no structure at all. It certainly isn't noise because by listening closely you certainly hear the pitches and rhythms and perhaps can discern motivic relationships, but overall, the music refuses to be heard as a discernible structure.

To write such severe criticism of another composer is a bold act. What most composers do is either behave with warm collegiality to their peers or ignore them. But with the growth of ideological manifestoes in the 19th and 20th centuries, composers more and more attack other composers, often out of self-interest. As Daniel Asia mentions, Pierre Boulez furthered his career by writing a notorious essay proclaiming the death of Schoenberg!

One of the dangers of being so critical of a fellow composer is that you will get a great deal of negative reactions as we can see from the comment section to the article by Mr. Asia. Let's have a listen to some of his music for a comparison. Here is his Symphony No. 1, dating from 1987, the year after Carter's Oboe Concerto:

Perhaps this is just an indication of my limitations, but I find that more interesting than the piece by Carter. I have tried to find my way into Carter's music quite a few times, but I always lose interest because I can find no thread to follow. On the other hand, I do get a sense of structure from the piece by Daniel Asia.

Which composers win prizes and are frequently praised in the mass media is often accidental or a product of skillful marketing. After a hundred years, if you look back, it is often the lesser-known composers whose music grows in popularity after their death. Of course, I don't know whether it will be Daniel Asia's music that lasts or Elliot Carter's, but time will tell. I certainly don't see anything wrong with criticizing a composer's music.

So, what do you think?

Carter, Henze, Barzun

Elliot Carter

I learn this morning that Elliot Carter just passed away. Here is the obituary in the Guardian. Carter, along with composers like Pierre Boulez and Brian Ferneyhough, was a pinnacle in the long trend in music towards maximalization of complexity. A major breakthrough for Carter was the premiere of his Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras in 1961. Here is the first part:

At the time fierce battles were being waged for and against music like this. Benjamin Britten, who wrote more traditionally, had talked about the role of the composer:

I do not write for posterity--in any case, the outlook for that is somewhat uncertain. I write music, now, in Aldeburgh, for people living there, and further afield, indeed for anyone who cares to play it or listen to it. But my music now has its roots in where I live and work.

On the other side, attacking Britten and praising Carter, was Stravinsky (or his ghost-writer, Robert Craft) who sneered at Britten, saying "nothing fails like success". Carter's music, on the other hand, was guaranteed to be historically important because it was revolutionary. Almost impossible to play, with a new metronome mark every measure, harmonically inscrutable and so complex that only a small circle of the enlightened could even hope to understand it, it was music whose role was the very opposite of Britten's: nothing succeeds like failure (to communicate)!

UPPERDATE: Stravinsky and a young Elliot Carter in conversation:

Hans Werner Henze

Just over a week ago, on October 27, Hans Werner Henze passed away. His sense of the role of the composer was quite similar to Britten's and he was, like Britten, an important opera composer. Early on he was part of the post-WWII avant-garde in Germany, sitting alongside Boulez and Bruno Maderna teaching the composition class at Darmstadt in 1955. But Henze became an apostate of the church of the avant-garde, later writing that:

Thanks to the initiative of Boulez and Stockhausen [Webern's aesthetic] had become institutionalized as official musical thinking whose maxims the body of lesser mortals now had to put into practice with religious devotion, esprit de corps and slavish obedience...

 Henze lived most of his life in Italy, where he found the climate, especially politically, more to his taste. He was a radical egalitarian in some ways, both appreciating the music of the Rolling Stones and writing in an unashamedly tonal style. He was also sympathetic to leftist causes and had attitudes towards the composer's role that foreshadow post-modernism.

Henze wrote quite a bit for guitar, some early Tientos and a later, larger set of pieces based on Shakespeare characters. He also wrote a kind of chamber opera called El Cimmaron for baritone, flute, guitar and percussion based on the autobiography of a Cuban slave. I got to know this piece quite well as I participated in the Montréal premiere and the West Coast premiere in both Vancouver and Victoria. Here is a photo of one of those rehearsals:

Alas, I no longer have recordings of my performances, but here is the beginning of the second half in a performance in Florence in 1990:

As you can see and hear, all the musicians play percussion instruments. The flute also plays mouth organ and the guitarist mbira or thumb piano.

UPDATE: Henze's Symphony No. 8, might be more representative of his style (or styles):

Jacques Barzun

On October 25, just two days before Henze, Jacques Barzun passed away. Here is his obituary. He was an astonishingly learnéd man, writing nearly forty books on history and culture. He had a particular attraction to music and wrote an excellent book on Berlioz, Berlioz and the Romantic Century. Unlike most writers on music who are not themselves professional musicians or musicologists, Barzun had a specialist's understanding of music, but could write for the lay reader. If you wanted to get a better understanding of the civilization of the West and where it is at present, you could do no better than to read his remarkable book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. Heck, if you are only going to read one book this year, make it that one! It was published in 2000 when Barzun was ninety-four years old. In honor of him, let's listen to some of his favorite composer, Hector Berlioz. Here is Berlioz' eccentric 'concerto' for viola and orchestra, Harold en Italie:

The Globalization of Music

The repercussions of the development of sound recording technology on composers have been talked about a lot in one aspect: how it led to the creation of electronic music and musique concrete. But there is another consequence that has been little discussed; how it widened the possible influences on composers. For example, much of the music that influenced me was experienced through listening to recordings. I spent one whole summer when I was young listening to nothing but music from the Folkways collection and this included music as remote as Javanese and Balinese gamelan, mbira music from Zimbabwe, harp music from Mali and so on. I spent another summer listening to nothing but Haydn string quartets. This kind of listening is only possible if there are libraries of recorded music from the whole world. And now, with YouTube, the amount of music you can be exposed to is very nearly unlimited.

How might a composer respond to this kind of stimulus? It seems a lot of the post-modern spirit in music has to do with this broad spectrum of influence: everything from 12th century organum to The Grateful Dead seems to be an influence on the latest couple of generations of composers. Sometimes I think that this can be exaggerated, either by critics and commentators or by the composers themselves. Perhaps this is just romantic of me, but I think, out of the myriad of possible influences (i.e. everything), we choose the ones that we like or that we think matter. Sometimes it is music that we feel closest to, but not always. Jigs and reels on the violin were what I grew up hearing my mother play, but I can't say that they have ever had the slightest influence on my music. Sometimes we go far afield to find something intriguing. Javanese gamelan has interested composers like Debussy, Ravel, Britten and myself.

But my own feeling is that we choose our influences because we have certain inherent tendencies, which is to say that we are individuals. As Borges observed, we even 'create' our own predecessors. This to me seems just as valid as the opposite theory put forth in Allan Bloom's Anxiety of Influence where creators stumble upon their own ideas by misreading their predecessors'. Personally, there always seems to be some music that attracts me and other music that repels me. I abhor massive pieces, full of seemingly pointless activity and redundancies. I love music that is sparing of material and I find the expression more effective as a result. So I prefer Debussy to Wagner and technical ingenuity or lack of it may be interesting, but it doesn't make the music better or worse.

So I suspect, at the end of the day, no matter how many different kinds of music you listen to, if you are a composer of any substance, you will pick and choose which ones will influence your work. I am reminded of the story of the composition of Elliot Carter's first string quartet. He was awarded a grant in aid of its composition so he temporarily moved from New York to the Sonora Desert outside Tucson where he spent a year composing the piece in complete isolation. It resembles, more than anything else, some of the mensurally complex music from the 13th and 14th centuries.