Elliott Carter, 1908-2012

[bwv 1080]

Shard was written first - it was commissioned by David Starobin for his Newdance CD (which is a great disc of guitar music btw)

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=29459

Although I prefer it within Lumien

Carter's music is unique in that extracting single parts would in most cases result in coherent solo pieces (like the piano part in the 1st mvmt of Concerto for Orchestra)

[bwv 1080]

Has anyone heard a release date for the rest of the Pacifica String Quartets on Naxos?

[karlhenning]

Joe, white courtesy telephone, please!

[Joe Barron]

Joe, white courtesy telephone, please!

Must I do everything on this thread? 

I believe the second disk is due out in July, though at the moment,  I can't remember where I read that or how to find the information again. So you've only got another couple of months to wait. Hard to believe we're halfway through May.

[karlhenning]

One of the pieces I am playing in June is by Steve Hicken; here is his review of the Pacifica Quartet's first Carter disc.

[karlhenning]

[ Can't have Joe doing everything . . . . ]

[Joe Barron]

From the Boston Globe. The new violin-cello duet sounds exciting, but then everything Carter does these days sounds exciting.--JB

A Carterpalooza in the woods

Tanglewood Festival celebrates a distinguished composer's centenary
As he nears his 100th birthday, composer Elliott Carter finds that he's busier than ever and writing music with blinding speed.

By Jeremy Eichler
Globe Staff / May 18, 2008

"I'm doing fine!" shouts the voice on the other end of the line. The subtext comes through almost as loudly: Why does everyone keep asking me the same damn question!

It's Elliott Carter on the phone from New York, and he's being interrupted again. The 99-year-old distinguished American composer has agreed to a brief interview, but in truth, he really just wants to work. He has entered an improbably, sublimely late phase of his career, and he has been writing music with blinding speed. Work after work flies off his desk. You can't turn a corner in the classical music world without bumping into another Carter world premiere. And now, smack in the middle of it all, he has to deal with a worldwide centenary celebration. Who knew that turning 100 could be such a drag on one's schedule?

Especially with the high style in which the Tanglewood Music Center will be marking the occasion this summer. As the largest event on the centenary map, TMC's entire Festival of Contemporary Music is being devoted to Carter. James Levine is directing, and there will be no fewer than 10 all-Carter programs shoehorned into five days (July 20-24), including three orchestral concerts, two world premieres, and two American premieres. Then there's a movie screening of his opera, a panel discussion, a symposium, and a public interview. It's a Carterpalooza the likes of which the composer has never enjoyed before.

"I think it's extraordinary," he says. "I'm delighted and appalled, and mainly delighted."

Did he just say appalled? "I'm appalled mainly because at this age I would like to go to all of the concerts, but I'm not sure I will be able to. I get tired very quickly."

There's also a deeper sense in which Carter feels he is racing against the clock. "I have a lot of pieces in the back of my head," he says, "so I'm very preoccupied with composing in my last years of my life." He describes his routine of lying in bed every morning and greeting a flood of musical ideas. He then spends the day working them out with pencil and paper, pausing only for lunch, a walk, and perhaps tea with a visitor.

But as he reviews the upcoming festival programs, full of pieces culled from the decades, Carter's enthusiasm seems to build. Hearing his older music, he says, is like looking at a photograph of his younger self. He also loves the fact that many of the performers will be students possibly encountering his music for the first time. Several stalwart Carterphiles will also be performing, including pianists Charles Rosen and Ursula Oppens, cellist Fred Sherry, and composer-conductor Oliver Knussen, who is serving as festival adviser. On July 24, to close the event, Levine will lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a program that includes not only Carter's astonishing 45-minute "Symphonia" but the "Boston Concerto," "Three Illusions," and the Horn Concerto.

Speaking of the BSO, Carter can't resist sharing some brief memories. The composer studied at Harvard as an undergraduate in the late 1920s - his letter of recommendation came from Charles Ives, naturally - and he says he attended every single BSO concert in Symphony Hall, often sitting in the rush seats in the upper balconies. As a teenager, he had fallen in love with music "backwards," he explains, starting not with Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven but with an early New York performance of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," which convinced him to be a composer. It was only through the later BSO concerts, he says, that he learned "the whole repertory of older music." He also sang in the Harvard Glee Club when it performed frequently with the BSO under Koussevitzky, an experience he describes as deeply influential. "I feel I owe the Boston Symphony a lot," he says, adding with seriousness, "and I have done what I could to repay them."

With that, Carter is on his way. A new duet for violin and cello is calling. "It's something I've never done before - I've never even thought about it," he says, the excitement palpable in his voice. "There's a great work by Ravel of this sort, but I let Ravel be Ravel, and Carter be different."

July 20-24, Tanglewood, 617-266-1200, tanglewood.org

[Joe Barron]

Hey! I'm mentioned in the Syndey Morning Herald.--JB 


Not a late starter but a delightfully late finisher
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
May 19, 2008

Australia Ensemble, University of NSW, May 17

To my knowledge, Elliott Carter is the first Western composer of note to remain active in his 100th year. As the old joke goes, most musicians his age have switched to decomposing.

Although he wrote his first opera at 90, he wasn't a late starter, just a delightfully late finisher. He has been writing music since the 1920s and it was only with his Wind Quintet of 1950 that the distinctive intransigent modernist style that has been baffling, repelling and attracting listeners for its complex and cogent austerity emerged.

Last year an April Fools' Day email announced he was renouncing modernism in favour of folk-song settings, but judging by the way he is going, Carter will outlive the wit who wrote it.

The Australia Ensemble is, I think, the first Sydney group to honour his centenary, playing two homages that Carter wrote to now-dead contemporaries, the Italian author Italo Calvino, and the British pianist, critic and music administrator William Glock, who was born in the same year, but who died at 92.

The Calvino tribute was shaped by subtle curved gestures, as though responding to some self-doubting, over-refined aesthetic sensitivity and inner dialogue.

Carter seemed to have found Glock a colder fish, and for him the piece comprised spiky outer sections framing a glutinously dense slower middle section leading to a flourish at the close.

In contrast, the English composer Peter Warlock died about the age of 36. Tenor Henry Choo brought a radiant clarity of sound to the mournful lines of his song cycle, The Curlew.

The string players finished the first half with a fine performance of Janacek's Kreutzer Sonata.

After interval Ravel's Piano Trio was played with mature and intimate flexibility, a quality that was particularly vivid in the first movement.

[Wendell_E]

Hey! I'm mentioned in the Syndey Morning Herald.--JB 


Last year an April Fools' Day email announced he was renouncing modernism in favour of folk-song settings, but judging by the way he is going, Carter will outlive the wit who wrote it.

  Yeah, I saw that and was just going to post it, in case you hadn't seen it. 

[Guido]

From the Boston Globe. The new violin-cello duet sounds exciting, but then everything Carter does these days sounds exciting.--JB

It sure does. I've often wondered what a second cello sonata would sound like at the end result of what he started 60 years ago.

On really old composers I'm sure that Ornstein composed after the age of 100, but there surely can't be many!

[Joe Barron]

I watched my DVD of Frank Scheffer's A Labyrinth of Time yesterday and want to share my favorite quotation from EC in the film. It appears near the end, while he's summing up:

I feel about the future that in the end, what we are living through at the present time --- this kind of mixture and confusion --- will wear itself out, and that people will become more sensitive and aware than they are now. They will have to be, because as society becomes more complex, full of more people and more different kinds of things happening, people will have to become much cleverer and much sharper.

Then they will like my music.

[Joe Barron]

Hey Joe, must admit that I was disappointed when he said that; and how he said it, first because there is no way to predict the future, and more importantly because in a way it implies that he writes his music for the sake of being merely clever, and you have to be a sharp person to comprehend it. It struck me as being quite condescending & pompous.

James, that's not the way I took it. In the film, Mr. Carter gives an impish grin after his comment, as if to admit everything you just said. Any pompousness the statement might have had was undercut by a gentle but unmistakable irony. The tone of voice and the grin let us know he wasn't taking himself too seriously, and we were not supposed to, either. I found it endearing, though I don't care for that word.

[Joe Barron]

Well it's not the first time he's said something stupid, irregardless of intent; it's the sort-of talk composers should really get away from & avoid if they're ever going to relate to people. In essence it really does come off like "I write music that's very clever and only in a future-world of ever increasing complexity where people 'perhaps' will become more clever and sharper will it be truly understood, cuz I'm a really sophisticated guy' (add condescending grin here)

James, I'm not getting into this again.

[karlhenning]

Well it's not the first time he's said something stupid . . . .

Something, happily, of which you are never guilty yourself.

[greg]

Something, happily, of which you are never guilty yourself.

lol

[Joe Barron]

Oh, the heck with it.

The violinist Felix Radicati, on Beethoven's late quartets : "Beethoven, as the world says, and as I believe, is music-mad;—for these are not music. He submitted them to me in manuscript, and, at his request, I fingered them for him. I said to him, that he surely did not consider these works to be music?—to which he replied, "Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age."

Composers really should stop talking like this. "For a later age" --- fah! He thinks he's just so cool and sophisticated and so much smarter than us. He'll never connect to people with an attitude like that.

[greg]

Composers really should stop talking like this. "For a later age" --- fah! He thinks he's just so cool and sophisticated and so much smarter than us. He'll never connect to people with an attitude like that.

should be that way....... except society is devolving instead......

[Joe Barron]

should be that way....... except society is devolving instead......

You have to stop talking like that if you're ever going to connect with people.

[Joe Barron]

This is from private talk, not a movie where the composer is making pretentious statements for all to see. Carter's music isn't ahead of the times; it's quite old news now and a more populated & cluttered world won't necessarily lead to increased cleverness, sharpness, awareness or popularity, if anything the opposite.

Not to contradict God, but two points: The context of Beethoven's comment is irrelevant. He made it, it reflected how he felt, and I'm sure he didn't care whether it got around. And the second point: Carter was making a goddam joke. Lighten up.

[greg]

You have to stop talking like that if you're ever going to connect with people.

lol, yeah, i know.......