Elliott Carter | |
|---|---|
 Carter in the 2000s | |
| Born | (1908-12-11)December 11, 1908 Manhattan, New York, U.S. |
| Died | November 5, 2012(2012-11-05) (aged 103) Manhattan, New York, U.S. |
| Education | |
| Occupation | Composer |
| Awards | |
Elliott Cook Carter Jr. (December 11, 1908 – November 5, 2012) was an Americanmodernist composer who was one of the most respected composers of the second half of the 20th century. He combined elements of European modernism and American "ultra-modernism" into a distinctive style with a personal harmonic and rhythmic language, after an earlyneoclassical phase.[1][2][3][4] Hiscompositions are performed throughout the world, and include orchestral,chamber music, solo instrumental, and vocal works. Carter was therecipient of many awards – he was twice awarded thePulitzer Prize for his string quartets. He also wrote the large-scale orchestraltriptychSymphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei.
Carter was born in New York City. He developed an interest in modern music in the 1920s. He was later introduced toCharles Ives, and he soon came to appreciate the American ultra-modernists. After studying atHarvard University withEdward Burlingame Hill,Gustav Holst andWalter Piston, he studied withNadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, then returned to the United States. Carter was productive in his later years, publishing more than 40 works between the ages of 90 and 100,[5] and over 20 more after he turned 100 in 2008.[6] He completed his last work,Epigrams forpiano trio, on August 13, 2012.[7]
Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was born in Manhattan on December 11, 1908, the son of a wealthy lace importer, Elliott Carter Sr., and the former Florence Chambers. Much of his childhood was spent inEurope; he spokeFrench before learningEnglish. As a teenager he developed an interest in music, although his parents did not encourage his interests other than providing for early piano lessons.[1] However, he was encouraged byCharles Ives, who sold insurance to Carter's family. While a student at theHorace Mann School in 1922, he wrote an admiring letter to Ives, who responded and urged him to pursue his interest in music. He began to be interested in modern music as part of his broader exploration ofmodernism in various other art forms.[1]
In 1924, the 15-year-old Carter was in the audience and "galvanized" whenPierre Monteux conducted theBoston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) in the New York première ofThe Rite of Spring.[8] Carter later came to appreciate the American ultra-modernists:Henry Cowell,Edgard Varèse,Ruth Crawford and, later,Conlon Nancarrow. Ives often accompanied Carter to BSO concerts conducted bySerge Koussevitzky, who programmed contemporary works frequently, and then returned to Ives' home to critique and parody the so-called tricks ofDebussy,Stravinsky orProkofiev, who were composing European new music that Ives considered only 'superficially modern'.[1]
Starting in 1926, Carter attendedHarvard University,[9] where he majored in English but also studied music, both at Harvard (whose music course did not satisfy him) and at the nearbyLongy School of Music, and also sang with theHarvard Glee Club. His Harvard professors includedWalter Piston andGustav Holst. Carter earned a master's degree in music from Harvard in 1932, but the course did not help make much progress in his compositional skills. Hence, Carter then moved to Paris to study withNadia Boulanger, both privately and at theÉcole Normale de Musique de Paris. He worked with Boulanger from 1932 to 1935 (though he did not compose much music with her that he believed was worth preserving)[1] and in the latter year received a doctorate in music (Mus.D.).
Later in 1935, he returned to the US to write music for theBallet Caravan. The founder of the Ballet CaravanLincoln Kirstein commissioned Carter to compose two ballets,Pocahontas andThe Minotaur, which would be among his longest works he composed during hisNeo-classicist phase, though neither of them was greatly successful.[1]
On July 6, 1939, Carter married Helen Frost-Jones. They had one child, a son, David Chambers Carter. He lived with his wife in the same apartment inGreenwich Village from the time they bought it in 1945 to her death in 2003.[5]
From 1940 to 1944, he taught atSt. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. He worked for theOffice of War Information duringWorld War II. After the war, he held teaching posts at thePeabody Conservatory (1946–1948),Columbia University,Queens College, New York (1955–56),Yale University (1960–62),Cornell University (from 1967) and theJuilliard School (from 1972).[5] Meanwhile, in the 1950s, Carter, having edited Ives' music, turned back to his interest in the experimentalists. In response to his experience in the war, he decided to achieve an emancipated musical discourse through re-examination of all parameters of music. Notable works during this time were theCello Sonata, the rhythmically complexfirst string quartet andVariations for Orchestra. The latter two marked Carter's turning point in his career.[1]
Carter wrote music every morning until his death,[10] of natural causes, on November 5, 2012, at his home inNew York City, at age 103.[11][7]
Carter composed his only opera,What Next?, in 1997–98 for theBerlin State Opera at the behest of conductorDaniel Barenboim. The work premiered in Berlin in 1999 and had its first staging in the United States at theTanglewood Music Festival in 2006, conducted byJames Levine.[12] He later considered writing operas on the themes of communal suicide and a story by Henry James, but abandoned both ideas and resolved to write no more operas.[10]
Interventions for Piano and Orchestra received its premiere on December 5, 2008, by the BSO, conducted byJames Levine and featuring the pianistDaniel Barenboim atSymphony Hall, Boston.[13] On December 11, 2008, Barenboim reprised the work with the BSO atCarnegie Hall in New York in the presence of the composer on his 100th birthday.[5][8] Carter was also present at the 2009Aldeburgh Festival to hear the world premiere of his song cycleOn Conversing with Paradise, based onEzra Pound's Canto 81 and one of Pound's 'Notes' intended for later Cantos, and usually published at the end of the Cantos.[14] The premiere was given on June 20, 2009, by the baritone Leigh Melrose and theBirmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted byOliver Knussen.[15][16]
Figment V for marimba was premiered in New York on May 2, 2009, by Simon Boyar, andPoems of Louis Zukofsky for soprano and clarinet had its first performance byLucy Shelton and Thomas Martin at the Tanglewood Festival on August 9, 2009. The US premiere of theFlute Concerto took place on February 4, 2010, with the flutistElizabeth Rowe and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Levine. The last premiere of Carter's lifetime wasDialogues II, written for Barenboim's 70th birthday and conducted in Milan in October 2012 byGustavo Dudamel.[17] The last Carter premiere ever, which happened after Carter's death, was "The American Sublime", a work for baritone and large ensemble, dedicated to and conducted by Levine.[18]
Carter's earlier works were influenced byIgor Stravinsky,Aaron Copland, andPaul Hindemith, and are mainlyneoclassical.[19] He had strict training incounterpoint,[20] from medieval polyphony to Stravinsky, and this shows in his earliest music, such as the balletPocahontas (1938–39). Some of his music during the Second World War is fairlydiatonic, and includes a melodic lyricism reminiscent ofSamuel Barber.
Starting in the late 1940s his music shows an increasing development of a personal harmonic and rhythmic language characterized by elaborate rhythmic layering andmetric modulation.[21] While Carter's chromaticism and tonal vocabulary parallelsserial composers of the period, Carter did not use serial techniques. Carter said, "I certainly have never used a twelve-tone row as the basis of a composition, in the way described in Schoenberg'sStyle and Idea, nor are my compositions a constant rotation of various permutations of twelve-tone rows".[22] Rather, he independently developed and catalogued all possible collections of pitches (i.e., all possible three-note chords, five-note chords, etc.), compiling what he called hisHarmony Book.[20] (An edited version of the book was published in 2002 byCarl Fischer Music.[23]) Musical theorists likeAllen Forte independently had systematized these data intomusical set theory perhaps having been inspired byHoward Hanson'sHarmonic Materials of Modern Music. A series of Carter's works in the 1960s and 1970s generates its tonal material by using all possible chords of a particular number of pitches.
Among his better known works are theVariations for Orchestra (1954–55); theDouble Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1959–61); thePiano Concerto (1964–65), written as an 85th-birthday present for Stravinsky; theConcerto for Orchestra (1969), loosely based on a poem bySaint-John Perse; and theSymphony of Three Orchestras (1976). He also composed fivestring quartets,[24][25] of which thesecond andthird won thePulitzer Prize for Music in 1960[26] and 1973[27] respectively. Spaced at regular intervals throughout his mature career, they are considered by some to be the most important body of work in that medium since Bartók.[21]Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei (1993–96) is his largest orchestral work, complex in structure and featuring contrasting layers of instrumental textures, from delicate wind solos to crashing brass and percussion outbursts.
ThePiano Concerto (1964–65) uses the collection of three-note chords for its pitch material; theThird String Quartet (1971) uses all four-note chords; theConcerto for Orchestra (1969) all five-note chords; andA Symphony of Three Orchestras uses the collection of six-note chords.[28] Carter also made frequent use of "tonic" 12-note chords.[28] Of particular interest are "all-interval" 12-tone chords, where every interval is represented within adjacent notes of the chord. His 1980 solo piano workNight Fantasies uses the entire collection of the 88 symmetrical-inverted all-interval 12-note chords.[29] Typically, the pitch material is segmented between instruments, with a unique set of chords or sets assigned to each instrument or orchestral section. This stratification of material, with individual voices assigned not only their own unique pitch material but texture and rhythm as well, is a key component of Carter's style. His music afterNight Fantasies has been termed his late period and his tonal language became less systematized and more intuitive, but retains the basic characteristics of his earlier works.[30]
Carter's use of rhythm can best be understood with the concept of stratification. Each instrumental voice is typically assigned its own set of tempos. A structuralpolyrhythm, where a very slow polyrhythm is used as a formal device, is present in many of Carter's works.Night Fantasies, for example, uses a 216:175 tempo relation that coincides at only two points over its 20+ minutes.[31] This use of rhythm was part of his expansion of the notion of counterpoint to encompass simultaneous different characters, even entire movements, rather than just individual lines.
Carter said that the steady pulses of older music reminded him of soldiers marching or horses trotting, sounds no longer heard in the late 20th century, and he wanted his music to capture the sort of continuous acceleration or deceleration experienced in an automobile or an airplane.[32] While Carter's music shows little trace of American popular music orjazz, his vocal music has demonstrated strong ties to contemporary American poetry. He set poems byElizabeth Bishop (A Mirror on Which to Dwell),John Ashbery (Syringa andMad Regales),Robert Lowell (In Sleep, in Thunder andMad Regales), John Hollander (Of Challenge and of Love),William Carlos Williams (Of Rewaking),Wallace Stevens (In the Distances of Sleep andThe American Sublime),Ezra Pound (On Conversing with Paradise),E. E. Cummings (A Sunbeam's Architecture),Marianne Moore (What Are Years) andT. S. Eliot (Three Explorations). Twentieth-century poets also inspired several of his large instrumental works, such as theConcerto for Orchestra (St. John Perse) andA Symphony of Three Orchestras (Hart Crane).
Orchestral[edit]
Concertos[edit]
Voice and ensemble[edit]
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String quartets[edit]
Chamber[edit]
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