Elliott Carter
(1908–2012)
Who Was
Elliott Carter?
A Brief Introduction
By David Schiff
Elliott Carter was one of the most important composers of chamber music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From the Canonic Suite for Four Clarinets (1939) to the Epigrams for Violin, Cello and Piano (2012), he produced a vast catalogue of chamber works for an array of instrumental and vocal combinations, the majority of them composed after he turned 80.
Early Period: Harvard, Boulanger, and Ballet Caravan
Carter grew up in New York City. His grandfather had founded a successful business that imported finery (silks, linens, drapery) from Europe. His father inherited the company, and the family assumed that Carter would do the same. The family, which had little interest in music, led a comfortable life with homes in Manhattan and Connecticut, and they spent most summers in Europe visiting their suppliers in Belgium, France, and Switzerland. Thanks to these trips Carter became fluent in French when he was young.
In New York City, Carter attended the Horace Mann School. The school’s music teacher, Clifton Furness, aroused Carter’s interest in modern music, which was just arriving from Europe, and introduced the 15-year-old Carter to Charles Ives. Ives, Furness, and Carter attended concerts together at Carnegie Hall, returning afterwards to Ives’s home to hear his harsh but humorous critiques.
Carter was an undergraduate at Harvard from 1926 to 1930. He majored in English and took only one course in music, though he sang in the Harvard Glee Club and briefly studied the oboe and music theory at the Longy School of Music. Carter’s Harvard classmate Lincoln Kirstein even remembered the undergraduate Carter as a mathematician, though he took no math courses. Along with literature courses, Carter studied Classical Greek and attended philosophy lectures given by Alfred North Whitehead that later were published as Process and Reality. Carter often said that these abstruse lectures were the source of his concepts of time and musical form. After graduating, Carter continued at Harvard’s small graduate program in music, studying composition and orchestration with Walter Piston. Piston, like many other American composers from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass, had studied with Nadia Boulanger and recommended that Carter do the same. Beginning in 1932, Carter spent three years in Paris, where his studies with Boulanger focused on developing his contrapuntal skills. He also composed music for Boulanger, but later destroyed almost all of it.
Piston, like many other American composers from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass, had studied with Nadia Boulanger and recommended that Carter do the same. Beginning in 1932, Carter spent three years in Paris, where his studies with Boulanger focused on developing his contrapuntal skills.
When he returned to New York, Carter’s Harvard friend Kirstein soon gave him a job as music director of his new ballet company, Ballet Caravan (a precursor of the New York City Ballet) and asked him to compose music for a new ballet, Pocahontas (1939). Kirstein’s friend, the composer Nicholas Nabokov, gave Carter composing advice, helped him find his first teaching job, commissioned his first choral work, and, in 1939, served as best man at Carter’s wedding to Helen Frost-Jones. Carter also began to write critical essays for Modern Music, a journal edited by Minna Lederman. These essays, later reprinted in The Writings of Elliott Carter, display his broad knowledge of the new music scene, as well as his fearlessly brash opinions.
Middle Period: Back in New York
Much of the music Carter composed after he returned to New York from his studies with Boulanger was written in the mainstream style of the period—a blend of late Romanticism, neoclassicism, and populism, as found in the music of Roy Harris, Howard Hanson, William Schuman, Walter Piston, and Aaron Copland—and most of it was orchestral, including a symphony and two extended ballet scores. Around the time he turned 40, he found a more distinctive and personal voice in four chamber works: the Sonata for Cello and Piano, (1948), Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for Woodwind Quartet (1949), the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952), and, most decisively, in his epic String Quartet No. 1, completed in 1951. In his earlier music, Carter often built on the traditional imitative counterpoint (canons and fugues) he had studied with Boulanger. In these breakthrough chamber works, he explored a new kind of non-imitative polyphony (with precedents in the string quartets of Haydn and Ives, and also in opera), so that the music became a conversation, an argument, or simultaneous monologues between sharply contrasting characters. To structure these often volatile encounters, Carter developed rhythmic procedures (that were soon called “metrical modulations”) that superimposed not only different speeds (in mathematical ratios like 7:5), but also rhythmic processes: pulses, accelerandi, ritardandi, rubato, even erratic disruptions. He first brought all these new approaches together in his String Quartet No. 2 (1959), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. In this score, he asked the players to sit further apart than usual to emphasize the distinctive identities, scripted in detail through the notes, rhythms, and gestures in their parts. While the four movements of the quartet resembled the traditional layout, the music unfolds as a Whiteheadian dialectical process, or as a splintered quasi-conversation recalling the “absurd” theatrics of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Carter: Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord
In his earlier music, Carter often built on the traditional imitative counterpoint (canons and fugues) he had studied with Boulanger. In these breakthrough chamber works, he explored a new kind of non-imitative polyphony... so that the music became a conversation, an argument, or simultaneous monologues between sharply contrasting characters.
The new techniques Carter developed in these works also moved his music to a style analogous to the abstract expressionist paintings of the period. We could term the music “abstract” because, unlike neoclassicism (which often went back to Bach) or populism (which quoted folk tunes, popular songs, or jazz), Carter’s music did not rely on intertextual echoes. Unlike some of the serial music of his contemporaries, however, Carter gave his abstract sounds a wide range of dramatic forms—at times tragic, at other times playfully humorous.
Carter devoted most of the 1960s to three large concertos—the Double Concerto (1961), Piano Concerto (1964–65), and Concerto for Orchestra (1969)—but returned to chamber music in the 1970s with his String Quartet No. 3 (1971, Pulitzer Prize 1973), which splits the four players into two warring duos, again seated far apart; the Brass Quintet (1974); the Duo for Violin and Piano (1974); and, in a new expansion of his dramatic impulses, two chamber works with singers—A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975), which set poetry by Elizabeth Bishop; and Syringa (1978), which combined a poetic retelling of the Orpheus story by John Ashbery with fragments of Classical Greek poetry. Engaging with two of his most important poetic contemporaries, and with Bishop’s “Confessional” probings and Ashbery’s “New York School” surrealism, Carter greatly extended his expressive terrain.
Late Period: Miniatures
He would continue this pursuit in the next decade with four major chamber works of sharply contrasting character. In Sleep, in Thunder (1981) mirrors the psychological rollercoasters in the poetry of Robert Lowell. In Triple Duo (1982), three pairs of players (flute, clarinet; violin, cello; piano, percussion) indulge in a riotously comic squabble. In his String Quartet No. 4 (1985–86), the characters of the Second Quartet seem to return, now older but ever more argumentative.
A further extension of Carter’s subgenres would begin in the 1980s with a group of shorter chamber works: Changes for Guitar (1983), Riconoscenza per Goffredi Petrassi for Violin (1984), Esprit rude/Esprit doux for Flute and Clarinet (1985), and Enchanted Preludes for Flute and Cello (1988). These miniatures formed a new genre, consisting of bagatelles and epigrams, that Carter would pursue for the rest of his life.
“Late Late Style”: Poetic Meditation
Carter’s String Quartet No. 5, written in 1995, can be heard as the gateway to his “late late style.” Alternating episodes that sound like rehearsals or sketches with well-polished movements, the music has a lightly playful quality, like a second childhood. In the final, amazingly productive quarter-century of Carter’s life, most of his compositions would fall within a broad definition of chamber music ranging from 25 solo works to duos, trios, quartets, quintets, and extended chamber ensembles, like those in his opera What Next? (1997–98) and his “farewell symphony,” Instances (2012). In all but one of Carter’s remarkable late, late song cycles—to poetry by William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens (two cycles), Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, and T. S. Eliot—a large chamber ensemble accompanies and illustrates the vocal line. Carter’s choice of poets for this project, the founders of American literary modernism, could be seen as his affirmation of the ties to the modernist pursuit that he first formed in his teens, even in an age which many termed “postmodern.” But they may also be a strong reminder that for all the numerical calculations that Carter used to structure the rhythms and pitches of his music, the essence of the music was a poetic meditation of lived experiences, emotions, and encounters.
But they may also be a strong reminder that for all the numerical calculations that Carter used to structure the rhythms and pitches of his music, the essence of the music was a poetic meditation of lived experiences, emotions, and encounters.
Watching and Listening
Two videos in the CMS archive illustrate the important influence of French music on Carter's musical thinking, but in contrasting ways. Carter often said that he composed the Wind Quintet (1948) in the neoclassical style he was encouraged to pursue by Nadia Boulanger (to whom the work is dedicated). Completed five years later, the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord unfolds in the more improvisational manner that Carter admired in Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp.
