RIP Elliott Carter

When a composer leaves us at 103 years old, continuing to work until a few months before his death (his last composition is dated 2012), after having composed for more than 80 years (the first commonly remembered piece, a lieder, is from 1928 and it’s definitely not the first) there’s no need to be sad. I’m sure that almost all of us would sign.

Elliott Carter (1908 – 2012) was the last of the great Cs of American music of the 20th century, the others being Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990), Henry Cowell (1897 – 1965) and John Cage (1912 – 1992), contemporaries and all very important in the panorama of 20th century music.

Carter, in his long career, was capable of renewing himself. After an initial neoclassical phase, influenced by Stravinsky, Harris, Copland, and Hindemith, he turned to atonality in the 1950s, although without ever embracing serialism. Instead, he independently developed a compositional technique based on the cataloging of all possible groups of pitches, i.e. chords of 3 notes, 4 notes, 5 notes, 6 notes, etc., then basing his own compositions on these sets. . For example, the Piano Concerto of 1964-65 derives its pitches from the set of 3-note chords, the 1971 Quartet is built on 4-note chords, the Symphony of Three Orchestras, which we listen to here, is based on chords of 6 notes and so on. Typically, each instrumental section is assigned a set of pitches in a layering of material.

In Carter, the concept of stratification also informs the management of rhythm: each instrumental voice has its own set of tempos, thus creating a structural polyrhythm.

The title of this piece from 1976, Symphony of Three Orchestras and not for Three Orchestras, derives precisely from the fact that, although the piece is divided into 4 movements of different character, as is tradition, each movement is made up of three partially overlapping movements, one for each orchestra.

Furthermore, the instrumental composition of the three orchestras is strongly differentiated: in practice it is a single orchestra divided into three groups. The first is made up of brass, strings and timpani; the second by clarinets, piano, vibraphone, chimes, marimba, first violins, double basses and cellos; the third by flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, second violins, violas, double basses and untuned percussion.

Boulez conducts the New York Philharmonic.

Enchanted Preludes

Elliot Carter, Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Enchanted Preludes is a birthday present for Ann Santen, commissioned by her husband, Harry, and composed in gratitude for their enthusiastic and deeply caring support of American music. It is a duet for flute and cello in which the two instruments combine their different characters and musical materials into statements of varying moods. The title comes from a poem of Wallace Stevens: The Pure Good of Theory, “All the Preludes to Felicity,” stanza no.7:

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchanted space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

The score was given its first performance by Patricia Spencer, flute, and André Emelianoff, cello, of the Da Capo Chamber Players in New York, on May 16, 1988.

100 and kicking

Oltre a quello di Messiaen, c’è un secondo centenario quest’anno: quello della nascita del compositore americano Elliott Carter (1908).

E quanto ho scritto non è un errore: la data di morte manca perché Carter è ancora vivo e conta di festeggiare alla grande il proprio centenario l’11 dicembre.
Dico alla grande perché non solo è vivo, ma è perfettamente in sé e compone ancora: nel 2007, per es., ha scritto 8 brani fra cui uno per pianoforte e orchestra (Interventions), un quintetto con clarinetto, un pezzo per coro e gli altri per strumento solista.

Lo stile di Carter, in epoca giovanile, fu definito neoclassico o “lirismo melodico” in quanto risentiva dell’influenza di Stravinskij e Hindemith, ma virò poi decisamente verso l’atonale a partire dagli anni ’50, approdando a una scrittura a tratti anche molto complessa, tanto che per lui venne coniato il termine “metric modulation” per descrivere i frequenti cambiamenti di tempo nei suoi lavori.

Ciò nonostante, mantenne sempre una certa dose di espressività e dramma:

I regard my scores as scenarios, auditory scenarios, for performers to act out with their instruments, dramatizing the players as individuals and participants in the ensemble.

Il suo personale sistema compositivo (volto spesso a far derivare tutte le altezze di un brano da un solo accordo “chiave”, o da una serie di accordi) non impedisce a Carter di muoversi in ambiti decisamente lirici, né di garantire una perfetta intelleggibilità del testo cantato, talora anche in modo decisamente “semplice”. Del resto, nonostante il suo usuale rigore compositivo, Carter occasionalmente sceglie di “deviare”, di creare delle eccezioni al suo proprio sistema.

Grazie al solito Art of the States possiamo legalmente e senza degrado farvi ascoltare alcuni suoi brani (ricordiamo che Art of the States è stato creato per diffondere la musica americana e per questo ha vinto il premio dell’ASCAP, l’equivalente della nostra SIAE, vedi questo nostro post). Come al solito i brani sono in RealAudio.

Elliott Carter – Night Fantasies (1980) for solo piano
Ursula Oppens, piano

Night Fantasies is a piano piece of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night. The quiet, nocturnal evocation with which it begins and returns occasionally, is suddenly broken by a flight series of short phrases that emerge and disappear. This episode is followed by many others of contrasting characters and lengths that sometimes break in abruptly and, at other times, develop smoothly out of what has gone before. The work culminates in a loud, obsessive, periodic repetition of an emphatic chord that, as it dies away, brings the work to its conclusion.

In this score, I wanted to capture the fanciful, changeable quality of our inner life at a time when it is not dominated by strong directive intentions or desires — to capture the poetic moodiness that, in an earlier romantic context, I enjoy in works of Robert Schumann like Kreisleriana, Carnaval, and Davids-bündlertänze.