Elliott Carter's Century
by Frank J. Oteri

You are now gazing at a thumbnail sketch of the history of classical music spanning the early years of the 20th century to the dawn of our own 21st.  That this music was all created by a single American composer, whose life spans this entire era is more than just a remarkable personal achievement, it is a singularly resounding testimony to the vibrancy of contemporary music.  This extensive body of work is clearly the creation of an individual with a unique and immediately discernable voice.  Yet, at the same time, it is a prescient collection of aural responses to all of the decades in which it was created.  And, like the music of Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin, it has indeed become work for all lands and all ages, as its entry into the classical music repertoire around the world as we approach this still-living composer’s centenary affirms. 

Elliot Carter, born in New York on December 11, 1908, studied at the Horace Mann School and then at Harvard from 1926 to 1932 where he received a Bachelor’s Degree in English and a Master’s in music.  But, before any formal training, at the age of 16, Carter was a protégé of the great American composer Charles Ives who took him to concerts and exposed him to a brand new sonic landscape that included Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Varese, as well as Ives.  This singular mentorship would have a lasting impact on the building musical maverick.  Like most of the great composers of his generation, Carter honed his technique under the tutelage of the legendary French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, studying privately with her in Paris from 1932 to 1935.  Soon after returning to America, Carter became the musical director of Ballet Caravan until 1940, but his fascination with rhythm and unfailing commitment to musical movement has continued throughout the rest of his life. 

Carter’s compositions at this time, music like the work of his slightly older contemporary Aaron Copland, were spirited Americana, music which reflected the populist idealism and inspirational optimism of this young and free land on the brink of, then fighting, and ultimately winning a war against totalitarian oppression.  (In fact, at one point, Carter served as a consultant in the Office of War Information during the Second World War.)  The earliest works of Carter, which date all the way back to 1936, are chock full of immediately accessible music.  Whether initially created for dancers or the concert hall, these scores-which include Pocahontas, The Minotaur, The Harmony of Morning, Holiday Overture, and the First Symphony-each demonstrate a remarkable fluidity of orchestration and a keen ear for the contemporaneous strains of jazz. 

But Carter ultimately had to stake out his own iconoclastic path.  While in his late 30’s, Carter began experimenting with such ideas as presenting opposing strands of material simultaneously, creating harmonics using the tonality of the chromatic scale, restricting different instruments to specific subsets of the scale, and, most famously, metrical modulation-the technique of seamlessly going form one pulse to another.  These techniques would become the hallmarks of Caret’s mature style which first manifested itself in chamber music but then evolved to include a new kind of orchestral music that is chamber music-like in its meticulous detail while retaining the broad gestures of a symphonic palette.

While much of the music of Carter’s middle period can be extraordinarily difficult for first-time players and first-time listeners alike, his singular brand of musical modernism always keeps the human element front and center.  Carter creates a theater of sounds that juxtaposes the interplay of well-defined personalities in ways that are engaging to the heart as well as the intellect.  His work, even at its most dauntingly complex remains musicians’ music and work that is capable of making an immediate and visceral impact on listeners.  While always highly organized and precise, Carter eschews serialism as well as all other pre-existing methodologies for the scaffolding of his musical material.  Part of the complexity of this music stems from the fact that so much is happening at any given moment.  Works like the Double Concerto for Piano, Harpsichord and Two Chamber Orchestras; the Piano Concerto, the Concerto for Orchestra, and A Symphony for Three Orchestras, each seemingly contains a universe of interwoven relationships.

In the music he has composed over the course of the past three decades, Carter had still further refined these techniques and in so doing has gradually entered a third stylistic phase.  While the music of this late period has been frequently described and simpler and leaner, it is because Carter crystallized and concentrated the relationships at play in his previous work to the point that a new clarity is immediately discernable on the surface of much of this music.  It is fitting that the one established musical form Carter has returned to most frequently during this period has been the concerto, classical music’s’ monumental metaphor for the struggle between the individual and the society.  To date, he has created idiomatic concertos for the violin, cello, oboe, and clarinet, as well as a second piano concerto-Dialogues- plus two works involving every member of the orchestra in oppositional relationships:  Asko Concerto and Boston Concerto.    

It is also fitting that as a by-product of the lyricism that has emerged with this clarity, Carter, the Harvard English major and lifelong bibliophile, would finally begin actively to explore vocal music.  He has created symbiotic settings of several great American poets, including Elizabeth Bishop (A Mirror on Which to Dwell), John Ashbery (Syringa), Robert Lowell (In Sleep, In Thunder), and William Carlos Williams (Of Rewaking).  Even when composing a purely instrumental work, a great poem is often

After his 90th birthday, Carter has even composed his first opera, What Next?  While it might be assumed that such a work such would be deeply serious, it’s actually a comedy.  Underscoring the unquestionable profundity or Carter’s output throughout his entire career has always been an uncanny wit and joyous spirit, making all of his music ultimately a delightful experience.

FRANK J. OTERI is a New York based composer and the editor of the American Music Center’s web magazine NewMusicBox (www.newmusicbox.org).