Carter 100: Changing Time. By Iain Matheson There are young composers, mature composers, senior composers – and there is Elliott Carter, who claimed the adjective Venerable for himself on 11th December 2008 when he celebrated his 100th birthday with concerts in London and New York, and further performances worldwide (the centenary website www.carter100.com has a full list). The dimensions of any 100-year-long life invite us to consider time and change. In the case of a musician, just the statistics are striking. Mahler, Debussy, Scriabin were all alive when Carter was born. Such works as Schoenberg’s Orchestral Pieces, Stravinsky’s Rite – part of a distant modernist legend for most of us – were part of his youth (he attended the American premiere of the Rite in 1924, one of the experiences which made him determined to become a composer). Carter is one of very few musicians to reach his centenary, though several – Copland, Tippett, Rodrigo, Petrassi – have lived into their 90s. Perhaps the only musician to live longer is Nicolas Slonimsky (1894 – 1995) who has a connection in the Carter biography, having conducted the premier of Ives’ Three Places in New England in New York on 10th January 1931. Such a long life encompasses much change. Carter has pointed out (Radio 3 interview 14.12.08) that, though his music is sometimes said to reflect the energy of New York (Carter100.com describes his mature work as ‘‘unmistakably American’’), the reverse is equally true. Much that is now seen as iconic in the city didn’t exist in his formative years – for instance the Empire State Building wasn’t built till 1931; asked if he remembered it being built, he replied ‘‘No, but I remember it not being there’’ (interview in The Telegraph, 5.12.08) Not just Carter’s long life however: his music invites us to consider time and change; a particular view of time, and the role of memory as a way to measure change. Carter has never been a celebrity composer, preferring to be known simply through his music. His career offers a different model to what has become the norm today, when a young composer will emerge fresh from college
and be celebrated as the great new hope of music, often expected to write too much music too quickly. Carter’s first characteristic works – those which we now recognise as being in his mature style – were written when he was already in his 40s. Influenced early on by Ives and other American ‘‘ultramodernists’’ (Cowell, Ruggles), his earliest works were neoclassical. Like several American composers of his generation he went to study in Paris (1932 – 35) with Nadia Boulanger. This didn’t immediately turn him into a publicly-recognised ‘‘composer’’, as it did some of his contemporaries: on his return to America in the years of the Great Depression he worked variously as a music critic and college lecturer in physics, maths and classical Greek as well as music. He became dissatisfied with the music he was writing, whether neoclassical or emulating the overt Americana which seemed to be demanded by the economic climate, and began to look for a new direction. He comments: ‘‘In considering change, process, evolution as music’s prime factor, I found myself in direct opposition to the static repetitiveness of most early twentieth century music... Musical discourse needed as thorough a rethinking as harmony had at the beginning of the century’’ (Notes in Nonesuch cd 79183-2). Carter’s rethinking of musical discourse led him to investigate how music could best represent time and memory and in this way express the time in which not just music but all life passes. He writes: ‘‘It is toward this time dimension that my own interest has been directed since about 1940, and whatever musical techniques I have used are contributory to the main concern of dealing with our experience of time, trying to communicate my own experience of it and my awareness of this experience in others’’ (‘‘The Time Dimension in Music’’, 1965). In his ‘‘Time Lecture’’ (1965/94) Carter similarly identifies time as a crucial dimension of human experience; beginning with Pythagoras and Plato he traces philosophical ideas of Time as they found their way into music. He comments on simultaneous time in Mozart opera (the three orchestras in the ballroom scene of Don Giovanni), and says ‘‘Beethoven was constantly inventing new and surprising methods of continuity (for example in the late Bagatelles)’’. Carter has also described his instrumental lines
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as characters in a drama, a metaphor which does not imply any programmatic drama, but refers to characters who occupy different times. He writes of ‘‘a special dimension of time, that of multiple perspectives, in which contrasting characters are presented simultaneously’’ (‘‘Music and the Time Screen’’, 1976). One of the things Carter admired in Ives’ music was the presentation of several tempi at once (in such works as Three Places in New England and Calcium Light Night; see ‘‘The Rhythmic basis of American Music’’, 1955, where he also comments favourably on the rhythmic experiments of Conlon Nancarrow) but he considered Ives’ programmatic concerns to be old-fashioned. Removing this aspect allowed Carter to make simultaneous tempi the subject of his music from the time of his Cello Sonata (1948). Since then Carter has been essentially a contrapuntal composer, making counterpoint out of distinct tempi which are then distinguished further by particular harmonies and scoring. Almost all previous music which used contrasting tempi had presented them successively; whether the movements of such a piece as Berg’s Lyric Suite, or the jigsaw of tempi in a piece like Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Carter developed his technique of ‘‘metric modulation’’ in the First String Quartet (1951: Carter prefers to say ‘‘tempo modulation’’, as it’s the tempo which changes, not the metre) as a way of precisely notating related tempi, which could then be stated simultaneously, as in this extract from the first movement of the quartet (bars 22 – 32): Carter describes himself as ‘‘a composer who just happens to be American’’. Culturally he is perhaps equally European and American. He spoke French from childhood, and travelled in Europe as a boy; he has a wide knowledge of European culture and shares his outlook as much with European modernists such as Boulez, as with American composers of his own or subsequent generations. His strong European background gives him a very different view of musical history to that of many American composers; an interesting illustration of this occurs in his 60th birthday appreciation of Milton Babbitt – perhaps no-one but Carter would have thought to describe Babbitt’s contribution to serialism as ‘‘Rameau-like’’ (‘‘To Think of Milton Babbitt’’ (1976) ). Carter is sometimes thought of as a complex composer [possibly refer to the Drouth issue on ‘‘Complexity’’]. This is certainly true at a
theoretical level when attention is paid mainly to the techniques; metric modulation, or structural isorhythms which coincide only once or twice in a piece. It’s also true that Carter’s music, especially the works of the 40s 50s and 60s, is complex and difficult to write down: one of the things Carter’s music does is challenge the limits of musical notation, which in turn creates challenges in performance. In practice, the music’s often complex sound results from layers of tempi which are in themselves quite simple, but collide unpredictably. A lot of information is presented all at once so that more than one hearing is required; it’s not ‘‘immediate’’ music in that sense – something which could be said of most polyphonic music, from Renaissance masses to Bach fugues. Carter developed his techniques not for their own sake, not to be ‘‘difficult’’, but to express something very human that he felt could not be expressed otherwise – the complexity which he recognises as an everyday aspect of life. We routinely live in past-presentfuture all at once; while waiting for a bus we wonder if we remembered to lock the front door, and also plan what we will eat at night. Such a temporal mixture is so commonplace that we hardly notice the tenses we are juggling: but Carter invites us to pay attention to our own complexity, and in this way he places demands on composer and listeners alike. This extract from an internet interview: ‘‘You try to incorporate the pace of modern life into your music?’’ – ‘‘It’s partially true at least. The older music that we know, Beethoven, Brahms, they were all living in a period when you walked or rode on horseback or soldiers marched, and that established a different pace and detail of movement, and it’s reflected in the music. Now we fly airplanes and such, and though people do dance, the idea of motion is utterly different these days.’’(www.marginalrevolution.com/ marginalrevolution/2008/12/elliott-carter.html). Or again: ‘‘In general my music seeks the awareness of motion we have; flying or driving a car, and not the plodding of horses or the marching of soldiers that pervades the motion patterns of older music’’ (sleevenote for ECM cd ECM1817: ‘‘What Next?’’) With such comments Carter places himself firmly in the historical tradition of ‘‘the older music that we know’’. Much of Carter’s time with Boulanger in Paris was spent writing counterpoint in up to eight parts, using Baroque and Renaissance models; in addition
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Boulanger introduced him to Mediaeval composers such as Perotin. Daniel Barenboim has described him as ‘‘one of the last properly classically-trained composers... who doesn’t feel that Mozart is old-fashioned or that Schubert is passe, but that there is a continuity’’. ((In the film ‘‘A Labyrinth of Time’’ (Allegri Films 2005)). Carter’s work grows out of the history of composed music, and translates its concerns for his own time. But he has never adopted the fashion of expressing his relation to music’s history by quoting the works or styles of earlier composers, describing this polystylistic trend as ‘‘a little bit of Bach and a little bit of Schoenberg and a little bit of Gershwin... one of the things I can’t stand’’ (BBC Radio3 interview with John Tusa). In the same interview Carter makes no secret of his dislike of minimalism; ‘‘The public apparently likes to hear the same thing over and over again because they can’t understand it until they’ve heard it ten times... This awful thing which is to beat people down to believing something just because it’s repeated over and over again. In my mind this is a way of destroying intelligence’’. More positively, when asked what he hoped people would be left with after hearing his music, Carter said ‘‘I hope they walk away with pleasure at music which broadens their horizons’’ (youtube interview).
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In Carter’s century the human relationship to time altered hugely, seeming at once faster (aeroplanes) and slower (evolutionary biology), larger (cosmology) and smaller (quantum physics). Einstein’s theories of relativity spelt out the nature of the world in which Carter lived, and Carter’s music springs from his response to these changed perceptions; relativity theory – black holes and big bang theory – time addressed both at the microscopic level of atomic clocks and the cosmological level of light years and carbon dating. Of course other composers have lived through some or all of the same changes: perhaps only Carter has drawn our attention to the difference these things made to the expression of musical time. Carter has read and written widely on subjects other than music, and he has pointed out similar developments in cinema (Cocteau, Eisenstein) and literature (Joyce, Proust) which influenced him in the search for artistic time-patterns and continuities. Other composers have their own priorities; for example the other major musical centenarian in 2008, Olivier Messiaen – born the day before Carter – has a very different view of musical time. Carter’s concern to express Change and make it as noticeable in music as in every other part of life, is contrasted by Messiaen who, from his