Background
Elliott Carter was born in 1908 in New York, the son of a wealthy businessman.
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LORRAINE VAILLANCOURT/NOUVEL ENSEMBLE MODERNE - CARTER: ENCHANTED PRELUDES - CD
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(Frank Scheffer shows Carter's musical development and pro...)
Frank Scheffer shows Carter's musical development and projects his compositions in time, in a journey led the composer himself. Beautiful pictures of New York City, of which Carter is a lifetime citizen, used as a metaphor, help build the juxtaposition of
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(Elliott Carter b.1908 is now generally acknowledged as Am...)
Elliott Carter b.1908 is now generally acknowledged as America's most eminent living composer. This definitive volume of his essays and lectures -- many previously unpublished or uncollected -- shows his thinking and writing on music and associated issues developing in parallel with his career as a composer; his reputation became established in the 1950s, and the material in this book offers an important and knowledgeable commentary on the course of American and European music in the succeeding decades. Carter's articles on his own music have become classic texts for students of his oeuvre; he also writes on the state of new music in Europe and the United States and the relations between music and the other arts. Other pieces range from a consideration of aspects of music to the work of individual composers. As a whole, the collection is the expression of Carter's musical philosophy, and a valuable record for historians of modern music.
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Elliott Carter was born in 1908 in New York, the son of a wealthy businessman.
He was a student at the Horace Mann School. When Carter attended Harvard, starting in 1926, Ives took him under his wing and made sure he went to the BSO concerts conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, who programmed contemporary works frequently. Although Carter majored in English at Harvard College, he also studied music there and at the nearby Longy School of Music. His professors at Harvard included Walter Piston and Gustav Holst.
His early works displayed an original diatonic style that was strongly influenced by the rhythmic and melodic patterns of ancient Greek music and literature. Among his early works were choral and instrumental pieces and a ballet. Two pieces from the early 1940s—The Defense of Corinth for narrator, men’s chorus, and two pianos (1941) and Symphony No. 1 (1942)—were especially representative work of that period.
Carter’s Piano Sonata (1945–46) marked a turning point in his stylistic development; in it he used a complex texture of irregularly cross-accented counterpoint within a large-scale framework. In the Cello Sonata (1948) the principles of metric modulation were well established. In a 2002 radio interview, Carter said, “Everybody hated it. I couldn’t get it published. Now it’s taught in most universities and it’s played all the time. ” The composer’s innovative rhythmic technique culminated in his String Quartet No. 1 (1951), characterized by the densely woven counterpoint that became a hallmark of his style. Both that quartet and the String Quartet No. 2 (1959; Pulitzer Prize, 1960) became part of the standard repertory. The Variations for Orchestra (1955) marked another phase of Carter’s development, leading to a serial approach to intervals and dynamics. The Double Concerto for harpsichord, piano, and two chamber orchestras (1961), which won rare praise from Igor Stravinsky, displayed Carter’s interest in unusual instrumentation and canonic texture (based on melodic imitation). The conflict generated between the two orchestral groups and the great difficulty of the concerto were mirrored in his Piano Concerto (1965). Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra was first performed in 1970 and the String Quartet No. 3, for which he won a second Pulitzer Prize, in 1973.
The 1980s began a major creative period for Carter. Some of his more frequently performed works from that and subsequent decades include the Oboe Concerto (1987); Violin Concerto (1990), a recording of which won the 1993 Grammy Award for best contemporary composition; String Quartet No. 5 (1995); the playful Clarinet Concerto (1996); the ambitious Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1993–96; “I Am the Prize of Flowing Hope”); an opera, What Next? (1999), about six characters in the aftermath of a car accident; the Cello Concerto (2000), first performed by Yo-Yo Ma; and a continuing string of commissions beyond the composer’s 100th birthday. Major orchestras and other performers around the world increasingly played his music, and he became one of the few contemporary composers whose works entered the standard repertoire.
Carter was the first composer to receive the U. S. National Medal of Arts (1985); the governments of France, Germany, Italy, and Monaco also awarded him high honours. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Referring to the “wit and humour…anger…lyricism and beauty” found throughout Carter’s works, the critic Andrew Porter labeled the composer “America’s great musical poet. ”
His compositions are known and performed throughout the world; they include orchestral, chamber music, solo instrumental, and vocal works.
He was productive in his later years, publishing more than 40 works between the ages of 90 and 100, and over 20 more after he turned 100 in 2008. He completed his last work, Epigrams for piano trio, on August 13, 2012.
(Frank Scheffer shows Carter's musical development and pro...)
(LORRAINE VAILLANCOURT/NOUVEL ENSEMBLE MODERNE - CARTER: E...)
(Elliott Carter b.1908 is now generally acknowledged as Am...)
Quotations:
"My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me. "
"An auditory scenario for the players to act out with their instruments. "
"Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore. "
"Well when I was young, when I was very young, when I was a little boy I don't remember the music I heard, but there was an article in the Brooklyn Daily written by my Aunt about how I could choose phonograph records. "
"I've known those pieces ever since I was about 16 or 17; I also at that time was taken to meet Charles Ives whom I got to know fairly well. He was the one who wrote a recommendation for me to get into college. "
"In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer. "
"Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way. "
On July 6, 1939, Carter married Helen Frost-Jones. They had one child, a son, David Chambers Carter.
