Elliott Carter

I have always wanted to study more about Carter’s music because of his percussion piece “Eight Pieces for Four Timpani” (1950-66). It was an article review presentation in theory class that recently motivated my study of Carter. The reviewer wasn’t only discussing his music but also pointed out some of the facts about the compositional techniques that composers were using at the time that Carter was active. The primary concern of music in Carter’s view is artistic expression. He also mentioned that many of the new musical ideas for harmonic systems at that time were a fad and caught a lot of attention but also became predictable and stale quickly.

Elliott Carter was born on December 11, 1908, in New York. Because of his family’s business, Carter spent half of his youth in Europe and was able to speak French before he could read English. He went to Paris and studied with Nadia Boulanger after he graduated from Harvard. Later, he lived in Greenwich Village in New York City. His music and writing show a little bit of American popular culture. Just like many American composers, Carter also tried to find a way to connect between his European educations with his American traditions.

Carter started writing in the neoclassicism genre when he was studying in Europe and later ended up in atonality. He never used twelve-tone techniques in his compositions. Although some critics say that he does use it but Carter’s answer is that he doesn’t analyze his music by himself. His musical ideas put more emphasis on rhythm, tempo contrasts, and dramatic characterization. It is very different from the pitch-centered European music approach. His music style seems to fuse the experimental techniques of the ultramodernists and European modernists’ musical sources together.

Before 1950, Carter was very much influenced by Stravinsky, Harris, Copland, and Hindemith. His Pocahontas (1936-1939) and The Minotaur (1947) show his neoclassical style. In the 1950s, he began to show his mature musical personality with the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948). It is interesting that Carter creates in this piece a drama for two instruments as two different personalities through rhythm. In this period, he used a lot of atonal and rhythmically complexities. The rhythmic device that he was using was known as metric modulation or tempo modulation. In 1948, Cater was impressed by the textures in Nancarrow’s Rhythm Study No. 1 in that several tempos were running simultaneously.

The First String Quartet was the composition that brought Carter to public attention. In Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952), Carter still retained the neoclassic style of instrumentation. The function of the Harpsichord in the first movement is as a timekeeper against the other instruments with their varied rhythms. The Second String Quartet (1959) has the most clear example of his dramatic characterization. The original thought for the setting for this piece was “four instruments to sit as far apart as possible – like characters in a Beckett play ”. But it turned out to be an impossible task for live performance. Carter points out each character in the instruments: “the first violin is a virtuoso, interested mainly in showing off; the viola is a bit too-consistently doleful; the cello self-indulgently romantic; the second violin, like a composer, tries to create order among its narcissistic neighbors. ”

In 1960s to 1970s, Carter generated tonal material by using all possible chords of a particular number of pitches. In the Double Concerto (1961), there are two sets of solo instruments with their own chamber orchestras and they play against each other. The harpsichord group plays minor 2nd, 3rd, perfect 4th, tritone, minor 6th and 7th; the piano group plays major 2nd, 3rd, perfect 5th, major 6th and 7th. In his Three Orchestras (1976), he even divided the orchestra into three parts with each group having their own four movements that are played independently. So one group might go to the second movement before another group finishes the first movement.

After the 1980s, Carter kept the same multiple ideas in his music but used less complexity.