Amazon.com
When David Schiff finished his overview of Elliott Carter's music in 1983, Carter was already 75 years old. No one could have predicted the flood of marvelous new pieces (including three large-scale concertos and two string quartets) the composer would produce in the intervening years. This second edition is current through April 1998 and arrives in time for the composer's 90th birthday. Schiff is the ideal guide for this repertoire: a composer himself who studied with Carter, he has also conducted the Triple Duo. His writing is stylish--in the String Quartet No. 4, he writes, the second movement "seems to begin over the first violin's repeated objections." Schiff is lucid without ever being superficial. Instead of the strictly chronological organization of the first edition, he now groups the music by genre. (This system is especially helpful in understanding the five string quartets.) Each chapter has a brief general introduction--the first few paragraphs of the vocal music chapter in particular are a model of practical musical thought. There is a technical glossary, an eight-page bibliography (which might have mentioned Andrew Porter's enthusiastic New Yorker reviews of the pieces), and an 18-page discography. Although there are a few dozen musical examples, readers will need scores to follow some of the discussion. Of necessity, Schiff describes some of the most recent music instead of analyzing it. Anyone who wishes to gain a foothold in Carter's endlessly rewarding world might listen to the excellent Chicago Symphony recording of Variations for Orchestra and follow Schiff's elegant commentary. --William R. Braun Book Description
Arguably the most important American composer of the century, Elliott Carter often has been more highly regarded in Europe than in his native land. Interest in his work has grown rapidly in recent years, however, and the celebration of his ninetieth birthday in December, 1998, accompanied by numerous performances and new recordings, undoubtedly will increase the attention of his fellow citizens to this remarkable figure.

Authoritative and gracefully written, The Music of Elliott Carter engages composers, performers, and critics, and speaks to concert-goers, whether attuned to or alarmed by the formidable difficulty of Carter's music. David Schiff views the music from the perspective of the composer's development and relates his compositional techniques to those nonmusical arts--contemporary American poetry in particular--with which Carter has been deeply involved. The volume benefits from Schiff's extensive discussions of Carter's works with their most noted performers, including Heinz Holliger, Oliver Knussen, and Ursula Oppens, and from the generous cooperation of the composer himself.

This new edition, a thoroughly reorganized, revised, and updated version of the book published in 1983, accounts for the many new works written by Carter since 1980 and accommodates the burgeoning critical literature on his music. Its features include many musical examples and a selected discography. In addition to the new foreword, the composer has provided his listing of three-to-six note chords and a note on "Voyage." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Tried....can't.......sorry
This reference to a line from a recent comedian popped into my head as I was trying to get into this book.After my 6th re-read of the beginning of the second chapter I felt like I was beginning to grasp some of the concepts the author put forth regarding Carter's music and Time, and it wasn't too far after that that I realized this book was interesting but not really necessary to enjoy Carter's music.And most likely, if you don't enjoy Carter's music for the way it sounds and unfolds, this book will not help you enjoy it.

The author does a great job of putting the concepts behind Carter's music into words, but I still found them to be very esoteric.This book reminds me of texts that I used to read in my 20th Century music theory and history classes in college, and I would have benefited greatly with this text by having a professor around to help clarify some of the more obscure comments.For example, in the section describing Carter's music as Collage, the author quotes Carter as saying: "`The form I seek is Coleridge's "form as proceeding", and I try to avoid "shape as superinduced".' For the latter, he says, `is either the death or the imprisonment of the thing; the former is its self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency.'"Far out.And gibberish, to me.Along with some of the rhythmic tables that made me chuckle, as a musician, imagining trying to figure it out--for example, from the 2nd quartet, part of the structure of the rhythm:2nd violin pulse--six dotted 32nd notes plus a dotted 32nd rest under a septuplet bar=70, matched to a tempo of dotted quarter=60, with a ratio to the others of 7:6.Okay.There's also the tempo marking of dotted eighth=163.3 and 186.7.

I soon realized that I though I already like Carter's music, the contents of this book will not make me listen to Carter's music any differently.Even though I find the concept of the Time Screen interesting, I won't be envisioning it next time I listen to his Concerto For Orchestra.So, if you like to read about what's behind really high concept music and have a mind to hold the information, I can see getting through the whole tome.Otherwise, browsing for fun seems to be a better use for someone approaching Carter's music non-academically.

Incredibly readable on greatstructural innovator
Schiff has done a lucid job here for the readers,he writes quite well, not slipping into piles of set theory or analytical jargoneze,that speaks to a diminishing elite. Many have labeled Carter an elite creator,but that's amatter of reference(well Carter did walk out on a performance in Chicagodue to Leonard Slatkin's pre-concert remarks). Schiff remarkably covers allthe great Carter works, the turbulent works of the Sixties and Seventies,the darkly brooding Piano Concerto(written in West Berlin) and the Concertofor Orchestra,a Sixties work of violence, a reflection on the Anti-WarTimes. The latter unaccompanied solos are all here as well, all workswritten,for the most part after the First Edition. Schiff frequentlyreflects upon what works in a piece, a purely function premise thatexplains much, and is food for thought to any youngster hoping to somedaywrite just like Elliot Carter. I miss the photographs from the FirstEdition, those with Stravinsky and Boulez, and the Carter manuscriptreproductions included there. Schiff seems quite lucid in speaking aboutall this complexity whether rhythmic,structural or pitchbound. I didn'tknow for instance that Carter has kept a harmony book, sort of a creativeOracle to refer to over ones life. The chapters divide things again quiteclearly, The Chamber Music, The Vocal Music, The Piano Music andOrchestral, with a nice Appendix of Carter's Listing of Three to Six NoteChords, also a Chronological Catalogue of Works, a select Bibliography andDiscography, a List of Charts. A shame however is, although the winner ofnumerous Pulitzers, Carter until quite recent times has been neglected herein this country fighting in his home territory, the Eastern MusicalEstablishment and the Bernstein Clique of the Sixties and Seventies. Boulezdid much to repair this damage with The New York Philharmonic and nowBarenboim has in Chicago, as well as premiere ensembles,Arditti andsoloists,Chas Rosen and Ms Oppens. Schiff also always points to Carter'sextracurricular interests in literature, where he frequently finds animpetus for a work, as well as the Italian language for a conceptualworking premise. The Glossary at the beginning also is a wonderfulclarifier, of forms we frequently hear about but seldom understand withinthe context of the subsequent work these terms refer to. ... Read more

Book Description
First performed by the Julliard String Quartet in 1960. Awarded the 1960 Pulitzer Prize, the 1960 New York Music Critics Circle Award, and the 1961 International Rostrum of Composers Award (UNESCO). Duration ca. 20 minutes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

more classic inshape water mark
with the Second Quartet 1959, you sense a greater undulating freedom of choice of materials,more compact,yet expansive for solo moments, texture is not as vigorusly pursued, of timbre, greater blends together, as if a common language has been now discovered/ / /the rhythmic conception is somewhat more static in nature,although you have incessant ties to identical tones over the barlines,something you might be torn asunder at a composition lesson as suggesting a course in music without meaning;at least Ralph Shapey would have told you so/ / / and you only see these dimensions within the maze of study of the First Quartet. There is greater diversity of everyone contributing toward an emotive center,more soloist lines exposed, the brilliant cello returns again , as in the First Quartet each part leading into the next player,interruptions only occur when new materials are needed to prod things along, like electric charges, or a new light added to the rhythmic maze pursued herein' each player entering fully conscious of the purpose of the phrase and direction of the proceedings herein, even if the materials are purely accompanimental and marginal to the quartets agenda. When characters emerge, they have longer declamations and come to dominate larger swabs of durational frames, as the First Violin attibuting a modest cadenza toward the latter parts of the third movement 'Andante espressivo'. Overall there seems to be greater assertiveness of purpose here, shorter time length half the time of the 40 minute First Quartet. This Second Quartet, seems to relish in the relative brevity of its existence,with cleaner threadbare lines, keeping less independence, yet not entirely so. The emotive thorny questioning state(from the First Quartet) is pulled in as well, there is far less ground to tread here, and the beauty comes through all the more. There are also a larger pallette(s) of extended sounds, three different pizz items with,Left-hand pizz, arco-pizz-arco, and the violent Bartok pizz, snapped against the fingerboard, and a fair amount of glissandi/ / / Carter advises in his introductory notes that tempi and polyrhythmic textures must be adhered to faithfully so to clearly experience the complexity sought after.This work won all sorts of prizes including the Pulitzer,but don't let that skew your view,music should be examined as it stands, and as it was written not what it has won, unless it is a race horse, and I imagine many composers today would like their music to take on such thorough-bred 'Seebisket"dimensions. ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

reflections of a great contemporary composer
For anyone interested in modern music, by whatever name (contemporary classical composition, "new music"), this book is invaluable.Elliott Carter, in my view one of the two bestcomposers of the late 20th century, along with Gyorgy Ligeti, has written fairly extensively over the years about his music.He was actually employed as a critic for Modern Music in the late 1930s, one source of these essays.Presented here are trenchant analyses of the difficulty of being a composer of advanced works in a commercial society, including the problems of orchestras and rehearsals ("the orchestral brontosaur"), reflections on American and European music, reminiscences of his studies with Boulanger in Paris, explanations of various compositions including the First and Second string quartets and the Concerto for Orchestra, and fascinating comments on other composers, including of course Charles Ives, along with Stravinsky, Varese, the Second Vienna School, Debussy and Mozart.Carter expresses the utmost respect for Webern's exquisite miniatures, while making clear his rejection of serialism, which he never adopted.

Elliott Carter enjoys a much higher level of recognition in Europe than in the U.S., where composers of schlocky film scores are vastly more popular (ie, "Star Wars").While noticed by only a few today, these writings will play a part in establishing Carter's future reputation as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century -- an American composer whether he was recognized by his contemporaries at home or not. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Die Hard Forms
this was commissioned by The Louisville Orchestra, you may recall the impressive exhaustive recording agenda that orchestra had maintained,with hundreds of works played yet not all recorded.
This was Carter first primary piece for orchestra with his newly discovered musical language of the dodecaphonic :First String Quartet:, some attribute this excursis as well to the protean, lean :Cello Sonata: of 1948, and the the "Eight Etudes and a Fantasy", and also the impressive,groundtreading :Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952),but each work seeks its own agenda conceptual space and procedures,the Orchestral :Variations: of Carter has a flow, a pathway into the lineage at times to Schoenberg's unforgettable :Variations: for Orchestra:,some claim Carter's are even more interesting, Hmmm! all music seeks its own context; the genre of "variations"I would say Schoenberg's creativity was initially not as timid or self-conscious as Carters,but all these superlatives lead nowheres;"variations form" is/was one more like a study,and one duly practiced under the primary signifiers of dodecaphonic language,simple examine the music of Wolpe or Shapey,and Babbitt recall all came to terms with this genre at some time.If you don't know where to go,(in one's aesthetic, of the philosophic) usually a set of variations will suffice. These Carter "Variations" are rather terse and measured,I cannot help feel Webern's "Passacaglia for Orchestra" here juxtaposed in some skewed manner and you sense Ives' death(1954) hovering within the four pages someplace,:Variation 7: for example utilizes juxtapositon of nefarious materials,as Ivesian moments thrown together, in fact the other :Variations: can come to make reference points(punkte) within music history, this after some more obvious as :Variation 2: a canon in measured style,where the displacement of interveals comes to equal the rhythms deployed,something Carter was to developed later.Durational procedures has always intrigued Carter in his own way,the contraction and augmentation, expansion of durations in measured procedures.And he new very little at the time of the achievements of the post-war European composers/ / /
:Variation 1: is light and fast,wistful; whereas "Variation 2: is heavy and slow, exposition materials,before we ascend into greater use of abstract procedures, as "Variation 4" a continuous ritardando, where the weight,of the durational frame is burdened with a dotted value, then more, weight,:Variation 5: is somewhat a motionless etude, of wonderful timbres, strings and winds,:Variation 7 some say is like a jazzy scherzando, but nothing to me strikes of jazz in Carter, his persona was entirely opposite.I recall Solti was very fond of this work and placed it on his first European Tour with the Chicago Symphony. ... Read more

Product Description
With the publication of this remarkable tome, students of Elliott Carter's music and theorists with an interest in contemporary music, have a detailed guide to understanding the music of a great composer. In addition, Harmony Book is a valuable study of the post-tonal harmonic possibilities within the twelve-note chromatic scale and will be an invaluable resource to serious composers of every style interested in expanding their own harmonic practice. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Why bother?
If you are a listener of music, this book will not help you 'hear' the music of Carter.It will help you understand it.In effect, harmony in Carter's music, exploiting the full chromatic spectrum as it does, frees his poly-rhythmic structures and intricate counterpoint to function independently of harmony.In my opinion, the harmony in Carter's music is its weakest aspect.I don't really hear it in his music.What I found interesting in this book was seeing how Carter's use of harmony enables his long term poly-rhythmic structures to work, which in themselves are quite fascinating.But the lack of the sense of 'vertical' in his music makes the actual study of his harmony a moot point for this listener.

Not your grandmother's harmony book
This is not a "harmony book" in the traditional sense - apart from a page of explication of one of Carter's guitar pieces, there is nothing here about how to write music. It is, however, an incredibly useful resource for composers working in a certain style.

As Carter began to be interested in the combinatorial relations of groups of pitches, he compiled this catalogue and cross-reference for his own use so that he would not have to figure it all out again with each piece. So if you are using two 6-note sets and you need to know which 4-note sets they have in common, or, if you have a 4-note set and want to know all the different 6-note sets that can be formed by adding each different interval, this is the book for you. In that sense there is nothing like it.

What we really need is a software version of this material - anybody listening?

not for everyone, yet illuminating sometimes,perhaps not!!
It was Foucault who in a onetime interview with Pierre Boulez had remarked how music has kept pace with the innovations in technology;Spectral harmonics at IRCAM,Just Intonation in the USA and I'd imagine not only innovation but subversion of concept would be great spots to transcend Foucault.For I find this(for Foucault it is our loss that music was not a realm he ever pursued,only as a spot of culture,the radical aesthetic and the end of man, where is he/she) a double entendre/ side here to this for technology does create obscurity as well The most exciting composers have been those who have continually challenged the traditions of reigning ideologies(the 18th and 19th Centuries) or the circumventing the magnetic attractions of the cash box(our own age)after the eclipse of modernity.Those who simply conspire to write serious music masquerading as film music(minimalism included) will be forgotten. All the John Williams's,countless permutations now by 2002,Phil Glass Clones out there will join the 747s in the Mojave Desert standing baking in the sun, bleached for Road Warrior to one day find.
I suppose Lacan would have or Zizek would find now something fascinating to say with the indulgences in today's new music,what is it, what does it represent, what incomplete dimension of your unconscious does it reside in.
Perhaps music creativity existing within the realms of the modernist language,post-Ferneyhough is harboring an aesthetic in exile,afraid to come out of its embattled neglected shell, like the intimacy of a Dutch lens grinder,a forgotten art.
Today it is actually more interesting, at least with new music, to discover the creative pathways of a work than the actual work itself,like an elaborate dinner setting where the food never comes(John Tilbury,pianist said that on radio) a new work for much of the time under-rehearsed,and played once,perhaps twice never to be heard again, and never recorded for consumption. And then there are primary new workswhich the citizens of a free democracy never get to hear at all. This the cause of cultural marginalization, we simply never hear some aspects of the creative spirit,even though the Silicon Valley has fashioned a saturation point of image,icon,aesthetic and place. Someone, some human body politically does decide who will get a Pulitzer,or what new premiere work the Chicago Symphony will play this year. In fact we seldom remember the Pulitzer winner's actual prize music,Can you name the work or even remember a moment from it??we listen more to the opaque cultural power a Prize represents, who cares about the music.Well Habermas said opacity"Undurchsichtlichkeit" is what this age is all about, New Age complaisance.

Carter has received numerous prizes but for his body of work the prizes seem to be arbitrary and marginal, we forget them because he has so many of them,like Oscars,who ever has more than one we forget about. We go(should go) directly toward the creative vigours structural or otherwise to the music, its incessant shapes, and convoluted designs,its virtuosic displays and its long range topologies of poly rhythms and other global durational frames.

The Harmony Book here, (actually Two Volumes sewed into one here)began as a fairly modest endeavor, a practical accounting means, a way to remember certain configurations of tones, or intervallic transformations. No one can remember everything, so Carter began making these large 14 inch long sheets of these tones. All of this creative odyssey is retold within the interview with scholar John F. Link, who has devoted his analytic work to Carter's polyrhythms,and also this Harmony Book.A wonderful interview here with Carter. Volume One is a Catalogue/Synthesis of three note, four note, five note etc chords, and their tranpostions. It seems easier to contemplate these chords here as 1+2=3, or 3+2=5, for one isolated tone then followed by 2 more tones can powerfully direct the best,evocative,crisis moments in music, anyones.. This becomes especially relevant when one needs to account for 55 six note chords distribute graciously over the durations of a work,or controlling the succession of 80 or 90 tones followed, staggered, accelerated as the work's discourse unfolds. Volume 2 then is Analysis, a means of looking more deeply into the relationships of all this stuff, the tones, the intervals, the chords. There are moments of pure illumination as in the discussion on Carter's provocative/evocative Night Fantasies or when for instance one learns as in Carter's Third String Quartet, a work shaped by the Duets,One Violin with Viola, One Violin then with Cello, One group more stationary reduced to Five tones, the other Duet ensemble is free to explore all interval rows. I can't help thinking this is how international capital functions,in Argentina, in South Korea in today's neo-liberal mileau.

There are also elaborate yet functional means of simple symbols, as a four note chord represented with a box, four point, then five note pentagon, and six, then what is referred to as the Sigla controlling and defining the entire array of tones,220 intervals and chords with all their additions.... There is a Glossary to help one wade through this fascinating Naming of the Father- game.

There are also nice excerpts from Carter's music that helps embellish a point,much like conceptual menus for creativity. Then there is the dimension as to who or what controls whom. Does one need this Harmony Book to decepher the structural complexity within Carter's oeuvre. Does Carter need his own Book? And the answer is sometimes! for Carter said that he did break the tyranny of these alloted configurations simply to make the music more interesting. I guess that is the last horizon, the music must be interesting, how one got there is also interesting,perhaps more so or less so, it may become part of what we may now think of musical philosophy and the creativity, the last bastion known. ... Read more

Book Description
This work offers an annotated reference guide to the life and works of this important American composer.Carter, born in 1908, is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest 20th century composers. This work contains a complete chronology of his life, list of works, detailed discography, and a fully annotated bibliography of over 1,000 books, articles, interviews, video recordings, and Carter's own writings.It offers an excellent introduction to this often-misunderstood composer for students and the general listener. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Info from the author
I've set up a page on my web site with errata and addenda for Elliott Carter: A Guide to Research. If you spot any errors or have an Elliott Carter source you'd like to add, please drop by www.wpunj.edu/coac/music/link/ecgrerrata.html. Thanks! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

expositions of an American structural thinker
This is the early Carter, we hear about his early days with Mlle.Boulanger,her perceptive clarvoyance for her illuminations of a work,her deep concern for her students,including the selctions of gifts for travel back to the United States,well New York. Stravinsky was the genius of the age, the Twenties, Carter had heard at a soiree, Persephone, with Mr. Stravinsky at the piano. He always brought an impeccable sense of rhythm, of precision, of attack.Carter distinguishes the piano composer Ravel, Igor.

There are great issues discussed here as the future of the orchestra, how difficult it has become to give everyone in the modern orchestra something to play. These interviews traverse only to 1971, Carter was on the threshold of his monumental Third String Quartet. But we obtain quite well thought out reflections of the darkly brooding "Piano Concerto",a work completed during a stay in Berlin with students, Rzewski among them, and the "Concerto for Orchestra". The latter he had fragmented the modern orchestra into 'concertini', small ensembles of fascinating timbres.

Carter here is quite social in his reflections of tradition and the elitist endeavor of writing music. He reflects that we really cannot speak of a national consciousness for serious composers as Carter has so obviously becomein the past ten years. That perhaps writing music for the primary venues will be something for the past. And if we warp=speed to the present from 1971 we see the corporate agenda for orchestral commissions as Eisner's vacuous vision of "Mickey Mouse" giving music money to Alan Jay Kernis and Michael Torke for modern creations, creations quite obvious and predictable.Yet without points of interest.

Carter reflects quite profoundly on his working methods, the five and seven tone chordal structures, in the "Piano Concerto", and The powerfully wrought "Concerto for Orchestra", the latter written during the Vietnam Times, of street anti-establishment rebellion.

We learn the impetus of Carter's musical aesthetic as linear, the only aesthetic worth pursuing, and he makes a profoundly convincing arguments against contra the texture bound creations a la Stockhausen, where texture became boring after the first initial moments. Or he reflects deeply on the vacuity of serial thinking that never lets the EAR be the primary focus for music, rather the highly abstracted geometric sense of music not for the EAR but the self-indulgent mind.

Shame this is out-of print, I have an old tattered copy that I cherish deeply. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on September 1, 1995. The length of the article is 830 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Elliott Carter: A Bio-Bibliography.
Author: Carl Rahkonen
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 1995
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: v52Issue: n1Page: p112(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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Book Description
This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on March 1, 1994. The length of the article is 1319 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and His Students, from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski.
Author: Bill F. Faucett
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 1994
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: v50Issue: n3Page: p988(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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Book Description
This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on December 1, 2001. The length of the article is 719 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Elliott Carter: A Guide to Research. (Book Reviews).
Author: Carl Rahkonen
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2001
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: 58Issue: 2Page: 344(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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Book Description
Internationally recognized American composer Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. has composed over three dozen substantial pieces, ranging from stage and choral works to ballets, symphonies, and chamber music. Even at age 85, he continues to pioneer trails into new territory in modern American music. Carter has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, two Pulitzer Prizes for Music, and numerous other awards and honors. This book contains a listing of all compositions by Carter with detailed information on premiere performances, a complete discography, and annotated citations of Carter's writings and writings about Carter and his music. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on September 1, 2002. The length of the article is 1776 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Elliott Carter ou le temps fertile. (Book Reviews: Music Since 1900).
Author: Jean-Michel Boulay
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 2002
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: 59Issue: 1Page: 61(4)

Article Type: Book Review

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Book Description
Commissioned by Carnegie Hall, and first performed at Weill Recital Hall, New York, in 2000 by Kirill Gerstein. Recorded by Charles Rosen on Bridge Records, Winston Choi (l'empreinte digitale), and Ursula Oppens for the Carnegie Hall Millennium Piano Book (released as a book/CD by Boosey and Hawkes, 48002532). The set of two pieces contrasts between simultaneous musical ideas. 8 minutes. ... Read more

Book Description
Born in New York in December 1908, the venerable but still active American composer Elliott Carter is one of the most highly regarded figures in the music of our time. His works span more than seven decades and have been the subject of many analyses, and most of his writings have appeared in carefully edited collections. In contrast, few of the documents on his life and music, largely preserved at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, are known to the public. This body of material forms the main source of the present volume, which offers a richly annotated selection of Carter's correspondence and other documents, including unpublished writings, facsimiles of music manuscripts, and photographs. The book traces the biographical, intellectual, and artistic evolution of a composer who, building on American modernism and interacting with the latest developments in Europe, has forged a distinctive, highly sophisticated musical language, and captures his friendships with fellow musicians and friends such as Charles Ives, Nadia Boulanger, John Kirkpatrick, Aaron Copland, Nicolas Nabokov, and more recently, Pierre Boulez, Oliver Knussen, Heinz Holliger, Daniel Barenboim, and James Levine. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Sensible Sound, published by Sensible Sound on June 1, 2000. The length of the article is 480 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Elliott Carter: Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei and Clarinet Concerto Michael Collins, clarinet/BBC Symphony Orchestra/ London Sinfonietta/Oliver Knussen.
Author: Karl W. Nehring
Publication: Sensible Sound (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 2000
Publisher: Sensible Sound
Page: 55

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Book Description
Parts only for: 2 violins, viola and cello. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

another water mark
there are certain works within modernist repertoire that represent a new departure, a break, or rupture as the French like to expound. Alain Badiou looks at the history,or trajectories of concept is a better term of the aesthetic as those places,those works where we can say represent an "event", a work that in many ways summed up a language, the beginning of an end; and holds within its four pages some creative possibility for continuation for development,for years,not as now a speeded in Virilio-ian droma; the work, the elegant canons and mirror repetitions of Webern certainly held that for the post-war generation of composers, and on this side of the Atlantic, the works of John Cage, threw a large influential net to catch many emerging genres,and cadre of performance artists, new instruments,graphic notation and live electronics.Carter's "First String Quartet" was equally one such work, an "event", call it American neo-expressionism/or romanticism, it sounds quite odious today to utilize such jargon, Carter had left his rather facile music of the previous 20 years for a stint into the language and challenges of dodecaphonic handlings, along his own quite original trajectories, although every movement shall we say is merely different "readings" of the same differing sets of ground rules,shapes,images, and emotive content, be it Cubism, serialism, minimalism,or expressionism, now all quite useless terms ready for the scraps of history/ / /if you situate this "First Quartet" you can see where things, materials, approaches presented themselves in fairly formative dimensions,the language of the new, must be learned,by the artist;but the outwardness of this quartet was quite exciting for its time,the submission of characters and roles for each part, the cello for the most part more pronounced,lumbering along arrogant at times,to the more threadbare viola, less arduous less spontaneous so,imprisoned at times in predictable triple shapes, 3 rhythms for the most part, the first violin then sustaining pencil thin tones,and harboring its own "character" / / / the second violin interrupting all that exists with contrary rhythms,also subservient as traditional speaks to it. There are also "enclosures" of intervallic content, one sequestered limited to one particular part, only the cello is allowed expansion, this is something developed vigorously some 20 years later in the "Third String Quartet". Two duets contrast each other;the buzz of the term "metric modulation" is also here is budding forms/ / /of interjecting slowly the change of a common pulse,then accelerated but within a definable proportion. You may recall the first time you had heard this quartet, and it truly sounded like music from another place, a music of exile,not a music that belonged anywhere,until now,50 years it does take these works to become partially understood, as Adorno said Beethoven we think is better understood than Webern, but that is not true,it never was true/ / /Carter's quartets now grace untold genres, now a safe music, fully acceptable into the neo-liberal order. ... Read more