aworks :: "new" american classical music

String Quartet No. 4 (1986). Elliott Carter

And after that burst of archaic nationalism, iTunes served up Elliott Carter's Fourth String Quartet. While I can't say I enjoyed the juxtaposition of hardcore modernism and patriotic pastiche, the quartet is always interesting. For good measure, iTunes followed with Barber's First Essay giving me a chance to assimilate my American music experience for the day.

Elliott Carter:

On another level, American works are seldom the product of working methods characteristic of many important European composers, who have gone about their work in a systematic way, carefully coordinating musical means and ends at every level while weeding out initially accepted elements that did not contribute to their specific intentions. For often it seems that they must have formed a very clear idea of what they wished to accomplish, and were determined to pursue this down to the smallest details of their work. In my opinion, it is the very absence of this sharpness of focus and close coordination of means in terms of a very clarified musical intention that gives the good works of American music their special freshness and makes the listener sense in them an aesthetic point of view different from the more or less standard European one.

But wouldn't Carter's own methods be classified as European by this definition?

 

Dialogues (2003). Elliott Carter

Recent relevant reviews from Classics Today:

10/10. Dialogues for Piano & Chamber Orchestra et al. Elliott Carter. Hodges et al. Bridge. Amazon #19,611. You would never guess that these four compact, vivacious, and imaginatively crafted concertos are the work of a man in his 90s.

10/10. Bells for Stokowski. Jerry Junkin. Telarc. Amazon #15,019. David del Tredici is less radical than Daugherty in the post-Romantic original wind work, which he named In Wartime because composition of this commission coincided with the four months of debate and build-up before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

10/10. Symphony No. 3 "Kaddish." Leonard Bernstein. Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. Amazon #81,969. The more time passes, the more Leonard Bernstein's "Kaddish" symphony sounds like an important work.

10/10. A Song for Anything - Charles Ives. Finley, Drake. Hyperion. Amazon #33,338. This is far and away the best program of Ives songs currently available, 31 of them, lasting slightly more than 70 minutes.

10/10. Symphony No. 4 et al. Alan Hovhaness. Keith Brion et al. Naxos. Amazon #105,411. But there is enough difference in the inspiration of these works, and enough stylistic development, that you don't really get an impression of sameness.

10/9. The Unknown Ives, Volume 2. Berman, Drury. New World Records. Amazon #195,083. Berman not only understands Ives' volatile aesthetic but also feels it in his bones, and more importantly, is a fearless pianist with a huge, totally ambidextrous technique and big sound to match.

9/8. Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra et al. Alan Hovhaness. Konstantin Krimeta et al. Black Box. Amazon #112,175. Several familiar ingredients of Alan Hovhaness' early style combine to make a dish of rather unusual flavor in his Concerto for two pianos and orchestra.

Three Illusions (2004-05). Elliott Carter

Richard Dyer reviews an American concert by James Levine and the Boston Symphony, including a mostly new work by 96-year-old (!) Carter, with the composer in attendance:

The world premiere was two-thirds of Carter's ''Three Illusions." All three brief pieces are responses to literary fantasies -- ''Micomicon," premiered last season, to ''Don Quixote"; the brand new ''The Fountain of Youth" to Roman myth; and ''More's Utopia" to Sir Thomas More's vision of an ideal society. The music is fantastical too: There is no way to know what's going to bubble up next, but it is always surprising, inevitable, and vividly orchestrated.

Andrew Clark in the Financial Times:

The piece, lasting barely 10 minutes, is music stripped to its essense. The ideas are strong, the syntax beguiling, the effect dumbfounding.

And in Chicago, Wynne Dellacoma reviews the premiere of Carter's Soundings, where Daniel Barenboim both conducts and plays piano (with Carter attending the second night):

Carter came up with an ingenious solution, organizing the 12-minute "Soundings'' so that piano and orchestra never played together. In brief comments before the piece Thursday night, Barenboim joked that he didn't know what Carter might be trying to tell him with such a strict separation of powers.

I had to check; composer Leo Ornstein wrote his Eighth Piano Sonata at age 98 and died eleven years later.

rgable: aworks culture wars era carter: aworks del.icio.us wikipedia google news yahoo audio singingfish  current listening: ligeti's capriccio for organ 

Night Fantasies (1980). Elliott Carter. [Aimard]

Richard Dyer, in the Boston Globe, reviews a Tanglewood concert by Pierre-Laurent Aimard which included Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies:

Now a whole new generation is tackling the piece and finding different things in it, chasing different chimeras. Aimard's performance was notable for its tints, washes, and bold strokes of color -- the work sounded like a last, unstable phantasmagoria of impressionism.

Night Fantasies (1980). Elliott Carter

From the New York Times:

The pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays at Zankel Hall in Manhattan on Monday:

PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD — Pianist. Carter ("Two Diversions"; "Night Fantasies"), Ives (Sonata No. 2). Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, 7:30. (212) 247-7800.

I wasn't aware Aimard was playing Night Fantasies. Carter's best work in my opinion.

At Tower today, I saw the Aimard/Graham Ives CD. I had already exceeded my quota on new CDs with the Nonesuch 25% off sale (the new Adams and the Kronos Harry Partch) and a Godspeed You Black Emperor double CD. Next time...

String Quartet No. 5 (1995). Elliott Carter

The Chamber Music Society of Detroit recently cancelled the performance of Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 5.

Mark Stryker: But society president Lois Beznos asked the Pacifica to drop the Carter quartet for fear of alienating those subscribers who complained after a November concert by the Juilliard String Quartet that included 20th-century atonal works by Viennese modernist Anton Webern. This is lunacy.

I have not heard this quartet although I did attend a San Francisco Conservatory of Music lecture/performance series of the first four quartets (with the charming Carter in attendance). Independent of what was best for the Detroit audience, I find these works difficult but worthy of the intellectual effort. And that familiarity helps me place them in the context of the overall string quartet literature. Having said that, I much prefer a Carter piano piece, Night Fantasies, which despite also being unconventional, did not require rigorous study to enjoy (although I did later buy the score).

Aaron Copland gets the last word on Carter:

A Reader: One might point also to the example of Elliott Carter, who has shaped a music of his own out of a wide knowledge of the music of our time.

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Update: San Francisco Performances, an arts series, has scheduled the Pacifica Quartet for February 2005.

Sharing a dedication to the best in contemporary and modern works, the Pacifica present American composer Elliott Carter's five string quartets.

Interestingly, it is not part of any of their subscription series e.g. their chamber music series including the Guarnieri, Tokyo, etc. Gotta keep that modern music segregated...

Boston Concerto (2003?). Elliott Carter

Great interview of Carter by Geoffrey Norris of the Telegraph. Norris mentions "Boston Concerto" will be heard at the Londomn Proms. But the interview is really Carter attacking minimalism, and maybe, at 96, being the last living modernist...

With his own music driven by change and diversity, what is his view of the popular trend of minimalism? "It's death," says Carter. "If you write one bar and then repeat it over again, the music ceases to have anything to do with the composer, from my point of view, anyway. It means a person's stopped living. It doesn't have anything to do with music.

"Well, it obviously does, because some people think it's very good. But I don't understand that. I think that one of the big problems we live with is that that kind of repetition is everywhere, in advertising, in public address systems, and in politicians always saying the same thing. We live in a minimalist world, I feel. That's what I think. Those other people can think what they think."

This is so contrary to the "Philip Glass/zen/let people have their own experience" aesthetic. It's the New York equivalent of the old LA Schoenberg/Stravinsky dichotomy.

Having listened closely to Carter's "Changes", for solo guitar this morning and now coincidentally tonight, minimalism's greatest achievement, Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians", albeit as background music, what's the verdict?

Ahh, to be alive 50 years from now to see how it all turns out...

Afterward:

Here's a proxy for Glass versus Carter with a "folksy" George Crumb substituting for Glass.

Changes (1983). Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter's music for guitar, "Changes", is available here on a Real stream from WGBH's Art of the States. This is the David Starobin recording.

Does the sweet nature of the guitar mask some of the thorny "Carter-isms" or is this good because of the brief flamboyant, almost rock-like passages?