Elliott Carter’s innovative, bold compositions tower over 20th-century American music. Born Elliott Cook Carter, Jr., in New York on December 11, 1908, he spent his childhood in an atmosphere of progressive cultural awareness, and at age 17 befriended the older and influential Charles IVES. After graduating from Harvard, Carter travelled to Paris, and from 1932 to 1935 completed his music studies with Nadia BOULANGER. When he returned to the U.S., Carter began a lasting academic career that would include appointments at the Peabody Conservatory, the Juilliard School, and Columbia, Cornell, and Yale Universities.
Carter’s early compositions displayed a range of influences, from STRAVINSKY to Samuel BARBER. These works included the ballet suite Pocahontas (1938–39), which was awarded the Juilliard Publication Award in 1940; the intimate Elegy for Cello and Piano (1943); and the popular Holiday Overture (1944).
In the mid-1940s, his music entered a new phase. Following a rereading of Freud, Carter wanted to explore deeper feelings and forms of expression in his music, and his Piano Sonata (1945–46) was the first piece to attempt this. In the piece, Carter renounced neoclassical aesthetic diatonicism and thematic recurrence, and employed the sonorities of piano harmonics and virtuoso figuration, in varied rhythmic groupings bound by a constant pulse. The Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948) continued Carter’s attempts to expand the musical language by superimposing opposing rhythmic patterns and shifting pulses from one to another as a means of relating continually fluctuating speeds, a technique known as “metric modulation.”
In the early 1950s, Carter was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters that allowed him to focus on the creation of his String Quartet No. 1. This piece, which used stark atonality and intricate rhythms evoking constant change, established Carter’s international reputation by winning first prize in the 1953 International Quartet Competition at Liège, Belgium. Variations for Orchestra (1954–55) introduced a textural dimension involving simultaneous ideas shifting between foreground and background roles. In the String Quartet No. 2 (1959), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in I960, each part represented a distinct persona made up of specific intervallic structures, textures, tempi, and articulations. The Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord (1961), hailed by Stravinsky as “the first true American masterpiece,” assigns a separate chamber orchestra and separate characteristic gestures to each soloist, using progressive differentiation to palindromic effect.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Carter continued to experiment with the dialogue of instruments, while exploring 19th-century orchestrations in modern terms. The mercurial String Quartet No. 3 (1971), which won a second Pulitzer Prize for Carter, features two contrasting duos engaged in virtuosic interplay. Dramatic rhetoric inflects the triptych of chamber cantatas: A Mirror on Which to Dwell (for soprano, 1975), Syringa (for mezzo, 1978), and In Sleep, In Thunder (for tenor, 1981). Night Fantasies (for piano, 1980) recalls the volatile character suites of Schumann with its “continu-ously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night.” Penthode for large ensemble (1984–85), the String Quartet No. 4 (1986), Partita (1993), and the String Quartet No. 5 (1995), show no slackening of inspiration or inventiveness.
Hao Huang
SEE ALSO: CHAMBER MUSIC; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Edwards, A. Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971);
Schiff, David. The Music of Elliott Carter (London: Eulenberg, 1983).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord; Elegy for Cello and Piano; Piano Concerto;
Piano Sonata; Sonata for Cello and Piano;
String Quartet No. 1; String Quartet No. 2;
String Quartet No. 3; String Quartet No. 4;
String Quartet No. 5; Syringa; Variations for Orchestra; Violin Concerto.