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Inside
This Issue:
Inside This Issue
Pianos, Ivory, and Empire by Sean
Murray
Searching for Brooklyn’s
Jazz History by Jeffrey Taylor
Reenvisioning a Critical Chapter in
American Music, review by Ray Allen
Robert Ashley’s Operas,
review by David Grubbs
Charles Ives and His Tunes, review
by Tom C. Owens
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Celebrating
Carter
by
Ève Poudrier
2008
saw a wealth of events and releases related to Elliott Carter’s
centenary. The composer’s music was featured at several summer
festivals and in major concert halls in New York,
Paris, and London, to name only a few; he also made
several public appearances, notably on Charlie Rose with Daniel Barenboim and
James Levine. Birthday tributes also took the form of commercial recordings,
master classes featuring expert Carter performers, conferences in American
universities and abroad, and a variety of special events, including an
exhibit of autograph documents at the Boston Symphony Hall. Carter himself
kept busy with several premieres and new commissions, including a long-awaited
Flute Concerto and Interventions for piano and orchestra
(commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for James Levine and Daniel
Barenboim, and premiered in Boston
a few days before the composer’s birthday). More premieres are
scheduled for 2009, including a new song cycle on poems by Ezra Pound, On
Conversing with Paradise for baritone and chamber orchestra. Although the
last decade or so has seen the publication of several books devoted to the
composer, Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler’s Elliott Carter: A
Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Paul
Sacher Foundation and Boydell Press, 2008) is an invaluable addition to this
scholarship and is likely to find a place of choice in the personal library
of many Carter enthusiasts.1
Since
Paul Sacher secured all of Carter’s music manuscripts and other working
materials in 1986 (the year of the official opening of the Sacher
Foundation), scholars have had to travel to Basel to gain access to Carter’s more
recent autograph materials. Little of this information has been reproduced in
print, and a catalog of the Carter holdings, probably the Sacher
Foundation’s largest collection, is yet to be published. According to
Meyer and Shreffler, the main purpose of this volume is “to present an
overall picture of Carter as a composer, of his artistic impact and his
position in the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (4).
The authors also aimed to give a wide overview of the music manuscripts and
show “various forms of notation that Carter has used in his
works” and “some typical features of his working methods”
(3). Overall, the reader will find that these goals have been impressively
met, although the lack of a descriptive list of the music manuscripts
reproduced will be disappointing to many readers. Such a wide scope
necessarily imposed certain restrictions: the analytical commentaries are
limited in depth and there are also too few items relating to a single work
to be used as a basis for an analysis. But taken as a whole, the carefully
selected materials—which are not limited to the Sacher
Foundation’s holdings but also include relevant materials from other
institutions—and the commentaries that accompany them provide much
insight into the composer’s working methods. Interested students are
offered a rare opportunity to familiarize themselves with Carter’s
compositional language before embarking on more in-depth study.
Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters
and Documents is organized chronologically, spanning from 1908 to 2008,
and offering what is probably the most extensive collection of biographical
information to date. Each chapter is conveniently subdivided in sub-sections
by themes or work titles. For example, Chapter 1, “Rather an
Exceptional Boy” 1908-1935, includes six sub-sections: Childhood and
Youth (1908-26), Support from Charles Ives (1926), My Love is in a Light
Attire (1928), Student at Harvard
University (1926-1932),
Incidental Music for Philoctetes (1932), and The Paris Years
(1932-35). However, the sub-sections are not included in the table of
contents, and there is no catalog of the reproduced materials. These
shortcomings make the volume somewhat less user-friendly, especially since it
is more likely to be used as a reference than read cover to cover. Instead,
most of the items are indexed under “Carter, Elliott Cook” by
format type, i.e., “Photos,” “Letters to,”
“Articles/Lectures/Interviews,” and “Works.”
Apart from the introduction, the book reads as a
series of vignettes that might be most easily enjoyed by casually flipping
through pages. The materials are organized in small topically related groups
of different types of materials, each accompanied by a brief commentary. The
analytical comments at times seem to
retread the territory
of Carter scholar David
Schiff, insofar as they are rather descriptive and focus on a few distinctive
features, but they also often include more details about the geneses of the
works, enriched by relevant biographical information and quotations from
letters. Thus, many analysts will find them illuminating and will be inspired
to explore various aspects of Carter’s musical discourse. Finally, the
book does not include a bibliography, but does offer generous footnotes
referring to primary and secondary literature. It also includes two
appendices: (1) English translations of letters in Carter’s French,
German, and Italian, and (2) a list of published works from Tarantella
(1936) to On Conversing with Paradise (2008). The letters in the text
and appendix are cross-referenced and thus easily compared. The list of works
is organized chronologically and entries typically include the piece’s
instrumentation, composition and publication dates, and information on the
premiere. This is sufficient for quick reference and to gain a more general
perspective of the works discussed within Carter’s oeuvre; more
inquisitive readers will want to consult John Link’s Elliott Carter:
A Guide to Research for more detailed entries.
Despite its necessarily fragmented contents, A Centennial
Portrait is very successful in conveying a sense of Carter’s
development as a composer and active participant in American and European
cultural history, a success that is unquestionably indebted to Meyer and
Shreffler’s skillful integration of relevant information. The authors
describe Carter’s fruitful involvement with musical institutions such
as the League of Composers, the ISCM’s Forum Group for young composers,
and Modern Music.
The most critical contribution made by the authors is
a brief re-examination of claims about Carter’s oeuvre as Eurocentric,
with Carter’s international activities interpreted in light of the
influence of the New York Intellectuals’ vision of an “aesthetic
of cosmopolitan modernism” on the young composer and the “transnational
spirit” of pre-WWII America
(6). Instead, the authors propose a perspective of Carter as a “radical
traditionalist” who “channeled his drive towards innovation
primarily in the direction of maximum sophistication and a systematic
employment of the traditional twelve-tone chromatic material, combined with a
corresponding range and variety in the shaping of musical time” (13).
Considering the wealth of
Carter-related materials available at the Paul Sacher Foundation and the
difficult task of keeping up with a century-old composer who is more active
than ever, this volume is a considerable achievement. Its publication will
certainly make Carter’s autograph materials more accessible as well as
provide scholars a valuable resource for the study of archival materials.
Libraries will find it to be an essential addition to their collection, as
will many Carter and American music scholars. The richly illustrated volume
will also be attractive to a wider audience of musicians, concert goers, and
cultural history enthusiasts.
—Ève Poudrier,
Yale
University
Note
1 These include William T. Doering, Elliott
Carter: A Bio-Bibliography, (Greenwood, 1993); Jonathan W. Bernard, Elliott
Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995 (University
of Rochester Press, 1997); David Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 2nd. ed. (Cornell
University Press, 1998); Max Noubel, Elliott Carter, ou Le temps fertile
(Geneva, Switzerland: Contrechamps, 2000),
and John F. Link, Elliott Carter: A Guide to Research (Garland
Publishing, 2000).
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