Carter's Reflections

by Judy Lochhead

Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995, edited by Jonathan Bernard (University of Rochester Press, 1998; $24.95) is an anthology of writings by one of the most important American composers since 1950. The compilation provides access to Carter’s musical sensibilities as an internationally eminent composer and as an articulate and insightful critic. His writings about music help to illuminate his own aesthetic as well as that of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors.

Bringing his considerable experience as a scholar of Carter’s music to bear on the project, Jonathan Bernard edited the volume in consultation with the composer. The collection is notable for making available several essays that were either not in print or have not yet been published in English. Most of the unpublished essays were originally lectures, the manuscripts of which are housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation. Forty-seven of the fifty-nine essays in the volume have previously appeared in journals or books (a large majority in the 1977 collection The Writings of Elliott Carter, edited by Else Stone and Kurt Stone); twelve are published for the first time. While the duplication of so many essays raises questions about the book’s goals, the collection is important for continuing to make Carter’s thinking about music available to the musical community and for presenting previously unpublished essays.

Bernard divides the essays into six topical categories. One wishes that he had provided introductions to each of these categories—Bernard’s reflections upon Carter’s thinking about these topics would have provided a useful context in which to contemplate Carter’s ideas.

The first section, “Surveying the Compositional Scene,” includes essays from 1946-65 about compositional practices in the early post-World War II years. Carter stakes out his own technical preferences in “Fallacy of the Mechanistic Approach” (1946), yet shows his sympathetic understanding of other compositional techniques in “La Musique sérielle aujord’hui” (1965; rev. 1994). The second section, “American Music,” shows Carter struggling not only with the idea of what an American music might be but also with his attempts to forge such a music. He is particularly insightful about differences between the social contexts in which American and European composers work and how they affect musical production and consumption. Essays in the third category, “Charles Ives,” demonstrate Carter’s great respect and occasional love for Ives’s music, while at the same time showing his uneasiness with Ives’s often impenetrable textures. Correctly, the essays chronicle the occasional rocky events in Ives’s and Carter’s personal and professional encounters.

The fourth section, “Some Other Composers,” includes essays on Fauré, Debussy, Stravinsky, Varèse, Steuermann, Piston, Sessions, Wolpe, Petrassi, Babbitt, Boulez, and the little-known composer Henry F. Gilbert. The fifth section, “Life and Work,” presents essays in which Carter reflects on his own musical practices. Many of these essays are program notes; others are extended philosophical and theoretical contributions that emerge from Carter’s own compositional concerns. The inclusion of such well-known essays as “Shop Talk by an American Composer” (1960) and “Music and the Time Screen” (1976) is questionable, since some of the lesser-known essays cover the same topics and the result is considerable repetition. Bernard might well have decided not to include these essays, since they are easily available.

The sixth and final section, “Philosophy, Criticism, and the Other Arts,” is a “grab bag” category, including essays on a great variety of topics: dance, film, poetry, Soviet music, among others. Some of the essays which fall, apparently, in the domain of philosophy and criticism present ideas that have occurred in earlier essays.

Taken together with the duplication of essays in the Stones' collection, this internal repetition raises questions about the goals of Bernard's volume. If one assumes that readers will pick and choose among the essays, then internal repetition will be minimized. But if the essays were chosen as representative of Carter's thought, as the topical organization suggests, then the decision to include essays with substantial overlap of content is problematic.

Despite these questions, the essays provide insight into Carter’s technical and aesthetic concerns as well as documentary evidence about musical practices and ideas in American concert traditions. Carter’s commentary reveals mid-century attitudes toward musical unity, popular music and jazz in relation to concert music, improvisation, race and its connection to production, and a host of other issues. Scholars can also glean information from what Carter chose not to write about and from the dates of his essays. For instance, he does not write about “Downtown” or West Coast composers but considers only those composers with whom he feels an affiliation. Most of the essays in the collection were written during the years of about 1940 to 1975, a period in which composers were deeply interested in articulating their aesthetic and technical concerns. In contrast, today’s composers seem to write substantially less about their music than did their counterparts of the 1960s and 1970s.

This collection provides a renewed incentive to engage Carter’s music through critical, historical, and analytical terms. It will stimulate further scholarly and critical attention to the music not only of Carter but also of other composers who have continued and transformed the traditions of American concert music.

–State University of New York at Stony Brook

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