|
Elliott Carter: Classics and Beyond
Eliott Carter
"Elliott Carter is one of America's most distinguished creative artists in any field," said Aaron Copland in nominating Mr. Carter for the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Eminence in Music in 1971.
Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the first composer to receive the U.S. National Medal of Arts, one of only four composers ever awarded Germany's Ernst Von Siemens Music Prize, and made "Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" by the government of France, Elliott Carter is internationally recognized as a pre-eminent American voice in the classical music tradition.
Centurion Carter was the subject of recent documentaries by London Weekend Television and the Netherlands Broadcasting Corporation. He celebrated his 80th birthday on December 11, 1988 to the accompaniment of salutes from around the world, culminating in December with the U.S. premiere of his recently completed Oboe Concerto. Concurrently, Mr. Carter's complete vocal/chamber works, string quartets, Penthode (for chamber orchestra) and ballet The Minotaur were recorded.
Encouraged toward a musical career by his friend Charles Ives, Mr. Carter was first honored by the Pulitzer committee in 1960 for his daring string quartet composition, and was thereafter hailed by Stravinsky for his Double Concerto (1967), which Stravinsky dubbed "a masterpiece." His second Pulitzer Prize came in 1973 for String Quartet No. 3. Mr. Carter's Concerto for Orchestra (1969) and Symphony for Three Orchestras (1977), introduced and recorded by Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez, received universal acclaim.
Mr. Carter's extensive writings on new music, found in the periodical "Modern Music" and in several published collections, have had a significant impact in shaping American musical thought. Together with Ives he developed a compositional method of "continual variation" to supplant formal expectations, to keep the listener caught up in the moment-to-moment evolution of the music.
Another characteristic technique is his incorporation of an almost inconceivably detailed knowledge of the sound and playing technique of the instruments for which he is writing, allowing this knowledge to help shape the musical material. Carter's compositions include stage, orchestral, choral and vocal works, and a particularly rich and varied collection of chamber and instrumental works.
(Adapted from liner notes for GM Recordings GM2020CD and Neuma Records 450-88)
Sonata for Piano and Cello (1948)
Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1852)
...out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the midday air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur
Merely in living as and where we live.
In prefacing a chapter about my music with this quotation from Wallace Stevens, Wilfrid Mellers, author of Music in a New Found Land, draws attention to some of the main aims of my work. It is quite true that I have been concerned with contrasts of many kinds of musical characters -- "many selves"; with forming these into poetically evocative combinations -- "many sensuous worlds"; with filling musical time and space by a web of continually changing cross references -- "the air...swarming with ...changes." And to me, at least, my music grows "out of what one sees and hears and out/Of what one feels," out of what occurs "Merely in living as and where we live."
The two Sonatas heard tonight are examples of this, since they treat of "metaphysical changes." For they were written during a time (1945-55) when I was preoccupied with the time-memory patterns of music, with rethinking the rhythmic means of what had begun to seem a very limited routine used in most contemporary and older Western music. I has taken up again an interest in Indian talas, the Arabic durub, the "tempi" of Balinese gamelans (especially the accelerating Gangsar and Rangkep), and studied the newer recordings of African music, that of the Watusi in particular. At the same time, the music of the early quattrocentro, of Scriabin, Ives, and the techniques described in Cowell's New Musical Resources also furnished me with many ideas. The result was a way of evolving rhythms and rhythmic continuities, sometimes called "metric modulation," worked out during the composition of the Cello Sonata (1948) and further developed in the harpsichord sonata.
To sketch briefly another part of the background of these works (although they are to be considered primarily for themselves and not in relation to their time or composer): I became interested in music as a boy through the exciting early works of Stravinsky, Bartok, Varese, and others. Later, while a music student in the late '20s and early '30s, the contemporary fashion changed and the latest thing -- like, perhaps, live electronic music today -- was the neo-classic revolt against the expressive and primitivist of the previous period. Music was to be anti-individualistic, to sound almost machine-made, and to use bits of "everyday music,", pop, Baroque -- anything that could be denatured into the cool, depersonalized character so much sought after. I found both directions increasingly unsatisfactory, and a return to older, "common-practice" music out of the question, so I took the steps described above.
Naturally any serious concern with rhythm, time, and memory must include the shaping of music, and I began to question the familiar methods of presentation and continuation, of so-called "musical logic," based on the statement of themes and their development. Certain older works, particularly those of Debussy, suggested a different direction. In considering change, process, evolution as music's prime factor, I found myself in direct opposition to the static repetitiveness of most early 20th-century music, against the squared off articulation of the neo-classics and, indeed, against much of what is written today in which "first you do this for a while, then you do that." I wanted to mix up "this" and "that," make them interact in other ways than by linear succession. Too, I questioned the inner shape of "this" and "that" -- of musical ideas -- as well as their degrees of linking or non-linking. Musical discourse needed as thorough a rethinking as harmony had at the beginning of the century.
These two sonatas are, then, steps along the way from a prevalent neo-classicism toward a freer, more vital and sensitive musical language. Both relate to their time and also look forward. The Cello Sonata uses bits of pop, but manipulates these in a way that produces the special rhythmic handling characteristic of most of my subsequent music. The Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952) ends with another kind of "everyday music" -- a Venetian gondolier's dance, the forlana -- but draws out of the characteristic rhythmic cell of that dance all sorts of rhythmic changes, a continuity which only later was to become widely used. Both works are also prophetic in that, encouraged, perhaps, by the example of Debussy's last sonatas, they avoid classical development, use sonority as an item of musical thought, and aim for a fluid changeable continuity. The later sonata starts its slow movement with a one-note theme, continuing the idea of my one-note piece in the Eight Etudes and a Fantasy of 1949.
Sonata for 'cello and piano
When I was asked in 1947 to write a work for the American cellist Bernard Greenhouse, I immediately began to consider the relation of the cello and piano, and came to the conclusion that since there were such great differences in expression and sound between them, there was no point in concealing these as had usually been done in works of the sort. Rather it could be meaningful to make these very differences one of the points of the piece. So the opening Moderato presents the cello in its warm expressive character, playing a long melody in rather free style, while the piano percussively marks a regular clock-like ticking. This in interrupted in various ways, probably (I think) to situate it in a musical context that indicated that the extreme disassociation between the two is neither a matter of random or indifference but to be heard as having an intense, almost fateful character.
The Vivace, a breezy treatment of a type of pop music, verges on a parody of some Americanizing colleagues of the time. Actually it makes explicit the undercurrent of jazz technique suggested in the previous movement by the freely performed melody against a strict rhythm. The following Adagio is a long, expanding, recitative-like melody for the cello, all its phrases interrelated by metric modulations. The finale, Allegro, like the second movement based on pop rhythms, is a free rondo with numerous changes of speed that end up by returning to the beginning of the first movement with the roles of the cello and piano reversed.
As I have said, the idea of metrical modulation came to me while writing this piece, and its use becomes more elaborated from the second movement on. The first movement, written last after the concept had been quite thoroughly explored, presents one of the piece's basic ideas: the contrast between psychological time (in the cello) and the chronometric time (in the piano), their combination producing musical or "virtual" time. The whole is one large motion in which all the parts are interrelated in speed and often in idea; even the breaks between movements are slurred over. That is: at the end of the second movement, the piano predicts the notes and speed of the cello's opening of the third, while the cello' conclusion of the third predicts in a similar way the piano's opening of the fourth, and this movement concludes with a return to the beginning in a circular way like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord
The Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord was commissioned by the Harpsichord Quartet of New York and uses the instruments of which that ensemble was composed. My idea was to stress as much as possible the vast and wonderful array of tone-colors available on the modern harpsichord (the large Pleyel, for which this was first written, produces 36 different colors, many of which can be played in pairs, one for each hand). The three other instruments are treated for the most part as a frame for the harpsichord. This aim of using the wide variety of the harpsichord involved many tone-colors which can only be produced very softly and therefore conditioned very drastically the type and range of musical expression, all the details of shape, phrasing, rhythm, texture, as well as the large form. At that time (in 1952, before the harpsichord had made its way into pop) it seemed very important to have the harpsichord speak in a new voice, expressing characters unfamiliar to its extensive Baroque repertory.
The music starts, Risoluto, with a splashing dramatic gesture whose subsiding ripples form the rest of the movement. The Lento is an expressive dialogue between the harpsichord and the others with an undercurrent of fast music that bursts out briefly near the end. The Allegro, with its gondolier's dance fading into other dance movements, is cross-cut like a movie -- at times it superimposes one dance on another.
Elliott Carter (Notes adapted from the liner notes for Nonesuch H-71234)
Esprit rude/Esprit doux (1985)
Esprit rude/Esprit doux was composed for the celebration of Pierre Boulez's 60th birthday on March 31, 1985, commissioned by the Southwest German Radio. The title, translated as "rough breathing/smooth breathing," refers to the pronunciation of classical Greek words beginning with a vowel. With esprit rude (rough breathing) the initial vowel is to be preceded by a sounded H, and is indicated by a reverse comma above the letter. With esprit doux (smooth breathing) the initial vowel is not to be preceded by H and is indicated by a comma above the vowel. In the Greek for "sixtieth year" (transliterated as hexekoston etos) the initial epsilon of the first word has a rough breathing sign while the epsilon of the second has a smooth one.
The score begins and ends with the motto: B flat C A E B (O) U L E (Z) t a using both the French and German names of the notes. Both instruments have some rough and some smooth breathing.
Enchanted Preludes
Enchanted Preludes, for flute and cello, was commissioned by Harry Santen for the 50th birthday of his wife Anne Santen, the musical director of Cincinnati's public radio station WGUC, who has supported new American music for many years. This fantasy duet contrasts the flute with the cello in playful moments. Each instrument, while maintaining its own musical personality, follows its own moods and logic. The title is a quotation from Wallace Stevens:
"Time. . . the enchantered space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place."
Henry Cowell, Quartet for flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord (1954)
Henry Cowell -- virtuoso pianist, composer in an immense variety of styles -- was also the founding editor of the New Music Edition, publishing scores in the 20s and 30s that no other publisher would risk. Cowell was a colleague of Elliott Carter on a number of projects, among them sorting and clarifying many of the scores of Charles Ives during the illness that preceded his death. In 1940, Carter wrote about Cowell's work: "The same program brought out several works by the many-sided Henry Cowell, which represent largely his consonant efforts to meet the audience with diatonic melodies of a lyrical nature. Cowell's work always has some special distinguishing character that is due as a rule to the extremes to which he goes in putting his ideas into practice. The attempt to reach the audience has made his music simpler, more diatonic, and clearer than that of almost any other composer moving in the same direction. However, he does avoid musical obviousness, and there is something fresh and new about his work ..."
Goffredo Petrassi, Tre per sette
Total ornamentation, achieving formal results of notable "statisticity", shows Petrassi nimbly overstepping his generation in Estri for 15 performers (1966-67) and in Tre per sette (1967) in which three performers play seven wind instruments (flute with piccolo and G flute, oboe with English horn and B-flat clarinet with small E-flat clarinet). It should be carefully noted that we are not, here, in the presence of a desire for "up-to-dateness"!
Petrassi has always rejected types of appropriation divorced from their necessary internal assimilation: he represents, in the music of contemporary Italy, the most striking example of a composer who composes his own compositional existence. We are acquainted with no others, even in transalpine Europe, but we could point out many who might benefit from this example.
We are not faced, in other words, with chromatic, athematic, structuralistic, or aformal models - Petrassi's journey follows no path, nor does it leave tracks; his, on the contrary, is a slow changing of thought, which finds in the increasingly radical reenunciation of "image" the vibrant gesture evoked by that which, in compositional experience, is offered by the interior visualization, as unfitting as it may seem, of the ineffable. Whether joyous, distracted, euphoric or depressed, Petrassi's thought moves among the wreckage of music (his diatonic recollections are no longer relicts of the chromatic) with the total lucidity which allows him to continue to expound his gestures, those difficult-to-analyze symbols of an interior monologue of which we are given to appreciate only the admirable surface. In this monologue, impossible to verbalize but closely bound to the sign of sound, Petrassi, with tenacious perseverance, finds the pathways of detachment, of impersonalized identity, where writing is a figure before becoming a word and a sign before becoming figure. He guides us to - or better still, indicates with slight motions - those pathways which lead to the threshold of silence, but also affirms - unequalled by any other - the impassability of this threshold..
-- Franco Donatoni
March 5, 1997 8 PMChrist & St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, 122 West 69th Street
DA CAPO WHIRLS AND SPIRALS
Notes on the Program
LOUIS KARCHIN
LOUIS KARCHIN (born in Philadelphia in 1951) received his musical training at the Eastman School of Music and Harvard University, with additional study at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. His works have been performed throughout the United States, Europe, and in the Far East, and recognition has included prizes and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the NEA, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Jerome and Copland Foundations, among others. Current projects include an orchestral work commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, and a new cycle of songs based on poetry of the Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Mr. Karchin's music is published by C.F. Peters Corporation and the American Composers Alliance. A CD of four of his works, including Galactic Folds, has just been released by CRI.
Mr. Karchin is Co-director of the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, and is a conductor of the Chamber Players of the League-ISCM. He is Associate Professor of Music in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University.
Mr. Karchin writes:
Galactic Folds was commissioned by the Griffin Ensemble of Boston, and composed in the spring and summer of 1992. Its composition was aided by deeply appreciated grants from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and the Research Challenge Fund of New York University. It received simultaneous 1994 premieres in Boston by Griffin, at Wellesley College's Houghton Chapel, and in San Francisco by the Earplay Ensemble. The New York premiere took place at Merkin Hall in 1995 on a concert by the New York New Music Ensemble.
My first ideas for the piece suggested a two-movement "slow - fast" format; in the end, two movements did evolve, but they might be more aptly described as "introverted" versus "extroverted." Each movement's opening music is transformed and recapitulated several times, although the last movement has more of the spirit of a traditional "rondo" than the first one.
I would not advise reading too much into the work's title. On a day which -- in the context of the piece -- a major ompositional breakthrough occurred, I happened to come across an article describing a significant scientific breakthrough -- the discovery of ripples -- or folds on the outer edges of our galaxy. The conjuring of a vision of peaceful galaxies quietly, but purposefully, rippling through space, seemed to focus the final details of the work's first movement. The title thus acknowledges a debt to a quite different field of exploration.
Galactic Folds is about 20 minutes in length; the first movement is about twice the length of the second.
STEFAN WOLPE
"Comet-like radiance, conviction, fervent intensity, penetrating thought on many levels of seriousness and humor, combined with breathtaking adventurousness and originality marked the inner and outer life of STEFAN WOLPE, as they do his compositions... The force of his artistic personality, motivated as it was by deep conviction and by an innately original way of doing things, occasionally seem utterly unconcerned with prudence and caution, yet frequently what he did turned out to be the only right way of acting." Thus did Elliott Carter write of Stefan Wolpe in his memorial testimony in Perspectives of New Music in 1972.
Wolpe was born in Germany, studied briefly with Anton Webern in Vienna (in 1933, after fleeing Germany), then spent four years in Palestine during the tumultuous period before World War II. In 1938 he came to the United States, teaching first in New York and Philadelphia, later at Black Mountain College (where he once walked out of a concert of John Cage's), and
eventually at C.W. Post College of Long Island University.
Piece in Two Parts for Violin Alone
This work, dedicated to the violinist Max Polikoff, was composed in 1964. The two-part format occurs frequently in late Wolpe, and in this case the two movements are differentiated by various elements: In the first, the tempo fluctuates throughout and juxtaposed gestures are often highly differentiated, as are modes of sound production; in the second, a single tempo is maintained throughout and the degree of contrast between gesstures is slighter.
Thus the first part of the violin piece is more like Form (a piano piece of Wolpe's) and the second part has a greater affinity with Form IV. (Taken as a set, the two piano pieces may be thought of as one complete two-part work, analogous to the solo violin piece.) In a general sense, the first part is more quixotic, the second more stable. At the same time the second part, with its faster pulse and generally quicker movement through different registers is, in several senses, faster-paced that the first. Thus the second part functions both to stabilize and accelerate, and this unlikely combination of effects indicates something of the subtlety and idiosyncracy of Wolpe's conception in the late works.
CHRISTOPHER ROUSE
Born in Baltimore in 1949, CHRISTOPHER ROUSE counts among his mentors two of America's most intensely expressive composers, George Crumb (with whom he studied privately), and Karel Husa, his teacher at Cornell during the 1970s. He also studied with Robert Palmer, a rigorous structuralist. Thus one finds a strong sense of order in Rouse's music, a formal awareness that tempers an essentially subjective temperament. He is currently a Professor at the Eastman School of Music. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his Trombone Concerto, and his Symphony No. 1 won the Friedheim award. He has received commissions from League of Composers, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and Barlow and Guggenheim Foundations, among others.
Mr. Rouse writes:
Rotae Passionis ("Passion Wheels") was commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva and was completed in Baltimore, Maryland on January 1, 1983. It received its first performance by the Boston Musica Viva under Richard Pittman's direction on April 8, 1983.
I have always been fascinated by the artwork of Northern Renaissance painters, particularly when dealing with the Crucifixion. Artists such as Bosch and Grunewald took a much more human (sometimes even horrific) approach to the subject that did the great Italian Renaissance painters, who on some occasions made the Crucifixion seem almost more of a joyous event that a cause for grief and anguish. It was this human view of the Passion story as detailed by German and Flemish artists -- the Via Dolorosa and Crucifixion of Christ the man rather that Christ the Son of God -- which I hoped to elaborate upon in my piece.
The word "rotae" is used because the materials are stated and developed (as well as repeated) in a circular fashion. Rotae Passionis divides itself into three large sections. The first, "Circular Lament -- The Agony in the Garden" is scored for clarinet (a sort of "vox Christi") and percussion and details the final moments of freedom for Christ in the Garden of Gethsemene in an Expressionistic manner. It is followed by Part II -- the actual "passion wheels" themselves in an almost cinematic interpretation built around the Fourteen Stations of the Cross: Jesus is condemned to death; Jesus receives the Cross; He falls; He meets His mother; Saint Simon of Cyrene carries the Cross; Saint Veronica wipes His face; He falls again; The women of Jerusalem weep for him; He falls a third time; He is stripped of his clothes; He is nailed to the Cross; He dies; His body is taken down from the Cross; His body is laid in the tomb. The effect for which I was striving was of the listener being strapped to a pew in a church and being forced to watch a slide presentation of each Station flashing by, with each change of slide symbolized by an immense wooden hammer blow.
The final part, "Parallel Wheel -- Christ Asleep," has almost the character of a lullaby, and it ends the work in a contemplative, quiet tone. Thus the score may be said to represent a three-day period (Thursday night, Friday morning and afternoon, and Saturday), without a Resurrection.
Rotae Passionis is dedicated to the memory of Carl Orff, who died as the early mental sketches for the music were being made. The "wheel" concept was borrowed from the "Wheel of Fate" imagery which begins and concludes Carmina Burana, and my work's opening bass drum motive is a paraphrase of the O-Daiko motive which is heard at the beginning of Orff's Prometheus.
|
