NYT: Elliott Carter, Composer of the Avant-Garde, Dies at 103

[Frank Forman]

Elliott Carter, Composer of the Avant-Garde, Dies at 103
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/arts/music/elliott-carter-avant-garde-composer-dies-at-103.html

By ALLAN KOZINN

Elliott Carter, the American composer whose kaleidoscopic,
rigorously organized works established him as one of the most
important and enduring voices in contemporary music, died on Monday
in Manhattan. He was 103 and had continued to compose into his 11th
decade, completing his last piece in August.

His death was announced by Virgil Blackwell, his personal assistant.
Mr. Carter died in his Greenwich Village apartment, which he and his
wife bought in 1945 and where he had lived ever since.

Mr. Carter's music, which brought him dozens of awards, including
two Pulitzer Prizes, could seem harmonically brash and melodically
sharp-edged on the first hearing, but it often yielded drama and
lyricism on better acquaintance. And though complexity and
structural logic were hallmarks of his works, the music he composed
in the decade leading up to his widely celebrated centenary, in
2008, was often more lyrical, if not necessarily softer at the
edges.

Mr. Carter, a protégé of the American modernist Charles Ives,
acknowledged that his works could seem incomprehensible to listeners
who were not grounded in the developments of 20th-century music.
Even trained musicians sometimes regarded his constructions as too
difficult to grasp without intensive study. Yet he had many
advocates among players, and his works were frequently performed and
recorded.

"As a young man, I harbored the populist idea of writing for the
public," he once explained to an interviewer who asked him why he
had chosen to write such difficult music. "I learned that the public
didn't care. So I decided to write for myself. Since then, people
have gotten interested."

Mr. Carter never lacked for commissions from major orchestras,
soloists and chamber groups, and late in life he was able to impose
conditions on those who sought his works. He refused to be held to
deadlines, saying he would release his compositions when he felt
they were ready. And for many years he would not accept commissions
from orchestras that had not played his earlier music.

Long before he began enforcing that rule, however, many of Mr.
Carter's works had found their way into the active repertory. In the
mid-1980s, he observed that hardly a year went by without at least
one New York performance of his Double Concerto for Harpsichord and
Piano With Two Chamber Orchestras (1961). His Cello Sonata (1948) is
considered one of this century's finest additions to that
instrument's repertory, and his solo keyboard works, the Piano
Sonata (1946) and "Night Fantasies" (1980), are performed regularly
and have been recorded several times.

Mr. Carter continued to explore new ground into his later years. He
avoided opera for most of his career because, as he put it in 1978,
"American opera is a novelty, to be played once and that's all, even
when they're good pieces," and because he doubted he could find a
libretto that interested him. Yet when he was 90 he completed his
first opera, "What Next?"

The opera, with a Dadaistic libretto by Paul Griffiths, a former
music critic for The New York Times, had its premiere in 1999 at the
Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden, with Daniel Barenboim
conducting. It had its American premiere in a concert version at
Carnegie Hall in 2000 and its first staged performance in the United
States at Tanglewood in 2006--an event filmed and released on DVD.

As Mr. Carter's centenary neared, the frequency with which his music
could be heard only increased, making it clear that for at least two
generations of young performers, even his thorniest works held
little terror. In the summer of 2008, for example, the entire
Festival of Contemporary Music at the Tanglewood Music Center was
devoted to Mr. Carter's work, with performances of dozens of pieces
from every stage of his career (including several premieres). Mr.
Carter attended most of the concerts. There were many such tributes
that year, and the attention unnerved him, he said.

"It's a little bit frightening, because I'm not used to being
appreciated," he said in an onstage interview at Zankel Hall the
night after a celebration with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. "So
when I am, I think I've made a mistake."

Despite his years, he remained vital almost until the end. His last
composition, "12 Short Epigrams," a piano work for Pierre-Laurent
Aimard, was completed on Aug. 13. Another piece, "Instances," for
Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony (commissioned with the
Tanglewood Music Center), was completed in April.

In June, in what Steve Smith, writing in The Times, called a
"miracle of continuing miracles," the New York Philharmonic
performed the premiere of "Two Controversies and a Conversation."
(Mr. Smith called it a "pocket-size double concerto.")

"The applause for Mr. Carter, wheelchair bound but
characteristically animated," Mr. Smith wrote, "resounded
thunderously."

Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was born in Manhattan on Dec. 11, 1908, the
son of a wealthy lace importer. While he was a student at the Horace
Mann School, he wrote an admiring letter to Ives, a New Englander
with a crusty manner who nevertheless responded and urged him to
pursue his interest in music. When Mr. Carter attended Harvard,
starting in 1927, Ives took him under his wing and made sure he went
to the Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts conducted by Serge
Koussevitzky, who programmed contemporary works frequently.

At Harvard, Mr. Carter completed a bachelor's degree in English
before deciding to study composition seriously. He studied with a
group of celebrated teachers, including Walter Piston, Edward
Burlingame Hill and Gustav Holst. He also received advice from Ives,
although their friendship cooled after Mr. Carter made the mistake
of showing Ives some compositions he had written in a neo-Classical
style.

In 1932, after completing his master's degree, Mr. Carter went to
Paris for three years of study with Nadia Boulanger, both privately
and at the École Normale de Musique. While in Paris in 1933, he was
commissioned to write incidental music for a production of
Sophocles' "Philoctetes" at the Harvard Classical Club. The work was
his first to be performed in public.

Mr. Carter returned to the United States in 1935, settling first in
Cambridge, Mass., and then in New York City, where he began writing
criticism for the influential journal Modern Music. In 1937 he began
a two-year term as music director of Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet
Caravan, for which he wrote the ballet "Pocahontas" (1939), a work
with echoes of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" and the residue of an
early interest in the music of the Elizabethan virginalists.

He also wrote incidental music for Orson Welles's Mercury Theater. A
choral work, "To Music," won a 1938 contest sponsored by the Federal
Music Project of the Works Progress Administration.

In 1939 he married Helen Frost-Jones, a sculptor and art critic. She
died in 1998. Their son, David, survives Mr. Carter, as does a
grandson.

Mr. Carter's works of this early period are in neo-Classical and
neo-Romantic styles, their modernism kept in check because, as he
later explained, the acidic experiments of the avant-garde seemed
wrong for a world that was gripped by the Depression. Trying to
write music that would appeal to a wide public, he composed an
amusing setting of "The Siege of Corinth" (1941), to a Rabelais
text, and his First Symphony (1942), an essay in a melodic, almost
pastoral style.

By the mid-1940s Mr. Carter had won several prizes but had made
little headway with the public, and he began to regard his consonant
style as an unrewarding compromise. In the Piano Sonata (1946) and
the Woodwind Quintet (1948), he began writing with a sharper edge,
and in the Cello Sonata he started the investigation of contrasting
materials that remained a fascination. In this case the contrast was
between a freely flowing, lyrical cello line and a disciplined,
almost marchlike piano part.

Desert Interlude

The turning point in Mr. Carter's style came in 1950, when a
Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Institute of
Arts and Letters allowed him to leave a teaching post at Columbia
University and spend a year in southern Arizona, outside Tucson.
During that year in the Sonora Desert he wrote a single 45-minute
work, his First String Quartet.

Recalling his desert sojourn, Mr. Carter said in a 1960 interview:
"I had been waiting for just such an opportunity to give form to a
number of novel ideas I had had over the previous years, and to work
out in an extended composition the character, expression and logic
these ideas seemed to demand. I felt that I was constantly pushing
into an unexplored musical realm."

Internal Oppositions

What he came up with was a process he called "metrical modulation."
Each instrument has a distinct personality and moves at an
independent rhythm. The effect is of a constant change of tempos.
Thereafter, virtually all of Mr. Carter's works were driven by the
tension between independent and starkly contrasting elements.

In the Second String Quartet (1959), for example, each instrument is
given its own distinct vocabulary of intervals and rhythms. In the
Double Concerto of 1961, the piano and harpsichord, each allied to
its own chamber orchestra, speak in languages appropriate to their
timbres. In the first half of the work, the opposing groups move
toward consensus; in the second, they split apart.

Between the 1950s and the late 1970s, Mr. Carter typically spent
several years on each new work and saw every piece as an opportunity
to overcome new challenges, some purely musical and others narrative
and dramatic.

"I just can't bring myself to do something that someone else has
done before," he said in 1960. "Each piece is a kind of crisis in my
life."

Starting in the late 1980s Mr. Carter's production picked up speed,
and by 2005 he was routinely producing streams of works, albeit
short ones, every year, sometimes at the request of musicians who
admired his work and sometimes spontaneously for musicians he
admired.

When asked why his early works took so long to complete, Mr. Carter
explained that his method of composing dictated his speed. "I like
to sound spontaneous and fresh, but my first sketches often sound
mechanical," he said. " I have to write them over until they sound
spontaneous." Many of his scores were completed only after he had
filled thousands of pages with sketches. He meticulously dated and
saved these, an idea he said he got from Igor Stravinsky. Mr. Carter
intensified his use of contrasting forces in works like the Third
String Quartet (1971) and the Symphony of Three Orchestras (1977).
In these compositions the main ensemble is divided into subgroups,
each of which is given a distinct set of movements. The movements
are played simultaneously with those performed by competing groups.
But they are not played in a conventional way, from start to finish.
Instead, the players may be asked to play part of a first movement,
all of a second and part of a third before returning to where they
left off in the first.

In works like "Syringa" (1978), a vocal setting of the poet John
Ashbery's updated version of the Orpheus legend, the internal
oppositions are set forth more clearly. As a mezzo-soprano offers an
understated account of the Ashbery text, a bass vehemently sings
fragments of Greek classical texts.

"I regard my scores as scenarios," Mr. Carter said in 1970, "for the
performers to act out with their instruments, dramatizing the
players as individuals and as participants in the ensemble."

That interest remained with him. His String Quartet No. 5 (1995),
for example, conveys his fascination with a quartet's rehearsal
methods, including the debates between players about phrasing and
coloration. The work is in 12 connected movements, five of which are
interludes that describe the discussions, with one player offering a
phrase from the section just heard and the others responding with
embellishments, humorous turns or consternation.

Some listeners found his music cerebral, elitist and devoid of
emotion. Even some who respected Mr. Carter's erudition and the
detail inherent in his compositional method were unmoved by his
music.

Reviewing the Concerto for Orchestra (1969) when Leonard Bernstein
led the New York Philharmonic in the work's world premiere, Harold
C. Schonberg wrote in The Times, "It may be a tour de force of its
kind, but to me it is essentially uncommunicative, dry and a triumph
of technique over spirit."

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Carter's music began to return to forms that
he had not addressed since the 1940s.

With "A Mirror on Which to Dwell" (1975) and "Syringa," he began
reconsidering the voice, and he continued his exploration in "In
Sleep, in Thunder" (1981) and "Of Challenge and of Love" (1994),
vocal chamber works that in retrospect seemed steps on Mr. Carter's
path to opera.

Around the same time, "Night Fantasies" (1980), an evocative
description of the fleeting states of thought one experiences
between sleep and wakefulness, was the first in a stream of solo
instrumental pieces for guitar, violin, trombone, flute, harp,
clarinet, cello and piano. He also composed a series of concertos
for various instruments, including oboe, violin and clarinet, and a
50-minute orchestral triptych, "Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei."
Indeed, Mr. Carter began composing at a brisk pace in the mid-1980s.
Instead of spending several years writing a single piece, he was
writing a handful of pieces a year.

Moreover, they seemed to reach out to listeners in a way that the
earlier works had not. The Oboe Concerto (1987) and the Violin
Concerto (1990) were decidedly lyrical, even though Mr. Carter's
harmonic language remained essentially dissonant. And in the "Triple
Duo," (1983) the dialogues within and between the three independent
instrumental groups are slyly witty and even overtly comic.

Two Decades, Two Pulitzers

Mr. Carter taught at several American conservatories and colleges,
including the Peabody Conservatory, Queens College, Columbia,
Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Cornell and the Juilliard School.

He was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for his Second String Quartet in 1960
and his Third String Quartet in 1973. A recording of his Violin
Concerto won a Grammy Award for best contemporary composition in
1994.

Among his many awards was the National Medal of Arts, bestowed in
1985. In September, France awarded him the insignia of Commander of
the Legion of Honor. Mr. Carter was elected to the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences in 1963 and to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters in 1969.

Mr. Carter did not seem bothered by objections to the difficulty of
his music, and he expressed confidence that it would eventually be
understood.

"There are many kinds of art," he said in 1978, when asked what he
had to say to concertgoers who felt that great music should have
tunes that could be whistled. "Some kinds are hard to understand for
some people, and easy to understand for others. But if the works are
very good, then finally a lot of people will understand them. And it
seems to me that if a work has something remarkable to say, then
someone who wants to whistle it will find something in it to
whistle. But these things are very subjective.

"Just this morning, I had a call from Ursula Oppens, who is playing
my Piano Concerto. She said, 'I finally know all the tunes in your
concerto.' I said, 'Which tunes are those?' And she whistled one. So
there you are."