Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,711

This is the grave of Elliott Carter.

Born in 1908 in New York, Elliott Carter, Jr. grew up quite wealthy. His father, Elliott Carter, Sr., ran a profitable lace business. They mostly lived in Europe and Carter learned French before English. His origin story in music is absolutely bizarre. His family had moved back to New York and he played a little piano, nothing much. But the Carters had an insurance salesman by the name of Charles Ives, who spent all his time when not working in insurance writing compositions. He urged the boy to work harder at his music and said he thought there was real promise there. In 1922, Carter wrote to Ives about his progress. Ives continued mentoring him. Then in 1924, Carter saw an early New York performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. This changed his life, like it changed the lives of so many music fans in the 1920s.

Ives introduced Carter to basically everyone, as they would go to concerts and then afterparties together. So by the time Carter went to Harvard in 1926, he was already extremely advanced in knowledge of composition. In fact, he found a lot of the music courses there boring since he already knew more than the teachers did, at least about the modern movement that interested him so much. He graduated, did a master’s there that he finished in 1932, and headed to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. He worked with her until 1935.

Still, it took Carter a good long time to become an important composer. He came back to New York, got married, and taught music at St. John’s College in Annapolis during World War II, while also doing work for the Office of War Information. His first reasonably important work was the Piano Sonata of 1945-46. But mostly in these years, Carter taught–Peabody Conservatory, Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Juillard. He also became Ives’ editor in the 50s, shortly before the great composer died after approximately a zillion heart attacks. It wasn’t really until the early 50s that he started composing consistently and doing the work that would make him famous. This is an interesting contradiction with Ives, who was tremendously productive as a young man and then composed basically nothing in the last 20 years of his life. In 1950, Carter went to Tucson for a year. There he composed String Quartet No. 1, widely considered his first major piece. He had trouble getting it performed, which did not happen until a 1953 premier at Columbia. It went on to win a big award in Belgium, which included its playing in Europe and he started to gain an international reputation.

Then came Variations for Orchestra, a 24 minute piece written between 1953 and 1955 and debuted by the Louisville Orchestra in 1956. This really cemented his reputation. Today this is considered one of his most important pieces. A 1998 Washington Post piece described it this way:

As with so much of Carter’s later music, this work is based on clashes of musical opposites. The “theme” in these variations is augmented by two equally significant but dramatically different motifs. One occasionally has the sensation that all of the variations are being played at once; the mind focuses on the slow diminution of one passage and the sudden importance of another, as if a world were changing before one’s ears.

I love this stuff. What I don’t love is the romantic music of earlier eras. I mean, it’s fine, I have a bit of it, but I rarely would choose to listen to something from the 18th century that just doesn’t impact me personally. Rather, Carter and other modernists represent the clashing of the modern world through music, the same way that jazz composers such as Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman brought the modern city into that type of modern music and which sounds continue to influence people such as William Parker and John Zorn today. At the same time, Carter could be slow and relatively limited in notes, also replicated in much of modern jazz.

After this, Carter became more productive. His work became part of the American canon, even if the fuddy duddies didn’t like all that dissonance. Older pieces such as 1948’s Cello Sonata became recognized as the great pieces they were. Newer pieces still took him a long time to write, but they challenged musicians like few others. I am going to just quote from his Times obit here because I can’t describe this system any better than it does:

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.

As he aged, Carter became much more productive and by the 80s, churned out multiple works a year. Some of these later works combined a bit more lyricism with the dissonance, such as The Oboe Concerto, from 1987, and The Violin Concerto, from 1990. This composer, so dismissive of opera for most of his career, finally wrote one, What Next? in 1998, which Daniel Barenboim debuted as a conductor.

Of course, the awards came pouring in over the years. Carter won the Pulitzer twice, for Second String Quartet in 1960 and Third String Quartet in 1973. He won the National Medal of Arts in 1985 and in 2012, the French named him Commander of the Legion of Honor.

Carter remained both incredibly productive and incredibly healthy until the very end of his extremely long life. He attended his 100th birthday party, where Barenboim played piano on Interventions for Piano and Orchestra. He was in English at the Aldeburgh Festival for the 2009 premier of his song cycle On Conversing with Paradise. In 2012, he wrote a piece for Barenboim’s 70th birthday, Dialogues II.

Carter kept writing every single day until the very end. His last original piece, The American Sublime, appeared later in 2012. He had died shortly before, at the age of 103.

There’s much more to say about Carter, and some of you unquestionably know his deep history better than I do, but let’s stop it here and listen to some of his work.

Elliott Carter is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other American composers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Samuel Barber is in West Goshen, Pennsylvania and Charles Ives is in Danbury, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.