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Elliott Carter
Nov. 6th, 2012 11:21 amWell, I didn't think he'd last for ever, so the news is not too unexpected that Elliott Carter died yesterday in New York. By my calculations, he was five weeks and a day short of his 104th birthday.
I first heard of Carter about 40 years ago when he was interviewed on Radio 3. One thing that fascinated me was that as a teenager, he had been befriended by Charles Ives, the pioneering American composer whose music I had recently discovered and possibly my all-time favourite composer.
Ives's day job was running an insurance agency and in an interview I saw Carter give a few years ago, he recalled how Ives had sold his father an insurance policy. Carter's father hated music and when he found out Ives was also a musician, he cancelled the policy.
In that same interview, Carter recalled going to the New York premiere of Berg's opera Wozzeck, a concert performance Stokowski had brought up from Philadelphia. Sitting next to him was George Gershwin.
Throughout the seventies and eighties, I got to many concerts in London of Carter's works, often with the composer present. When the Royal Festival Hall in London celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1976, the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed Carter's Piano Concerto, followed by The Vision of St. Augustine by Sir Michael Tippett, another of my musical heroes. Sitting in the row behind be were both Carter and Tippett.
Bizarrely, as he got older he seemed to get more prolific. He wrote his first opera when he was ninety. A couple of years later, someone asked him in an interview if he could explain this sudden outpouring. He said he'd been composing so long, it was now second nature to him and he at last knew what he was doing.
On the occasion of a 100th birthday concert in London, he introduced the concert on a video recorded in New York. He joked that whereas writers on music often divide composers' output into early, middle and late works, they had now added works that were late-late Carter. And he was still composing then. Wikipedia lists a number of composition written last year and even one dated 2012.
Carter's early music was very much in the style of Copland, his near contemporary. The 1st Symphony is a good example of this. But around the age of about 40, he hit his mature style. His music was rhythmically complex. One set of pieces is for solo tympani and the 3rd String Quartet requires the players to wear headphones playing a click track to enable them to synchronise properly.
A quote from Carter on the radio this morning was that he said when he started, he wrote music to please people and nobody cared, so he started writing music for himself and people then started listening. But at an interview for his 90th birthday concert in Huddersfield, someone in the audience asked him who he wrote for. He said he wrote for his friends the musicians, and if they enjoyed playing it, they'd get an audience.
So, my favourite Carter pieces? There are too many. The song cycle A Mirror on Which to Dwell, is one, the five string quartets, the piano piece Night Fantasies, the Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord, and many, many more.
I first heard of Carter about 40 years ago when he was interviewed on Radio 3. One thing that fascinated me was that as a teenager, he had been befriended by Charles Ives, the pioneering American composer whose music I had recently discovered and possibly my all-time favourite composer.
Ives's day job was running an insurance agency and in an interview I saw Carter give a few years ago, he recalled how Ives had sold his father an insurance policy. Carter's father hated music and when he found out Ives was also a musician, he cancelled the policy.
In that same interview, Carter recalled going to the New York premiere of Berg's opera Wozzeck, a concert performance Stokowski had brought up from Philadelphia. Sitting next to him was George Gershwin.
Throughout the seventies and eighties, I got to many concerts in London of Carter's works, often with the composer present. When the Royal Festival Hall in London celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1976, the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed Carter's Piano Concerto, followed by The Vision of St. Augustine by Sir Michael Tippett, another of my musical heroes. Sitting in the row behind be were both Carter and Tippett.
Bizarrely, as he got older he seemed to get more prolific. He wrote his first opera when he was ninety. A couple of years later, someone asked him in an interview if he could explain this sudden outpouring. He said he'd been composing so long, it was now second nature to him and he at last knew what he was doing.
On the occasion of a 100th birthday concert in London, he introduced the concert on a video recorded in New York. He joked that whereas writers on music often divide composers' output into early, middle and late works, they had now added works that were late-late Carter. And he was still composing then. Wikipedia lists a number of composition written last year and even one dated 2012.
Carter's early music was very much in the style of Copland, his near contemporary. The 1st Symphony is a good example of this. But around the age of about 40, he hit his mature style. His music was rhythmically complex. One set of pieces is for solo tympani and the 3rd String Quartet requires the players to wear headphones playing a click track to enable them to synchronise properly.
A quote from Carter on the radio this morning was that he said when he started, he wrote music to please people and nobody cared, so he started writing music for himself and people then started listening. But at an interview for his 90th birthday concert in Huddersfield, someone in the audience asked him who he wrote for. He said he wrote for his friends the musicians, and if they enjoyed playing it, they'd get an audience.
So, my favourite Carter pieces? There are too many. The song cycle A Mirror on Which to Dwell, is one, the five string quartets, the piano piece Night Fantasies, the Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord, and many, many more.
