Elliott Carter: A Challenging Composer

Elliott Carter, one of America's foremost contemporary composers, prefers that attention be focused on his music rather than on himself. Always the individual, he writes music for individuals rather than for instruments. In this issue of the Review, he discusses his views on contemporary music with members of the Composers String Quartet. Carter's Pulitzer Prize winning String Quartet no. 3 and his Eight Etudes and a Fantasy are available on streaming services worldwide.

CSQ: To begin with, to which historical figure in music, prior to 1900, do you feel the closest affinity? I mean, if you were reincarnated back in history, which composer would you prefer to have been?

EC: As a composer, Mozart is certainly the one I would have liked to have been, not because of his 18th-century style, but because of his wide range of expression. I would not have liked to be Mozart, the man - his life was, very troubled.

CSQ: Have you ever thought of any period of your music as avant-garde?

EC: I thought that my music has always been very advanced from the very first note I ever wrote!

CSQ: Then perhaps the second part of the question is not necessary. Have you ever considered yourself a revolutionary figure in music?

EC: I think a serious composer can't help but be a revolutionary because if he is any good he is bound to be personal and original and hence, new.

CSQ: Do you find your musical ideas being taken up by other composers in the way that Bartok, Webern, and Stravinsky, etc., were 30 years ago?

EC: My music has influenced quite a number of young people. It disturbs me, however, because I feel they don't really understand what I am doing, but follow my work's more superficial aspects - that's disappointing.

CSQ: You're being appreciated for the wrong reasons.

EC: I'm afraid I often think that.

CSQ: Do you have any major regrets in terms of the way you have gone about practicing your art?

EC: I do have one major regret, and it's a continual one. I am always sorry that my pieces are often so hard to play, at least on first acquaintance. Each time I've finished one, I decide to write the next in an easier style, but as I get into it I find my feelings and musical ideas leading to performing difficulties. These difficulties are not intentional but are an integral part of the concept of the music and many performers and listeners find the result engrossing. I could, of course, write easy pieces but so far I have not come up with musical ideas that satisfied and excited me enough to bother writing them down.

CSQ: I heard James Joyce's sister on a radio broadcast say that when he was very sick and just before he died, someone asked him what kind of stuff he would write if he wrote anymore and he said after he thought for a minute that he would write something very, very simple. Do you think you will feel that way?

EC: I think I have always said that to myself, but when I come to write it, the score doesn't turn out that way, because my feelings and interests don't lead me in that direction.

CSQ: Are you incorrigible?

EC: I don't think you would want me to write a boring, pointless but simple piece, and so I suppose one could say this is an incorrigible situation. I sympathize with the amount of rehearsals you have devoted to my quartets -- I hope that you have not felt that this effort was useless.

CSQ: What would you have done differently in pursuing your musical career had you known what you know now?

EC: I don't even know what I know now. I can't really tell what I would have done because each year brings a different perspective on everything. The only way I think I should have led my career differently is to have remained even more anonymous than I am. I don't like to be a public figure. I have written my music to interest other people and like to stay home and compose and not be bothered by all the public appearances which seem to be part of the profession, yet I finally feel that I owe my music my public appearances.

CSQ: I guess then you answered this next question. Do you feel stimulated by the works of your contemporaries or would you just as soon go your own way and not be distracted?

EC: Oh, I'm very interested in what everybody does. I am stimulated certainly to a certain extent by the works of -- well, in 75 years of life I've had a lot of different contemporaries, and have certainly been stimulated by contemporaries in the beginning of my life, less now than I was at one time, certainly - Bartok, Stravinsky, Ives, and Schonberg. All of these composers gave me all sorts of ideas, none of which I used directly, but I have sort of formed a background and I think that some of my music is not completely intelligible except to an audience that has some familiarity with contemporary music.

CSQ: Do you find that world events, even in a far-fetched way, have any bearings at all on the psychology of your music or how you go about it?

EC: I can't say that world events had a conscious effect, but I certainly see in looking back over my life that politics and world events of all kinds have had quite intense effects on my music in one way or another. I mean the very conception of this Third Quartet is in some sense a political conception. It was a conception of a kind of democratic view of music in which the individuals that contribute to this are separated out and made into individuals and not all stepping together as they do in older music, and part of this is a picture of an attempt to free musical performances and give an impression of each performer as an individualized character, which I feel is more democratic, and this is certainly an idea that has been in my mind for many years.

CSQ: Your Third Quartet can only be described as a "blockbuster," and for density of notes and exploitation of the instruments, the only other piece that comes to mind is the great fugue at the end of the Beethoven Quartet, op. 130. Do you feel any such connection or continuing with the past, or do you feel your music is entirely new and a radical departure from all that has preceeded you?

EC: Well, you can't be that new if you're using a string quartet. After all, the limitations of playing string instruments is special, and I'm writing a piece that depends on the performers of string instruments to play the piece and therefore I don't try to make them do certain things. I don't expect them to tear their violin or cello apart or do other kinds of things that might be more amusing to some people, but boring to me. On the other hand, I think that the originality of my music or the novelty of it and the advanced quality is not in this rather simple-minded view of music, but in the way the whole piece is put together. As you said, the whole concept of these two duos playing against each other and the way we hear one kind of music contrasted with the other one simultaneously is really a very novel idea. It's a little perhaps like some moments in Mozart's operas where there are many characters singing at once, or in Verdi's operas, like at the end of Aida. Those ideas came from that, but they have never really been applied in a thorough-going way that I have to instrumental music.

CSQ: Is music today in danger of taking a back seat to the sciences as some people claim in the expression of today's cultures?

EC: I don't think music is taking any more of a back seat to the sciences today than it did in any other time. I mean it has always been a special field of interest and endeavor which is sup­ported by people who are very devoted to music and it was never a very enormously large public. Beethoven, I suppose, was a very successful composer, but his public probably didn't amount to more than a couple thousand people, not more than most contemporary composers, maybe fewer than most contemporary composers, have as an audience.

CSQ: Was the legendary influence of Nadia Boulanger on so many American composers exaggerated? Do you feel your development as a young composer was influenced by her teaching?

EC: I think Nadia Boulanger was very important, particularly to people of my generation and before, because she was the only teacher at that time, outside of Schonberg, who took contemporary music seriously and really showed what it was that was interesting in the works of Stravinsky, and even in the early days before I went there, of composers like Bartok and Alban Berg. By the time I studied with her in the 1930s, she was less interested in the middle­European composers. It was the time of the rise of Hitler and she was rather unfriendly to German things in general, but she was very, very interested in the music of Stravinsky and was able to be very lucid about why the music like The Rite of Spring had a special quality and was able to show us many things about this. There was no other teacher that I came in contact with at that time that could do that, and she was really very informative. Of course, as time went on, many people began to be able to do this, but she was one of the first to be able to really analyze contemporary music and make it something that students could learn from.

CSQ: The young person today who wants to be a serious composer is facing a different set of problems than you did as a young student. What is your advice today to a young person who wants to be a composer?

EC: Well it's a very hard thing. I think in our kind of society that a composer has to follow what he likes.and what he thinks is important to do. It is a very hard kind of a life to be a com­poser. It's full of uncertainty, a very difficult public reception. It is uncertain in all sorts of dif­ferent ways and as a result a composer better be pretty sure of what he wants to do and what he likes. You can't give any more advice than that. I find it strange that composers want to repeat older music like Brahms or Mahler at the present time because I was brought up myself to write in that style as a young student, and I find that young people who try to do that now, having learned how to write like Bart6k or Schonberg, go back to this without the real knowledge of how to do this and they do it rather poorly and it discourages me a lot.

CSQ: We know that you have plans to write a fourth string quartet. In 25 words or less, what will it be like?

EC: I wish I could tell you - I can't even tell you in one word. It will be very good, that is the answer!

CSQ: And simple, hopefully.

EC: We hope simple!

CSQ: Would you comment on the role of the critic today?

EC: I think one of the problems the critics are always bringing up is the composer's relation­ship to the public and why he writes music that either the public doesn't understand or like, or why he writes music that the public does like. The critics nowadays, more than in any other time during my life, are really like consumer advocates; that is, they are simply selling what they think the public will be most likely to like. As far as I can see, contemporary music is treated by the public, at least in this country and in many other places too, as a novelty, and it really doesn't matter what style a composer writes in. It would be played once or twice or three times in any given place and if there's even a little bit of interest it will be played in many different places once or twice and then they will have had the novelty and they will go on to something else. As a result, the contemporary meaning of music as it has been written in the 20th century is something that is not in competition with older music. It is simply like a little of paprika on a concert and as far as I can see the attempt to write for the· public is a misguided one at the present time because the public really doesn't want to hear any 20th-century music, whether it sounds like Brahms or whether it sounds like Xenakis, and this is a disturb­ing thing that young composers don't realize, and I think that as far as I can see it works like that all the time.

CSQ: Do you think the idea that a composer is ahead of his time can be taken literally, or is it simply that the composer is dragging the rest of the people with him?,

EC: I think the composer makes the channel of history, that is, the composer will be ahead of his time only because the music that he has written is interesting enough to interest people for quite a while, until many more people gradually catch up to it and understand it, and this represents a very complicated kind of social thing. Largely, at least as I see it, composers first interest the performers and his colleagues. Then finally colleagues and performers com­municate their enthusiasm for the work to the public by performances such as your quartet has given my Third Quartet.