Elliott Carter: A Musical Intellect Of The First Order

Surely no composer can have been so showered with honors in his lifetime as has Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. He has twice been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music. He has been granted honorary doctorates by close to a dozen prestigious universities, colleges, and conservatories. He has served on the faculties of St. John's College, Peabody, Columbia, Queens College, Yale, Juilliard, Cornell, and the summer schools at Tanglewood and Dartington. To list the other evidences of high esteem bestowed on him would be to take up the rest of this piece, or very nearly. And all this represents regard for the high quality of his work, for Carter is not an extraordinarily prolific composer: his total output - much of it in small forms -- comes to only about 50 works.

Recently a dissenting voice was heard from a couple of reviewers in Fanfare (Vl:3). John Ditsky, considering recordings of two recent Carter compositions, noted "the apparent imbalance ... - at least on first hearing - between the intellectual and the sensuous aspect of things," adding that in Syringa the "interplay, or clash, of poetries ... must surely require advance preparation for even minimal appreciation." To be sure, Mr. Ditsky (like the present writer) is a professor of English, and can perhaps be forgiven his musical shortcomings.

But in the same issue Paul Snook -- a musician, I believe -- reviewing some early works by Carter, is by no means so circumspect: his article bristles with phrases like "inflated reputation," "extreme inaccessibility," "elitist isolation," "guru of the progressive wing of American music," and "a defiant and almost sado-masochistic urge to unintelligibility" (the sort of epithets hurled at academicians by bright freshmen in the 1960s).

Understandably, Mr. Carter's supporters rallied nobly to his defense in Letters to the Editor, accusing Mr. Snook of anti­intellectualism, ultraconservatism, fascism, ignorance, and failure to recite a matutinal pledge to the flag. But Snook stood his ground. Having listened to Carter for nigh-on 30 years (man and boy), he could no longer resist pointing out the emperor's near-nudity. He suggested that a poll of reasonably sophisticated music lovers would show that "Carter's kind of arcane solipsism would have no chance -- now or in the future -- of capturing and holding a substantial audience." And he concluded that we have too long over­valued the wrong things in contemporary music, as witness the recent volta face of certain younger composers.

Well, hell! the reviewers said it about Beethoven ("disagreeable and deafening," "barbarous chords," "want of intelligible design," etc.). And Elliott Carter can take comfort that the most recent standard reference works leave his reputation spotless: "one of the most original and complex minds in present-day American music" (David Ewen, American Composers, 1982); "an energy of invention that is unrivalled in contemporary composition" (Bayan Northcott, Grove, 1981); "sureness of line, profundity of thought, and maturity of workmanship [that] bespeak a musical intellect of the first order" (Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music, 1979).

What I think the Fanfare people are reflecting, as Mr. Snook hints, is a general and expectable reaction. For 40 years and more we have increasingly promoted the intellectual aspects -- ingenuity of idea, form, and structure -- over the emotional (an area against which we have been reacting because of its 19th-century overstatement, among other reasons.) There had to be a turning point, and for a time, no doubt, music of that stripe (or regarded as of that stripe) will suffer.

As an intellectual I admire in Carter's music the aspects noted above. Perhaps, however, like a young person of my acquaintance, I am cursed with 19th-century ears, for so far the emotional impact of it has eluded me. And I am insufficiently clairvoyant to be able to say whether it will ever be other than caviare to the general.

I welcome this record especially for making it possible for me to have all three quartets in the reading by the magnificent Composers String Quartet. (It was nos. 2 and 3 by the way that copped the Pulitzers.) There will be others who will be delighted to see the resurrection of the Etudes, deleted from Schwann in their Candide incarnation six or seven years ago. In his liner notes to an earlier recording; Samuel Baron called these pieces "practice music" in whose very nature the composer finds a delight that he tries to communicate to the listener.

I personally can think of no better introduction to Carter's musical mind and method. And undoubtedly the record will be greeted enthusiastically by Carter's many admirers and by listeners with a sense of adventure.