Elliott Carter interviewed by Jonathan Cott (1961)

This interview was transcribed by the editors from an audio recording in the Oral History of American Music collection at Yale University.

[ 1 ] Jonathan Cott: Good evening. The program is Discussions in Modern Music. This is Jonathan Cott. Tonight, I am talking to my favorite American composer, Mr. Elliott Carter, whom Edwin [sic] Franco Goldman has described as “the most original and significant American composer of his generation.”(1)Goldman 1960, 361. The fine English music critic William Glock has written, "The true criterion is whether the music says something worth saying. In Carter‘s case, there seems no doubt on this point, for one can hardly help being impressed by the intensity of expression and by the imaginative power of the music, in terms both of sheer sound and of grandeur and subtlety of organization."(2)Glock 1953, 52. Mr. Carter was born and lives in New York. He attended Harvard University and studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He has taught at St. John’s of Annapolis, Columbia University, the Peabody Institute of Music, and teaches presently at Yale University. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships and has won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for his Second String Quartet. Mr. Carter, you have been a member of the League of Composers and the ISCM since 1940. You have organized many concerts and still review concerts here and in Europe. What is your opinion of contemporary music at the present time?

[ 2 ] Elliott Carter: Mr. Cott, that is a very large order. Contemporary music as I have seen it develop over the last twenty or thirty years has changed quite rapidly. In the early stages, in the ‘20s and ‘30s, as I said in my article on the subject in the Encyclopædia Britannica,(3)Carter 1953. there was a very great interest on the part of the public to hear this new music, which sounded so different and presented such new concepts, and as time went on, and these concepts became a little more familiar, the public began to lose interest and began to be disturbed by the fact that so much music was played that was no longer as interesting; it didn’t seem to be so selective as it had been. However, in the eyes of a composer the twentieth century has become increasingly interesting from the very earliest times up until the present time, and it seems as though it will go on getting more and more interesting. For one thing, each aspect of music has been delved into, reconsidered, and expanded in one way or another. In fact, right now it seems as though even the old categories of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, form, were all being changed and we were approaching them all from entirely different points of view. Even new instruments are being developed and in many ways this period is the most lively that the history of music has ever seen. Certainly many wonderful compositions that use these new possibilities have appeared and have made these possibilities seem very genuine and not just tricky things that were invented to give some sort of a strange and special thrill.

[ 3 ] You have said about the American composer Charles Ives that his life, and I quote, “vividly presents the special conflicts inherent in the American composer’s situation. Today, even more than in his time, the division between the musician’s professional code of ethics, his traditional standards of skill and imagination established at another time in another place, and the present standards of behavior respected, sanctioned, and rewarded by the society that surrounds us is very pronounced.” Would you discuss this idea?

[ 4 ] Yes, of course. Mr. Ives himself was the victim of this difficult situation. He was a man of very great vision and a very lively man who was always trying out new ideas. And these ideas in his time were considered so iconoclastic that the music profession found that they were almost absurd. He published a great deal of his music at his own expense, refused to have it copyrighted, and on the whole considered that music should remain completely outside of the domain of the business world of America, and even later he’d seem to even think that we should remain outside of any world at all and [his] simply was a kind of a private effort of his own. This may be, in a way, what composers have always thought, but Mr. Ives carried it to a very great extreme. It is quite true that the professional aspect of music, at least the professional aspect of composing, is something that has not as yet been thoroughly faced in this country. For one thing, we have no real development of a music profession in terms of what a composer should learn in order to be a composer in this country. And hence the standards of composition are extremely varied and, in many ways, very perplexing to anyone who is involved in the profession, since one man tries to adhere to one view of music, and another, his colleague, adheres to an entirely contrary one. This makes for a very confusing situation as far as the public goes and a very confusing situation as far as young people who wish to study [goes] because they do not know what it is they should study. On the other hand, of course, the old professional view, which gave composers a kind of training which is similar, let us say, to the grammar that one learns in language, seems somehow no longer as valid as it did, and we’re at a turning point in which it is difficult to know just what to do and how to maintain the traditional standards which will make music continue to be as interesting and as important as it was in the past.

[ 5 ] [In your] last answer, you just mentioned the music profession. What really is the music profession, and what is it today?

[ 6 ] The music profession today, of course, in the particular field of composing, is undergoing a very rapid change. One of the things that is surprising, for instance, [is] that in countries where there is a kind of state arrangement that supports the profession, such as [in] France, where there’s a state-supported conservatory and where teachers are chosen by a kind of competitive examination or by their colleagues. The Conservatory is very advanced and teaches all the latest techniques – a thing which would surprise the members of the American public, for instance, who find that much of contemporary music is unintelligible. It would be surprising to them to find out that many of the techniques of contemporary music have penetrated the traditional schools, in Europe particularly, and become part of what a composer is expected to know and to use. Therefore the music profession, in an organized place, is something that is always progressive but always maintains certain standards of what music is, of how interesting it should be, what its content is, and these are more or less believed in without being thought about and are accepted as part of the background of a composer and something that the public expects from the composer. In this country we’re always discussing the simple questions like what is music and how should a composer reach his audience. This kind of question is far less important when there’s a music profession that somehow gives a connection between the composer and his audience that does not have to be thought about continually.

[ 7 ] To get to some more specific items, I‘d like to know, what do you think of serial music?

[ 8 ] Well, first of all, it seems to me that serial music, like any music that is built on a kind of pre-arranged pattern, such as for instance consonant music, which of course used harmonies that were in many ways far more restricting than twelve-tone music, and which used them over a matter of three or four hundred years, and yet produced a large variety of compositions, is…. Serialism is only one very small aspect of musical composition. A composer learns how to compose a piece and how to make ideas join together, how to think of ideas, how to organize them, and these ideas may be serial or they may not be according to his choice. But the most important thing is that the piece itself be an organized piece in terms of musical coherence and musical expression. Serialism affects this in some ways, but the prior thing – the musical piece itself – is far more important than serialism, which only contributes a small part of it.

[ 9 ] What about chance composers such as John Cage?

[ 10 ] Well, I feel that in chance composition, one cannot actually say very much about this because composition itself is a matter of prediction. A work of music is, in a sense, a series of directions for performers, and these performers somehow can predict what’s going to happen. If you can’t predict what is going to happen, it is impossible to know what one can think about a chance composition until after it has happened. And then, since it never repeats itself again, that opinion is only the opinion of that particular instance. I do feel that chance composition and many other things, many other types of composition which do not give the audience any idea of what’s going to happen, is a kind of test of the audience’s interest and love for music, and the test of how much the audience will stand at a concert. I think that the audience itself, in many concerts, deserves to be treated this way because it’s laid itself open by showing such lack of interest and such a lack of concern for music that it’s very understandable that composers want to wake them up by doing something that will surprise them and rather outrage them.

[ 11 ] Right. Finally, electronic music.

[ 12 ] Well, I don’t think that electronic music is a problem in itself. It’s exactly the same kind of thing as serial music, and that is that it’s a means, a small means, that can be fitted into the larger means of a total musical composition of one kind or another. There have been mechanical types of music in the past. We know that very beautiful work that Mozart wrote for mechanical organ, and there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be electronic music, which is also mechanical music.

[ 13 ] Right. I’ll switch the subject now. I’d like to ask you about music composed in America. Igor Stravinsky has written that, and I quote, “Compared to Webern, most of our simple, homespun American style is fatuous in expression and in technique, the vilest cliché.” In the phrase “American music,” he continues, “‘American’ not only drops emphasis from music, but it asks for lower standards.” Do you agree?

[ 14 ] Yeah…. [Chuckle] There are two or three things that I do and don‘t disagree with. For one thing, I think it’s unfortunate to set up Webern as a standard for all music, because it’s obvious that if that were done, the music of Webern would suffer very badly. One hopes that music will remain a very heterogeneous thing, dealing with the matter of music in many different aspects. Otherwise, it will really perish for lack of interest. That‘s the first side of this. As far as American homespun simplicity goes, it’s certainly true that that American composers have, at various times, attempted to imitate the attitudes of country folk, and this has a certain engaging quality to it, like Western movies. But it seems to me also, since we are a complex industrial civilization, it‘s rather hard to act like a peasant.

[ 15 ] Right.

[ 16 ] As far as the encouragement of American music goes, it seems to me that we have a tendency in this country to encourage music because it’s American rather than because it’s music, and this is a dangerous thing because if we encourage too much music of inferior quality and have it performed, the public and the profession itself will suffer very severely and lose all interest in contemporary music.

[ 17 ] I’d like to ask you one or two questions concerning your own music. In a review of Roger Sessions’s Violin Concerto masterpiece, you wrote that, and I quote, “Roger Sessions’s music has increasingly come to grips with the most serious and important issue that has faced contemporary music when considered in terms of its own internal development. That is, the important task of finding new forms for the new material.”(4)Carter 1997, 175. Would you say that this is perhaps the most important technical aspect of your recent compositions, and might you not also be talking about your own musical development?

[ 18 ] Certainly this is something that’s interested me a great deal. I’ve continually felt that the question of form, both in the detail of the music, such as what a musical idea is, and in its next-sized stretch, that is, how these ideas are linked together, and thirdly how they come together to make a composition, is really the concern of the composer. And it is up to him to make all of these three dimensions or these three lengths of music, meaningful. I have felt that, for instance, the sonata form had only a limited meaning to me, and as time went on also such forms as the fugue and other traditional forms seemed to me to be rather beside the point. For one thing, I find that I wasn’t thinking of ideas that fitted into fugues, and I wasn’t thinking of ideas that even fitted into sonata forms, and hence it became important to deal with every aspect of the musical situation. Certainly, as we know today, the sonata form is something that has to do with harmony, and when your music moves in a field in which there is no strong sense of tonality, or no continuously strong sense of tonality, it is absurd to try and apply the sonata form. I feel, for instance, that a composer like Hindemith and certain works of Schoenberg in his middle period, applied this sonata form rather rigorously and to the detriment of their musical expression.

[ 19 ] Yes. On the record notes for the Louisville Symphony Orchestra’s [sic] performance of your Variations for Orchestra,(5)Carter 1958. you have written, “In the Variations, I have tried to give musical expression to experiences anyone living today must have when confronted with so many remarkable examples of unexpected types of changes and relationships of character uncovered in the human sphere by psychologists and novelists, in the life cycle of insects and certain marine animals by biologists, indeed in every domain of science and art.” I wondered if you would elaborate on this interesting statement.

[ 20 ] I feel that there are two things about music that give it its real interest and validity. To me, one of them is the question of the characterization, so to speak, in music. And then secondly, how this characterization, how the various characterized moments are linked together and how they flow from one to the other, either according to some evident chain of causality as they did in older music or in some kind of a more concealed way, or by sudden just dramatic juxtapositions. And obviously our experience today as we live our lives that are so utterly different, both in its physical aspects, let us say, in terms of the motions that we go through when we ride in an airplane or in an automobile, than the motions were to people in the past who rode on horseback…. And the time in our life, the experience of time is so different, for instance, just because of these kinds of activities. Because also we’re able to receive so much more information all the time through different kinds of means of communication. Bach didn’t have a telephone, for instance, and the coming of people into your house by an electric wire is a very, very intense kind of experience. It seems to me that just these physical things are one aspect of something that – even when you start to look at it from another point of view, from the internal and subjective point of view – that is so different that it is even hard to understand how we can imagine what the past was like and why old music has any meaning to us at all. For instance, when we think of the extremely religiously dominated society that Bach lived in, in which every aspect had to do with proving the existence of God, it seems very strange that we now, who live in a much more fluid and much more uncertain state about such matters, and live in a society where all this is a very much more argued thing, can understand music which comes from such a rigid and stern point of view. And I find that it’s very hard to imagine how anyone who is a composer and who experiences the life of this time could even conceive of returning to a past time unless he was indifferent to the art that he’s doing.

[ 21 ] I see, but would you say that perhaps these developments which you have been describing of modern times perhaps portend a literal destruction of music as an art, in fact of art in general, and perhaps of man?

[ 22 ] [Sigh] Naturally, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that they do portend either destruction of art and certainly not of man. Because while men may be clever enough to learn how to destroy themselves, they’re also even more clever, and that is to learn how to make continuity in their lives. And it seems to me that, similarly, just through the boredom of repetition, which our mechanical civilization tends to produce, and to produce more and more of, there will be an increasing wish to produce things that have individuality and character and variety, and it certainly is in this domain that art will continue to flourish. We don’t want a kind of silly and trivial variety if we’re people of any civilization. We want something that has real variety and still real cogency to our lives, and to me this is what art supplies.

[ 23 ] What is your opinion concerning the function of the music critic today?

[ 24 ] Well the music critic is in a very unfortunate position today. For one thing he’s a newspaper writer in America and as a result his main concern is with making a concert into a news item. And this is very hard on composers because you can’t expect a composer to receive the just attention of the critic. The critic comes, hears his piece once, perhaps not terribly well played, and has to rush off after the concert and meet a deadline an hour later, when compositions have taken a year or so to compose and represent many more years of effort, all of which of course is done more or less gratuitously [sic] by the composer. To have the critic rush into the hall, rush out rapidly, write his column, and get more for the column than the composer gets for the performance, it seems that a composer can’t help but have a certain attitude towards critics, regardless of who they are. [Laughs.]

[ 25 ] I see. What are, to you, the important and meaningful works of the twentieth century?

[ 26 ] Well, to me, the twentieth century started as far back as Mussorgsky and Mahler, and I think that perhaps the first interesting works of the twentieth century are parts of the works of Mussorgsky – some of the song cycles, particularly Sunless – and of Mahler, certainly a few of his symphonies, the Ninth Symphony in particular, and the Lied von der Erde. A little bit later, to me, Debussy was perhaps the greatest innovator in the twentieth century, in my opinion. And his late works such as the orchestral work Jeux or the or the late sonatas, are works of such a revolutionary nature in terms of their conception of form and of musical progression and development, that very few composers since that time have lived up to the novelty that these works exhibit. And so I would consider that Debussy perhaps is one of the leading composers of our time. After that, I tend to like composers that have been influenced by Debussy. For instance, Varèse, whose music in many ways is similar to Debussy in its concept of idea and development, and I think perhaps that of the works of Varèse I’m fondest of Ionization and Intégrales and Hyperprism and I think also his new electronic piece [Poème électronique (1958)] has many very beautiful things about it. Then I’m a great admirer of Stravinsky, practically from the time of Petrushka to the present. I like, I think, nearly every work but particularly I am fondest of the Symphonies for [sic] Wind Instruments, and the Symphony of Psalms, the Symphony in Three Movements, and then some of the very recent works, parts of Agon and the new Movements for piano and orchestra. I also am a great admirer of Arnold Schoenberg’s music, particularly the early music, starting with the Five Pieces for Orchestra and Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung, and some of the very late works such as the Trio for strings and the Phantasy for Violin and Piano. I’m very fond of the music of Alban Berg, particularly the postal card songs [Five Orchestral Songs after Postcards by Peter Altenberg, Op. 4] and parts of Lulu and Wozzeck, and parts of the Chamber Concerto, and I’m also very fond of Webern, although I’m not especially fond of the last works of Webern and I think that the works before he became a twelve-tone composer are on a whole more interesting than the works that he wrote after he became a twelve-tone composer. I find that Bartók to me is a less interesting composer now than he used to be five or ten years ago. I still like his Third and Fourth Quartets and the work for strings, percussion, and celesta [Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936)]. Of the American composers, I’m fond of the music of Carl Ruggles, a few works of Aaron Copland – his Sextet and the Variations for Orchestra, and – as you mentioned, Mr. Cott – Roger Sessions, whose Violin Concerto and whose Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies I’m very fond of. And then I like parts of Mr. Ives, although I have the impression that he never wrote a completely successful work. I only like the very advanced parts of his music. The rest I find not especially interesting.

[ 27 ] As a final question, I’d like to know what composition or compositions are you working on now or plan to work on?

[ 28 ] I‘m working now on a work for the Fromm Foundation: a Double Concerto for piano and harpsichord and percussion and small orchestra. And then after that I‘ve been commissioned by the Ford Foundation to write a piano concerto for Jacob Lateiner. I have many other plans but they‘re not quite clear yet.

[ 29 ] I want to thank you very much Mr. Carter for coming to spend the half hour.

[ 30 ] Thank you Mr. Cott.

Footnotes

1. Goldman 1960, 361.

Bibliography

Carter, Elliott. 1953. “Music of the Twentieth Century.” In Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 16, 16–18. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Carter, Elliott. 1958. Variations for Orchestra. Louisville Orchestra, Robert Whitney, conductor. Louisville LOU–583 (Mono LP). Reissued on First Edition: Elliott Carter: Variations For Orchestra; Everett Helm: Second Piano Concerto (First Edition FECD-0001, 2001).

Carter, Elliott. 1997. “Roger Sessions: Violin Concerto (1959).” In Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937–1995, edited by Jonathan W. Bernard (University of Rochester Press), 175–180. Originally published as “Current Chronicle: New York,” Musical Quarterly 45, no. 3 (July 1959): 375–81.

Glock, William. 1952. “A Note on Elliott Carter.” The Score and I.M.A. Magazine 12 (June 1955): 47–52.

Goldman, Richard Franko. 1960. “Current Chronicle.” Musical Quarterly 46, no. 3 (Jul): 361–80.