Elliott Carter interviewed by Shulamit Ran (February 16, 1994)
This interview was conducted while Carter was in Chicago for the world premiere of his Partita (1993) by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, which took place on February 17th, 1994. Shulamit Ran was then the Chicago Symphony’s Composer-in-Residence.
[ 1 ] Shulamit Ran: Elliott Carter is back in Chicago, only a little over a year since his previous visit. Last season it was Pierre Boulez who conducted Mr. Carter’s Three Occasions for Orchestra with the Chicago Symphony. This time Mr. Carter is here for the world premiere of his Partita, written in 1993 on commission by the Chicago Symphony, and the very special invitation of its music director, Maestro Daniel Barenboim, a great admirer of your music, Mr. Carter.
[ 2 ] Elliott Carter: That’s what I like to hear.
[ 3 ] Welcome once again to Chicago and to WFMT, and I suppose having celebrated your 85th birthday in December, and having been acknowledged for decades as one of the leading creative artists of your time, world premieres are nothing new. Or are they? Does it ever get to the point that you can treat a first performance casually?
[ 4 ] No, I think not. Of course, the history of first performances of my pieces has changed rather drastically over many years. Years ago, people went crazy at my first performances, and the performers didn’t know what they were doing and they couldn’t understand why they were doing it, and it bothered them a great deal, and they gave, if they were very good, a very mechanical but very accurate performance. As time has gone on, there’s enough of my music that has now gotten around so that performers know what to expect when they look at a score of mine, so that now first performances are much easier for them to play and very much easier for them, thank goodness, to understand.
[ 5 ] And probably easier for you to take, therefore.
[ 6 ] And easier for me to take. I used to say that it took about ten years before the pieces that I’d written sounded the way I’d expected them to because the performers were always playing in a rather dull and mechanical way. Fortunately I don’t think that’s true anymore and I must say I don’t think it’ll be true with the Chicago performance here.
[ 7 ] Are you still sometimes surprised by what comes out? I mean I’m talking now about that the difference between hearing something in your mind and putting it down on the paper and then having it actually come out at you in the large concert hall. Are there still surprises?
[ 8 ] Well, I’m less surprised than I used to be because it’s not so much that I’m surprised at what I hear. Usually, the music sounds in a certain sense the way I expected it to. But what bothers me in performances, especially first performances, is that the performers play as if they didn’t know what they were doing, and that’s not what I thought when I was writing the piece at all. I expected them to have a feeling about it, to have to play it as if it meant something musically to them. And I’m less surprised now, less frequently surprised, by first performances than I used to be. When the old ones were [played,] very often performers played them without understanding anything they were doing and that surprised me and distressed me a good deal. Now it’s quite different. With my music, I feel, boy, the Chicago Symphony’s played a number of my pieces in the past. There were wonderful performances of my Variations under Sir George Solti that has sort of indoctrinated them to what they ought to expect. And they come out now playing the sounds as if they really meant it, which is nice.
[ 9 ] And yet, I remember that when there was the first discussion of you writing a piece for the Chicago Symphony, and Daniel Barenboim, really I think from the very first day that he took leadership of the Chicago Symphony, has been talking about commissioning you. But when you first were approached about it, you did express some concern. You and I talked about it and you mentioned some matters having to do with rehearsal time and was it going to get the proper kind of attitude, and I almost sensed, as though you were saying, is it really going to be worth the enormous effort and time that it takes to write an orchestral piece and I’m sure that this is born by experience, this kind of realism.
[ 10 ] Yeah, oh certainly. And in fact this is an unusual case, this particular commission. I now never write a piece except for performers who have already played my music and Mr. Barenboim, as far as I know, has never played anything of mine, but he spoke so well, I felt that I would.
[ 11 ] Well, we are so happy that you did, and so very much looking forward to these world premiere performances on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. And let’s talk a little bit about the piece. Maybe we can start with the title. For all your music’s innovation and progressive tendencies, you very often choose titles that seem to look back on tradition. Does Partita have anything whatsoever to do with Baroque forms?
[ 12 ] In my particular case, having lived off-and-on for a good many years in Italy, the word “partita” there now means “game,” and there’s a partita of soccer, of “torto calcio.” You see partita written all over the street!
[ 13 ] How cultured of them.
[ 14 ] This is sort of to me a piece that means just a kind of a game, a play of different ideas and different musical thoughts. I worried about the title because actually while I was writing, I couldn’t figure out what kind of title I wanted, and as you have it in the program notes, I was reading a poem, a poem actually in Latin, that was written in the Jacobean period right after Queen Elizabeth by an English poet called [Richard] Crashaw. And it was about a bubble, and it’s a humorous poem in which it describes a bubble floating through the air and having many thoughts and I thought I would read you a little bit of this in translation. The bubble thinks this:
To be sure I am the flower of air,
the star of the sea as it were,
the golden wit of nature,
the rambling tale of nature,
the brief dream of nature,
the pride of trifles and grief,
…
the golden daughter of treachery,
the mother of the quick smile.
…
I’m the prize of flowing hope.(1)Richard Crashaw (ca. 1613–1649), “Bulla,” lines 122–27, 129-30, and 133, translated as “Bubble” by Phylis S. Bowman (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1970).
And I thought this would sort of express the kind of, rather changeable and variable piece that I was writing. Originally I thought of having the piece titled in Latin, “Sum Fluxae Praetium Spei.” And then I decided that that was a little bit arcane, so I used the word “partita.”
[ 15 ] And you talk about “game,” and you are saying elsewhere in your program notes, that this piece adheres rather strictly to certain laid-down rules. And I want to ask you, of course, in a sense this is not new, because composers of all times put themselves into boundaries and then spoke about the great freedom that that afforded.
[ 16 ] Yes, exactly. Well, this particular piece, actually explores, if you want to talk about it technically, it explores the qualities and variety that exists in one chord of six notes, and this chord exists in every measure of the piece, in one way or another. Sometimes there are many more notes added to it, but in any case it’s always done in a very systematic way. Because, one of the thoughts was that the piece would have so much different kinds of variety, different kinds of color, different kinds of moods as this poem suggests, and I felt that there should be some unifying idea behind the entire piece that would give you the coherence that it wouldn’t have if I just went along from one thing to another and didn’t have an inner kind of connection. This is not unusual. After all, all the works of Johann Sebastian Bach only used about six chords, and they stuck to them very strictly. In Beethoven and Mozart, the whole, what we call the common practice period, limited itself to a very small range of chords. Actually, the triad and dominant seventh type chords were used millions and millions of times and so it seemed to me it was reasonable enough to stick to one chord in this piece. It’s a chord that, by the way, the only chord of six notes that includes all possible chords of three notes.
[ 17 ] Now the Partita is an undivided one movement work of approximately 18 minutes. Do you start with an overall plan of the shape that the piece is going to take?
[ 18 ] I wish I knew about that. I don’t know. I have an idea of the kind of character that the music has and then I actually don’t start with a plan. I start by writing all sorts of things. For instance, writing a great many things that use this chord and also all types of different sonorities. And when I’ve got a whole collection of these then I began to think about how I could assemble them into a piece. And very often in the end every bit of this is rewritten but they were the things that suggested the general character of the piece. It starts with very low notes and a kind of a shriek in the high thing and then the piece gradually grows together and settles in the middle register, and I was interested in having this piece that constantly went out to the furthest distance of the registers and then came together again. That was part of the kind of fluctuation that I thought of in character in this music. So that there were many different ideas. The actual writing of a piece invariably starts with a lot of little sketches, which then suggest more or less what the piece will be, and then, you know, then I don’t find a sketch that I like that will begin the piece nor one that will end it, and I finally think of that too. I wait around till I get a good idea sometimes. Sometimes it’s not so quick.
[ 19 ] So in spite of the fact that there is a, on one level, the music gives one the appearance of a master plan at work, and yet, on a gut level, I can tell that a lot of it also involves the element of intuitive decision making.
[ 20 ] Well, I hope so.
[ 21 ] So that there really is that fine balance between plan and intuition.
[ 22 ] Well, look, I mean, after all, the composer in my generation was taught to have a master plan, so to speak. I mean, we would find the way we thought about music was that way, so that I suppose I just fall into this automatically, as a certain sense. This is the way I would invariably think, but in another sense, I always try to break away from the conventional type of master plan. And none of my pieces, for instance, in the last 20 or 30 years have ever used a thing like a fugue, like a sonata form. In fact, none of the forms of classical music, although I suppose there’s some connection between them. The idea of crescendo, for instance, is something that certainly came out of classical music, that exists in my music. The idea of rhythmic motion is something that certainly exists, although I very rarely stick to one speed in a piece. I often combine them in different ways, but usually to produce a constant flow and a constant increase or decrease of activity.
[ 23 ] This is another point that I want to maybe read a phrase out of your own program notes for the Partita. You’re saying, “In general my music seeks the awareness of motion we have in flying or driving a car and not the plodding of horses or the marching of soldiers that pervades the motion patterns of older music.”
[ 24 ] I left out the one thing that’s the best thing about older music, and that is dance.
[ 25 ] Aha! Okay, you were trying to give us the two absolute extremes.
[ 26 ] Well, I sometimes suggest dance in my music too.
[ 27 ] Yes. But I think that in the statement you not only place yourself squarely in the 20th century by, say, flying as opposed to horses, but I think you’re talking not only about the speed, but the rate of change of the landscape.
[ 28 ] Yes, yes, exactly. I like very much the sense that something is flying into the air and seeing many things and changing. We’re living in a different world. It’s very old-fashioned and rather, to my mind, tiresome to drive around in a horse and carriage. People seem to like to do it now, especially in New York, but I always feel so sorry for the horse. But then that’s another matter.
[ 29 ] And not a laughing matter, actually.
[ 30 ] No, but in any case, it seems to me that we’re accustomed to living in this rather fluid state of motion. I find it very surprising that many many composers don’t seem to be aware of this, that they don’t have [in their music] the experience, the kind of motion that we live all the time in our lives, and that I’ve tried to put it in the music. I think that Debussy actually began to do this in things like the work that’s being played on this program, La Mer: the idea that there’s never a downbeat to the music. It’s always sort of flying up in the air and maybe the downbeat comes in the last beat of the piece, but it’s always sort of moving in this kind of big flowing motion, which is what I admire very much in his music more than any other composer actually. There are moments in Wagner like that, too, and in Strauss sometimes, but this is something that I’ve tried to get in my music very strongly.
[ 31 ] Well, one of the first images that come[s] to my mind when I listen to your music is that of sculpted motion.
[ 32 ] Yeah.
[ 33 ] It is so very much about that and about change and transformation.
[ 34 ] Well, I’m glad you got that! [Laughter]
[ 35 ] One question that I have is, how do you regulate the rate of change, since change is so rapid in your music? How do you regulate it both on the local level, but maybe also in terms of the large-scale planning? In other words, let’s put it differently. I marvel at how, with all the complexity of your music, there is also great transparency to it. When everything is done right, when the players are absolutely right where they should be – which is extremely challenging, but it’s being done – it’s incredibly transparent. One hears everything, and I ask myself, how do you accomplish that?
[ 36 ] I wish I knew. I have no idea. I just put down what I think I’d like to hear, the way I feel about the music that I’m writing. This is something that goes back beyond my actual conscious thought. This is something that just comes out that way, the way I talk English or something else. The timing, the timing of such music as mine is, I suppose, a very delicate thing and I must say that I do sometimes take a certain amount of trouble over feeling that I’ve written something that’s too short for the kind of material that it is, or too long, and I sometimes change the length and the rate of change, but not a great deal. Mostly it comes out pretty much as I wanted it to the first time around.
[ 37 ] What would you say to a young composer, to a student, about how to avoid a perceptual overload?
[ 38 ] Oh, I don’t know. People keep saying my music is full of perceptual overload.
[ 39 ] Well, there’s a lot happening.
[ 40 ] Well, I’m glad you told me that. [Laughter] I don’t think that this is a matter of …. I think that you can’t tell people that. This is a matter of feeling and experience. You know, the perceptual overload, if you put it that way, is a very puzzling thing in itself because, for instance, the opening of the Kyrie of the B minor Mass of Bach, is a perceptual overload pretty much. It is a five-part fugue accompanied by an orchestra playing other counterpoints than the five parts, sometimes as much as ten parts are going on, much of which you don’t really hear, you just hear some harmony changing from one to the other. But if you were to try and listen to what’s going on, you would probably never be able to hear it completely. Now I don’t know whether that’s perceptual overload or not, it’s a very moving piece. I don’t know whether I care about such a matter.
[ 41 ] One conductor and composer, in fact, who has great familiarity with your music is Oliver Knussen, himself a prodigious composer, and he recently recorded the Violin Concerto, a little bit of which we heard at the very opening of the program. It’s actually an all-orchestral Carter CD, and nominated for a Grammy by the way, and we’re going to listen to a little bit more of the Violin Concerto, but before that I want to read a little something that Oliver Knussen said about the music. He said, “While it is certainly true that Carter’s orchestral music is complex in effect, it is never gratuitously so and is always rewardingly conceived for the instruments involved. The rhythmic elaboration is the result of layering simple pulses. The lines are made of clearly identifiable intervallic patterns. The harmonic characters are sharply defined and their progress carefully controlled.” He also says, “In other words, the basic compositional principle is common sense.” And I’m not sure that the common or not so common concert-goer would immediately latch on [to] these words “common sense.” But I think this point is well taken and I’m wondering if you can take these (he talks about rhythm and we talked a little bit about that) – but line, melody, harmony: basic elements that people usually have a very clear idea of what they envision these to be and relate them, apply them to your music.
[ 42 ] Well you’re going to play that part of my Violin Concerto, the second movement. One imagined, for instance, [in] a slow movement of a violin concerto, the violin singing a great long line. I decided to write a piece like that, except that the great long line was something that was completely fragmented. But I was hoping that it would be played in such a way that you would hear that the violinist was really playing a long line, although almost every note was separated from the previous one. This is an idea that I had had previously in another piece that was played here, in my Three Occasions [for Orchestra] and this new piece, Partita, is filled with the idea of fragmentation. Almost every line in it is broken up in some way or other. There are pauses, they’re little fragments, bits of things, and they make long stretches, but they’re constantly cut into pieces. This was something I had not done very much before, and something I’d been thinking about for a long time. Finally, I decided in this period of my compositions, I would try to write pieces with more pauses, and more meaningful pauses than I had before. Before, the music went on in one great big stream like the Concerto for Orchestra, and so I thought now it was the time to try another point of view. You know, talking, just as we talk, if I stop now and wait for a half a second or two seconds, it becomes meaningful. If I’ve said something interesting before, not that I always do, but anyhow, I try to do this and it seems to me that it’s an interesting way to think about things, at least for me at this time.
[ 43 ] So silence becomes part of your sound world.
[ 44 ] Yeah.
[ 45 ] Maybe we can hear now a little bit of the second movement of the Violin Concerto?
[ 46 ] Sure.
[ 47 ] And this is the beginning of Elliott Carter’s second movement of the Violin Concerto. The violinist here is Ole Böhn, the conductor Oliver Knussen, and the London Sinfonietta. This is a Virgin Classics CD, and I think some of your strongest supporters have been performers, fantastic performers like Mr. Böhn, who find your music incredibly challenging but also very, very gratifying.
[ 48 ] You know, I must say that I’ve always felt if I was concerned with writing music for someone else, it would be for a performer. I’ve never really thought about writing music that was directed for the audience so much as I felt that I was writing music to interest performers. Because in the end it’s more logical, it seems to me, to [write for] performers so that they will then interest the public rather than to write with the idea of writing for the public, which is actually a very uncertain quantity, especially in this particular field. One doesn’t know what the public is and what they know and what their background is. But we do know what performers know. That is, performers have a great skill and younger performers have almost all been trained to play modern music, and I felt that it was my social job, so to speak, to write things that would help them present their skills in front of the audience in a way that had a quality and a novelty and an imagination that would be commanding in some way, I hope. And it seemed to me that this was the social function of a composer in my particular period. Because we’re surrounded by extraordinary performers and many of them play contemporary music and they need a repertory to play. And I’m sure that when they are convinced enough by a work, a contemporary work, the audience finally will be convinced of it too.
[ 49 ] This has certainly happened a lot with your music, where these terrific performers, many of whom young indeed, have been your greatest champions. You know, it was interesting yesterday after the rehearsal, I was talking to one of the orchestral musicians, a young woman, who said, about Partita, “This is player’s music.” And I thought this was really a terrific comment. And indeed, the music for all of its formidable difficulties, and I mean now difficulties to perform, once it sits in the hand, I think, yes, it is a player’s music. It certainly sounds brilliant, makes a wonderful scintillating noise.
[ 50 ] What a nice thing for you to say. Thank you. [Laughter]
[ 51 ] Well, I think that it is wonderful to see how performers react to the challenge. One question though: interpretive freedom. What does that mean in the context of your music, where everything is chiseled so precisely and carefully? What differences can there be, other than a good performance versus an inaccurate performance?
[ 52 ] The word inaccurate is a peculiar word in this particular context because an accurate performance can be very boring and an inaccurate one can be quite interesting. So it’s rather puzzling. To me the music is a kind of like a text for a play and you have an actor that comes out and produces…. Now the difference between two actors doing the same part, let us say the difference between, I don’t know who, Laurence Olivier and John Barrymore doing Hamlet doesn’t mean that Shakespeare would be disturbed profoundly by either one. I mean, it is rather hard to explain, but I’d like to have different performers play my music according to what it means to them, which sometimes is rather disturbing in a certain sense. But it’s better to have them play it as if it meant something to them than to have them play it accurately but boringly. So that actually interpretation seems to me an essential part of the performance of a piece, and there can be different interpretations. This particular piece, for instance, this Partita, could be played very much more dramatically than it is, and it could be played less dramatically than it is, and I think it would make sense either way. It could be played very much more lightly and gently, and it could be played very much more violent[ly]. To my mind, I wouldn’t care that much. I don’t want it too far either way, let us say. I think that Barenboim has found a fairly happy medium between these two qualities. But the piece could be pushed one way or the other more, and it would still not be something that I would be against.
[ 53 ] Mr. Carter, it’s wonderful to have you here, and we are looking forward to the formal birth of this new piece.
[ 54 ] Thank you very much.
[ 55 ] And come back to us soon again.
[ 56 ] Thank you.
Footnotes
1. See René Leibowitz, Schoenberg et son école: l'étape contemporaine du langage musical (Paris: J.B. Janin, 1947). Translated by Dika Newlin as Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949).