Elliott Carter interviewed by Steven Swartz (February 6, 2004)
This interview was conducted at Elliott Carter’s apartment in New York City for Russ Wiltse’s documentary film Beautifully Scary – Contemporary Music in America (Beyond Definition Films, 2018).
[ 1 ] Steven Swartz: Well, the obvious fact of being ninety-five years old has afforded you a perspective on the development of music in the past century that few people have. And beyond that, you’ve been close to many of the major masters of previous generations, and – to begin at the beginning – what were for you the main milestones on your way to becoming a composer?
[ 2 ] Elliott Carter: Well let me say that I was sent to a high school, to Horace Mann High School uptown in New York, it was in the early ‘20s, and at that time it was rather an experimental school and as a result we had all sorts of people that were later to be important. I knew Eugene O’Neill’s son, for instance, very well, and I came to know Eugene O’Neill, who was an important playwright at that particular period. And then there were quite a number of people from the Soviet Union before the time of Stalin who were very interested in contemporary works of all sorts. There was Alexander Bloch, who came from Russia and delivered lectures. So that my first interest in music was an interest in contemporary music. I did not know very much about older music and I really didn’t like it for a long time. I used to go to hear The Rite of Spring when Monteaux played it at Carnegie Hall and half the audience walked out and I just sat there enchanted. And at that time, of course it was also the period of Prohibition, so that some high school people came down here and drank a little bit of wine or whatever we drank, and I got to know Varèse in one of the speakeasies in this area. And so I came to know quite a number of people, including Charles Ives, in the ‘20s, in the mid-‘20s, when I was about 14, 15, or 16, and that group became a very important thing in my life because I got to know all their music. And of course we had a lot of modern composers writing, so to speak, modern music at that time in New York City. Even Aaron Copland was one that wrote that Piano Variations, which to me was a wonderful piece at that time. Henry Cowell began to publish the New Music Edition, and Charles Ives made a subscription for me and sent it to me. So my whole world was a world of contemporary music for a very long time. This made me an impossible figure in many places. When I went to Harvard, the Music Department hated modern music and I couldn’t understand why. But I went to Harvard actually because Koussevitzky was playing contemporary music almost on every program of the Boston Symphony, and I went there year after year. I stayed as an undergraduate [and a graduate student] at Harvard for six years, and I think I went to every single concert the Boston Symphony gave [during] that time. You could get cheap pop seats or something. We’d stand on Saturday afternoon on the steps and be let in for practically nothing. So it was largely due to the fact that I’ve heard all this contemporary music, which interested me more than the older music, and it was only gradually, as I heard all this stuff in the Boston Symphony, that I began to like the other composers. And then I was a member of the Harvard Glee Club where we sang Bach’s B Minor Mass with the Boston Symphony, the Mozart Requiem, and then later, of course, the big thing was that we sang in Oedipus Rex of Stravinsky, and that was brought here [to New York City] to the Metropolitan Opera with the Harvard Glee Club: we sang in the pit, and we had a very modern set. They had puppets the size of the entire stage, about 30 feet high, that moved very slowly. So this was all of my life: that was what was interesting to me most as a very young person. I’ve never really gotten over it.
[ 3 ] Where did you first encounter Charles Ives?
[ 4 ] Well, I encountered Charles Ives when he lived in a house, I think it was on 22nd Street, right next to Gramercy Park. He had a house there, and I remember spending a Sunday afternoon with him and we talked about Stravinsky and he didn’t like Stravinsky ‘cause there was too much repetition. He said, “It’s all right to write that dissonant [music] but you shouldn’t repeat that way.” And he sat down and imitated something from, I’ve forgotten, Firebird or something and showed how that was just not what a composer should do. And I got to know him quite well. He was a subscriber to the Boston Symphony when it came to Carnegie Hall four or five times a year and he used to sometimes invite me to his box whenever they played Scriabin or something. The other influence, to mention Scriabin, was that there was a woman down here, Katherine Ruth Heyman, who had a little studio on 14th Street and Third Avenue, I think. It isn’t there anymore. And about once a month, she used to play Scriabin sonatas, and a number of us would go there and hear it, including Ives sometimes, so that I got to know the later works [of Scriabin]. But there was also in the ‘20s a large number of Russian refugees that came, not only were there the Soviet people who came here officially, but also there were a large number of Russian refugees who used to give Russian operas at what was the Hippodrome which was on 43rd Street and Sixth Avenue, and I saw Prince Igor and a lot of the Rimsky-Korsakov operas, and especially Boris [Godunov]. I heard [Fedor] Chaliapin as Boris at the Metropolitan [Opera]. [It] was a very exciting time in those years. And when I went to Harvard, I discovered that the music department disliked contemporary music, so much so that I didn’t study music, actually. I went into English literature, and then when Walter Piston came back from studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, as a graduate student I studied with him.(1)Walter Piston went to Paris in 1924 and returned to Harvard in 1926, Carter’s first year there as an undergraduate. And then Gustav Holst also came to the Harvard Music Department. I was writing very bad music then, I must say. But then Walter Piston suggested I study with Nadia Boulanger, who was at that time the only person that I knew of that would consider contemporary music seriously. And [Walter Piston] had studied with her, and I came to Paris. And you see, another part of this whole story is that my father had me taught French as a child, so there was a period when I was seven years old when I could speak French better than English, so that I had an attraction [to France]. My father was an importer, so that we went to Paris quite often, and I had a knowledge of this, not only the language, but also the place, and that was one of the things that attracted me. I might have studied with Schoenberg. Because that was the same year that Schoenberg came to the United States. But I knew his music, but I didn’t [study with him]. The French was more attractive to me because of that. And then the other side of that is that my father, who was very pacifist, had taken me to see all the fields where all the people had fought in France during the First World War, and I really just had a very strong feeling against the Germans because of that. So it was hard for me to get over there, so that the French was more attractive. It was not a very good time to be in Paris. I arrived in Paris the day that Hitler took power, and Paris was filled with German refugees almost the entire time I was there, and that was a very saddening thing, I must say. Anyhow, what do you want to ask me?
[ 5 ] Did you actually meet Schoenberg?
[ 6 ] No, I never did. I met his daughter.
[ 7 ] Yeah, Nuria.
[ 8 ] I once went out to Los Angeles with the intention of meeting Schoenberg. He wasn’t there that short time I could be there, but his daughter showed me around. I know Nuria slightly. I’ve met her several times, and I knew Nono quite well when I saw him in Venice. But I always admired the Schoenberg thing. You see, because my father made all these tours, we would buy up all this music cheaply at that time. The Austrian shilling was not worth anything and I still have the stuff I bought in 1925 of Schoenberg and of all those composers.
[ 9 ] Fantastic. If you had to choose a handful of pieces, you’ve mentioned The Rite of Spring, you’ve mentioned Oedipus, you’ve mentioned the B Minor Mass, but if you had to choose a handful of pieces that you heard as a young man that really made an impact on what you became as a composer, what would those pieces be?
[ 10 ] Well, I think that first of all, the Concord Sonata of Charles Ives, The Rite of Spring, and Pierrot Lunaire. I think that those are the main ones. And then, you see, I was living in a time of transition. As I grew up, this older music, this older, dissonant music, was beginning to fade out, and people like Hindemith and Poulenc and Milhaud and others began to take their place. So that I became quite interested in a lot of that. I loved some of the music of Hindemith at that time and I still do as a matter of fact. But it was a transitional period and Stravinsky had already turned into a neoclassic composer which shocked me at the time when I heard that Piano Sonata of his in New York, I was shocked that it didn’t go on with The Rite of Spring, but then I came to like that too.
[ 11 ] Of course, in that period before and perhaps even during the war there was a polarization. People were in the Schoenberg camp, they were in the Stravinsky camp. It doesn’t sound like you were in either camp.
[ 12 ] No, I never was in either camp. In fact, I’ve always felt that my Cello Sonata was a cello playing Schoenberg and the piano playing Stravinsky.
[ 13 ] So, of course, music changed a lot, modern music, after the war …
[ 14 ] After the Second World War?
[ 15 ] After the Second World War, yes.
[ 16 ] Because it changed after the First [World War] too.
[ 17 ] That’s true too. So talking about the way that music changed after the Second World War, both here and in Europe, how did these developments affect you?
[ 18 ] Well, let me put it this way. By the time of 1945, which was the end of the Second War, I had started to write my Piano Sonata, which was right here in this apartment. And I began to see that I wanted to write music that was more like the music I’d been interested in when I first became a composer. I felt that the one problem that people hadn’t worked on was the question of rhythm. It seemed to me there was a rhythmic world that had not yet been very much explored and that interested me a lot. So I started working, a little bit in the Cello Sonata and then later I got a Guggenheim fellowship and went out to Tucson and wrote that big string quartet [String Quartet No. 1] that lasts for 40 or so minutes. And that was a complete break with what I had written before, and that changed the entire history of my music. It’s in many ways the most difficult of the pieces I’ve written. It’s very hard to play and I thought nobody would ever play it but I liked writing it.
[ 19 ] So, in fact, for you, it harked back to the experiments of people like Ives and Cowell?
[ 20 ] That’s right. For me, what I was doing then was a good deal of the same thing. In Europe, you see, because Hitler had stopped all of that, so to speak, modern music or advanced music, and so when the war stopped a lot of people went back and became very interested in Schoenberg and in Alban Berg and all those composers that had been partly blocked out by Hitler during the Hitler period. And then of course there [were] also financial reasons why none of that was done, and then there was the war. But even in Italy, some friends of mine did [Berg’s] Wozzeck at the Rome Opera during the occupation of Italy by the Germans. I mean there were people that were going to keep it up. Anyhow, the big figure of course at that particular time was a man named [René] Leibowitz who wrote a big book about twelve-note music.(2)See Leibowitz 1947. It became a kind of Bible for many people all over the world and even in Japan.
[ 21 ] However, you yourself did not adopt serial composition.
[ 22 ] No, I tried to, but I didn’t like what I was doing, so I didn’t do it.
[ 23 ] What did you do instead?
[ 24 ] Let me say, this is a very difficult thing to describe. But what happened was something that I had realized from the earliest part of contemporary music, and that is that there was a way of isolating different ideas with different intervals. Milhaud, for instance, wrote a whole bunch of tangos, each one on a different interval. Saudades do Brasil, I think it’s called. And then Bartók, in the Bagatelles, which were written in 1908, also has each movement using a different [interval], and even The Rite of Spring has moments like that, there are parts which use triads and other places where they use sevenths and ninths and the rest of it. So that I began to feel that I could develop out of this idea of isolated intervals a harmonic scheme. And I began, I actually wrote, and it’s now recently been published, a whole Harmony Book.(3)Carter 2002. Actually I was teaching in Cornell for a while and I used to write the book while I was riding on the plane or on the train to go to Cornell. I hated doing it, but I felt I had to find out how to work all the hard … So I wrote a book that showed how all the different chords fitted together to make twelve notes. But I never used the twelve-note system, but I used these different systems of chords.
[ 25 ] You were embarking on a direction that was different from what other people were doing. You could say it was parallel to the serialists, but it wasn’t serialism. But whatever it was, it was music that no one had ever written before. What were your feelings at that time about the task you had set for yourself? About striking out in a new direction? Was it a lonely thing? Did you feel that you had supportive colleagues?
[ 26 ] I’m not very sociable in these matters. I just liked what I was doing and I never thought about how I fitted in or whether I didn’t. And a lot of my music was very difficult to play, so it didn’t get played that often. On the other side, I wrote that Double Concerto that was commissioned by Paul Fromm, and he said, “You can have as many rehearsals as you want.” Well, that drove – you know, I wrote a piece, you can’t have so many rehearsals, and now it gets played almost every year in Paris. But there was a whole period when people fought, you know, you had to have four percussion players who were excellent players, all who had a very refined sense of rhythm. Anyhow, the Double Concerto was one of the big things of that particular period, it was 1960. But I started doing all of this, as I say, in 1950, which was about five years after the war ended. Now during these years we had several things. Metropolis was conducting the Philharmonic, and he conducted, not terribly well, some of the works of Schoenberg, for instance the Variations for Orchestra, and other things. And I was invited by Sir William Glock in England to lecture at a summer school called Dartington Hall, and I brought the tape of the Schoenberg Variations, which no one had ever heard.(4)Carter taught at Dartington Hall in the summer of 1957. See Meyer, Felix and Anne C. Shreffler 2008, 140-149. And I remember [Peter] Maxwell Davies was one of my students, and I remember we went through it in a class and discussed all the details of it, and it was quite interesting. And so I was interested in all this at this time, but it had no, as far as … For one thing I’ve never really liked, I mean, I can’t say that, but I’ve never been very enthusiastic about the Schoenberg of the twelve-note music, most of it. I liked what he did before that, and I liked the very last few works that he wrote, but in between, it seems to me, it’s just Brahms with wrong notes. [Laughter]
[ 27 ] So you had a role, however, by going to England, in spreading the knowledge that this music existed.
[ 28 ] Well, let me say about England, and and then this is part of this story, is that Sir William Glock, who was running the music at the BBC, played everything of mine. He played everything of Stravinsky’s, he played all of contemporary music, year after year. He’s died now and he’s not there, he hasn’t been there for a number of years. But this means that in England, it turns out there were lots of people who know my music very well, and that makes an enormous difference. My music isn’t played on the radio here [in the U.S.] at all, but in England it’s been played almost every year for years. And it’s somewhat the same in France, but less, and somewhat the same in Germany and Italy. So the difference between my presence in the United States and in other countries is very large. I get something like ten times as much royalties from all that in Europe than I do here. And it’s only because they play those old records on the radio. [Laughs]
[ 29 ] So, why do you think that European audiences or listeners have become more accustomed to your music? Is it because the broadcasters took the lead?
[ 30 ] Yeah, I think so. Also I think that in countries, especially in England and in Germany, people live a little bit because they want to be educated all through their lives, they want to find out things. We don’t have that, that particular spirit so much in this country, I think. And I don’t think it happens so much in the Latin countries either. So that English people go to concerts that play music that they had never heard of before, just out of curiosity, which is very seldom what would happen here, you see.
[ 31 ] The composers we’ve been talking to have pointed to the decrease in music education over generations of young kids as one reason that adults are less musically literate and less curious about modern music and less able to understand it. What do you see as the role of education of children in cultivating audiences?
[ 32 ] Well, let me say that I’m trying to remember the first time that I thought or came across this was in Rome, in Italy. I went and there was a little conference about this particular subject, about how music wasn’t taught enough in schools for children, and this has become something not merely in the United States, but it’s everywhere. But of course in the United States it’s even more so. You see that music has a great many competitors which it didn’t used to have. I mean it’s got the movies, for instance, television. And then we have all those new subjects like sociology and God knows what, all kinds of computer … all these things which have absorbed the attention of people, very understandably. While there was a time when there weren’t so many competitors to study. I mean, in [Italy][some]one said to me that the first son becomes a lawyer, the second son becomes a priest, and the third one becomes a musician. Now that doesn’t exist.
[ 33 ] And there’s, of course, not so much money in music …
[ 34 ] Yeah.
[ 35 ] … and there’s not so much support.
[ 36 ] And then let me say the other side of the United States is that during my whole lifetime, we have fought to have serious music paid for. When we first started with the American Composers Alliance, composers had to raise money to have their pieces played at the Philharmonic. We had to pay the Philharmonic to play it, and we managed to establish the idea that we ought to be paid something, the composer ought to be paid some kind of royalty, which they were in Europe. And so that was something that took many, many hours and years of work on the part of the people of that particular time, Virgil Thomson and Aaron [Copland] and a lot of other people.
[ 37 ] Some people, some writers, commentators on culture, have claimed that as music became more innovative and more concerned with breaking new ground, creating new languages and new styles, that it left much of the audience behind. Do you think that’s true, and do you think that’s a fair judgment?
[ 38 ] Well, I mean, the audience, I can’t understand that. It depends entirely on the presentation of contemporary music. I mean, when James [Levine] just now played my Partita in Boston, the audience liked it.(5)These performances, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, took place on January 15, 16, and 17, 2004. Now, you know, it’s a very difficult piece to understand in many ways, and it was liked very much in Chicago.(6)Partita was premiered in Chicago by Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on February 17, 2004 and performed there again in 1995, 2000, and 2001. [In Boston] we had James Levine, who does no wrong. So he was able, with his authority, to make the audience believe that that was something they ought to hear. If that had been conducted by somebody else, God knows what they did. Well, we had that Ingo Metzmacher last year playing my Boston [Concerto], and they liked that.(7)Ingo Metzmacher led the Boston Symphony in the world premiere of Carter’s Boston Concerto on April 3, 2003. But I don’t think that would have gone well here in the Philharmonic in New York. Those two pieces are difficult to understand from the point of view of the ordinary audience, I would think. But I don’t care. I mean, I write what I want, and I feel that if people don’t like it, well, that’s too bad for me and too bad for them, that’s all you can say.
[ 39 ] So to your way of thinking it isn’t necessarily important that they understand it in order to appreciate it and it’s not even perhaps important for them to appreciate it for you to want to write it.
[ 40 ] Of course if you say that, I wonder how many people really appreciate a Brahms symphony. When I was a student at Harvard, which was in the, [I] started in ‘26, there was still a statement that said the exit sign meant go this way for Brahms.(8)In other words, “Go this way if Brahms’s music is played.” I mean, I must say I agreed with them at that time. [Laughs]
[ 41 ] One thing that strikes me, you know, sitting here in 2004, reading about the history of music in the nineteenth century, there was a great controversy between the followers of Brahms and the followers of Wagner, and from here, you know, you see the similarities. You see the asymmetrical phrases, you see the expanded harmonic palette, you see the richness of the orchestration, and it all seems a little bit petty. Do you feel that future generations will see the battles of the 20th century in the same way? Do you think that there’s a commonality between different kinds of music being written today?
[ 42 ] There are two things to say about that. One is that in my entire lifetime, I don’t think I could ever have predicted the future at any time, what was going to happen. It never would have occurred to me that Hindemith would show up when I was interested in Stravinsky, and the same thing, it would never occur to me that Boulez would show up when everybody was against that kind of thing. I mean, history is nearly unpredictable in our period. It happens so fast and in such strange ways that we don’t really know what the future will be. Now the other thing is if there is the kind of future that we’ve always had, which we never had, but we think we had, it’s possible that the very good pieces will be accepted. I mean, the difference between The Rite of Spring, which is now an old piece, written in 1913, and Richard Strauss’s Salome, which must have been written about that time, a little before, there’s still a lot of difference in it, I can say that. I don’t know that we’ll ever hear that those two things are alike in any way. I mean, they’re alike in some remote way, but not in a simple way.
[ 43 ] Well, you said an interesting thing. People were listening to Hindemith, and then Boulez came along. Some people have said that, one, that history is cycling more rapidly: that things that used to oscillate between poles of one extreme and the other over a period of a century … Now it happens over five or ten years, or a matter of months.
[ 44 ] I think this is true, yeah.
[ 45 ] Do you think that the history of music is an oscillation between periods of complexity and periods of simplicity, and if so, do you feel that you have a role in this dynamic?
[ 46 ] I don’t think that that’s a question of simplicity and complexity. It’s a question of how important and how vigorous and how imaginative the music is. It doesn’t really matter what style it’s written in, if the music is very telling and very strong and very imaginative. Of course, from my point of view I would say it’s impossible to do that with the conventional system of harmony. I think that’s what I believe, but I’m not sure this is true. It could be that somebody would come along and write something wonderful in some sort of a harmonic style that I don’t really think much of.
[ 47 ] Which leads me to another question. Do you feel that the concept of beauty has any place in a meaningful discussion of music? Is there something that, for you, constitutes beauty in music, or do you feel that it’s not necessarily a relevant concept?
[ 48 ] You’re trying to put me in the place of the public and I don’t understand it. It seems to me, after all, [that in] the world that I have lived in all my life, the world that I’ve been surrounded by, and the world of my friends, and the world that I’ve known, music is a very important thing. And when I see the results of music such as you have in Paris, for instance, with the Cité de la Musique, and all those buildings and everything, you can see that music has some sort of power that will draw people and make people build buildings, and opera houses, and all that. I think that the music has to be that strong to make people want to do it. That’s my opinion.
[ 49 ] That’s a great point of view. You’ve made comments to the effect that the rhythms in your music are the rhythms of modern life. They are conflicting streams of activity and information that pour into our senses as we walk down the street or turn on a television. Or flying over a landscape we see all different kinds of terrain, whereas the the music of minimalists is like the clopping of horses’ hooves: it’s a more antiquated type of expression. Implicit in that, I perceive a notion of progress in music. Do you think there is such a thing as progress in music or in any form of art?
[ 50 ] I think there’s such a thing as a history. Progress is not quite the word. The field of music has expanded over many, many years. I don’t know that this is called progress, but it’s become much more, well, a) musicians play much better than they used to. I mean, we train musicians [and they’re] extraordinary. You know, that man that played my little piano piece was extraordinary. I don’t know how he could learn it and play it so well. And over my own lifetime, the way string quartets play my string quartets is extraordinary. The way they now can play them, even students do them. I suppose that might be called progress. But the idea of the field of music, if you start with Palestrina and then you think with Schütz and then you think with Bach, certainly each one of those [composers] developed a wider sense of harmony and a wider way of dealing with the harmonic system, and it’s certainly developed over that time. We get Tristan and then you finally get Erwartung, for instance, which is a sort of extravagant kind of Tristan, but all mixed up and very much more intense and violent. I think it expands, that’s all. I think that it expands in all sorts of strange ways. For me, for instance, this repetitive music that we hear now seems to me to be a rather a disturbing idea because we are faced in our lives continuously with repetition, particularly if you look at the television, you can’t stand all those advertisements that are repeated day after day, exactly the same, and this is a destruction of the mind. And I feel that there’s some element of that in minimalism. You’re not meant to pay attention, and I think that music is meant to be … I mean, as far as I’m concerned, it makes you pay attention. If it’s good and if the audience is musically sensitive enough, it should draw your attention to it, just the way reading some sort of a detective story could do that.
[ 51 ] Is there then an element of the narrative and dramatic in your music?
[ 52 ] I suppose there is. I never think about it that way, but yes, I suppose there’s … I don’t know what the narrative is. You see, I think, from my point of view, what I’m doing is rather old-fashioned. I’m really carrying out what I learned as a young person about how you develop an idea in the music. I mean, you do certain sorts of things. I remember Nadia Boulanger once said to me, “You know, you can’t have three measures of rest just before the end of the piece.” Well, that’s the kind of thing I’m … [claps hands].
[ 53 ] Let’s talk about your Symphonia.
[ 54 ] Oh, well, that’s a sort of narrative piece.
[ 55 ] That’s why I wanted to bring it up. For the benefit of the viewers, talk about the idea behind the piece and how it was conceived.
[ 56 ] Well, the Symphonia itself was written movement by movement for different commissions, over a matter of maybe, I’ve forgotten, four or five years. First one movement was commissioned by the Chicago [Symphony Orchestra], the second movement by the BBC and the third by the Cleveland Orchestra. And I had this vision of writing this piece that represented various attitudes toward human life. So that one would be more or less full of humor and liveliness, another one would be full of sadness, and then the third one would be the culmination of this. And I had read this poem by [Richard] Crashaw, a late Elizabethan/Jacobean poet, that described a bubble floating over the earth and seeing these various things. So I thought that the last movement would be the bubble vanishing into the air and I thought that it would be better than ending with a grand big Brucknerian ending for a symphony: to just have it disappear. I like that. You see, that’s one of the things I fight against is the idea that … I like to have my pieces have some sort of a lively beginning and end that is not a beginning and an end in the ordinary sense. Triple Duo starts with the musicians practicing, as does also my Fifth String Quartet. I like that. I like to have it have different kinds of fantasy. One of the elements of music is the idea of fantasy, You have to be aware of the composers, and this is so wonderful about Mozart, for instance. It’s all full of little fantasies all the time. That’s what interests me a great deal.
[ 57 ] Mozart once said, “Everything we know we have learned from Bach.” And he was talking about J.C. Bach, Johann Christian, and yet, of course, J.S. Bach was continuing to compose his great masterworks at the same time.
[ 58 ] Still, Mozart got to know the fugues of J.S. Bach …
[ 59 ] That’s true, too.
[ 60 ] … with Baron von Swieten. And Mozart’s wife told him to write a fugue that was like that, and she complained when he didn’t. [Laughter] But Mozart managed, you know, you get these … he was full of that. Take the ending of that last movement of the C major symphony, where it sort of fools around with a fugue, and it’s just extraordinary. I mean he doesn’t do anything you expect but it’s all remarkable.
[ 61 ] I definitely perceive much of that spirit in your music and particularly in the Symphonia …
[ 62 ] Thank you.
[ 63 ] … the sense of play. And I think for some people it’s difficult because they’re used to tonal mileposts in their listening.
[ 64 ] Oh yes. Well, the big problem with, so to speak, non-tonal music is the fact that there is no note or chord which seems to be the place of rest. So then you have to establish that somehow. I’ve tried to do that. I mean, there are all sorts of different ways of constantly returning, let’s say, to a group of notes so that that is heard over the whole or over large stretches of time. I mean I’m aware of this particular problem because after all, on the other hand, you get a little tired of those symphonic endings with the same chord repeated over and over again. [Laughs] That seems to tell me nothing anymore.
[ 65 ] One thing I hear in new works such as Boston Concerto is an aspect of refrain: material which has a very strong textural profile that returns and substitutes for the function of a cadence or a home pitch. And I think this is, for me, one of the striking developments in your music, beginning in the mid-’80s. Where in the past you would overlap and juxtapose contrasting elements, now there’s more of an alternation.
[ 66 ] That’s right.
[ 67 ] I hear this in the Fifth Quartet too, where [there are] areas of harmonics, and staccato, and so on.
[ 68 ] That’s right. Getting lazy. [Laughs]
[ 69 ] Is it? Would you talk a bit about the evolution of your music since the mid-’80s?
[ 60 ] I can’t answer. You tell me that. I don’t know how my music has evolved. I simply write what I like at the time that I like it, and I guess I like different things at different times in my life. That’s all I can say. Well, I mean, this new piano concerto [Dialogues (2003)] doesn’t do that. Everything is overlapped. In fact, it’s all one big strand of sound, which changes its character bit by bit here and there, and it’s like a river that keeps moving in different ways. I like to get that idea, that the motion is constantly bringing in new things and leaving old things behind, and picking them up again, maybe. I’m very interested in the long stretch of things, in trying to find ways of getting through a piece and being interested and yet not following the old tradition of sequences, for instance, or repetition.
[ 71 ] So this is really a new, still a new area for composers to explore. How does one do this? I think you’re maybe as close to solving it as anyone I can think of.
[ 72 ] Well, it bothers me that lots of composers don’t seem to be … Stravinsky, for instance, is very conventional in terms of the form of the pieces and the way he moves. I’m not saying the music isn’t wonderful. It is. Or even Schoenberg is very conventional. I mean, it goes in blocks and there’s a little transition to another thing. But I’m just not trying to do that, that’s all. Other people can do it, and they can even do it very well.
[ 73 ] Morton Feldman was my teacher and he took a different metaphor, taking from the abstract expressionists the idea that the canvas had no foreground and background and so his pieces were like an unbeginning and unending flow, although in a very different way from yours, but that was perhaps another way of …
[ 74 ] Well, in terms of that particular idea, early on it occurred to me that even as you and I, for instance, are talking, and this is the center of our focus at this moment, there are all these other things that are happening that we’re just vaguely, sometimes more conscious and sometimes less conscious [of], happening around us. And I’ve tried in many pieces to give this impression that there’s one focus thing and then there’s all this background of thought, sometimes remembrance of other things. Sometimes something that we’re talking about suggests something else which you then discard. But I’ve tried to make the pieces fit the way we think, a little bit, or the way we feel.
[ 75 ] You’ve talked about that with your program notes to the Fifth String Quartet, that it was an attempt to convey in music not only how musicians rehearse, but how ideas are put forth, accepted, played with, rejected.
[ 76 ] Yeah, I’ve tried all sorts of things from that point of view. What are you going to ask now?
[ 77 ] I don’t know. What would you like me to cover?
[ 78 ] What haven’t we covered? We’ve covered everything that you don’t want!
[ 79 ] Do you feel that a composer can become trapped in a certain way of working? And have you ever felt yourself to be trapped in a certain way of working, of structuring your ideas or developing your ideas?
[ 80 ] Well this is a peculiar question in the sense that composers – I think it must have started with Beethoven. Beethoven wasn’t trapped with his ideas but I think that when Haydn and Mozart wrote six string quartets in a row, I think they didn’t feel they were being trapped, but they were, from our point of view. I won’t write the piece unless I feel it’s an adventure of some kind. So that if I feel trapped, I do something else. I’m not going to do that. I don’t want to be bored by writing my pieces. I like it.
[ 81 ] I mentioned that question because it was something that I read about your admiration for Scriabin, and you felt that at the point in his career, because he started getting more mechanical in his writing …
[ 82 ] Well, Scriabin was a peculiar composer. After all, he wrote a whole bunch of stuff that was not unlike Chopin in its style in the first three quarters of his life, and then he gradually began to develop this particular harmonic style, and almost each piece is an exploration of a different type of harmonic system. But it was always built on one chord, which I can’t stand, which is the augmented fourth, and he’s got so darn much of that you finally get sick of it. But there are periods when he became very good with that, but then I think he got trapped a little bit. But those last piano preludes are very remarkable pieces. I think Prometheus is boring, but the Poème de l’extase is wonderful. You know, I think that people who get into this sort of thing with mysticism get trapped in the mysticism and they lose their ability to criticize their music from a point of view of a musician. They want to see it as a vision of some extraordinary thing, and Scriabin never finished that enormous piece that he was writing at the end of his life [Mysterium].
[ 83 ] What do you see as the role of intuition, of the non-rational, of raw feeling in the creation of a piece of music?
[ 84 ] Well, I think, I can’t really say that. What you’re asking me is something I don’t really know about, because what I do is, you know, I start writing and that writing suggests something else, and then that something else suggests something else, and it goes on like that, and then I go back and look over it and change it a little bit. I mean, this is all a matter of both training and intuition and experience and all sorts of things. Intuition is certainly always there in a certain sense, and the intuition has been guided in particular directions in order to produce, you know … I mean, I won’t start writing a Bach chorale in the middle of some of my pieces. I wouldn’t have any intuition to do that.
[ 85 ] One of the projects that Russ [Wiltse] is working on in connection with this film is that there is going to be a celebration at his university of Nadia Boulanger.(9)Nadia Boulanger and American Music: A Memorial Symposium, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2004. What is it specifically …
[ 86 ] They invited me to come to that and I refused to go.
[ 87 ] Why?
[ 88 ] Well, there are two things. I have quite a lot of commissions and I don’t want to spend the time doing something like that that would take out a lot of energy from me, that’s one thing, and the other thing is that Nadia Boulanger is very much part of a past long ago – you know, I studied with her from ‘32 to ’35. And I thought she was very remarkable, and I’ve written everything that I think about her in various books, and I feel that there’s no reason for me to go and repeat the same stuff over again.
[ 89 ] Especially that article you wrote in ‘77. It’s a wonderful article on the France/United States ….(10)Carter 1977.
[ 90 ] Well there’s that one in the book called Mademoiselle when I wrote the introduction to that.(11) Monsaingeon, Bruno. 1985. Also see Carter Ca. 1985/1995.
[ 91 ] Yeah. For the sake of the camera and for the people that are going to watch this we’re going to show it in the presentation …
[ 92 ] Well I have a picture of Nadia Boulanger myself there in the closet. And I also have a book in French about my music that has a picture of one of the letters I wrote to her in French, my handwriting.
[ 93 ] Elliott, can you give us one of your impressions of Nadia, maybe in two minutes, just for the sake of the camera?
[ 94 ] Oh, oh, oh.
[ 95 ] They sent me here, so I’ve got to get something.
[ 96 ] Well, I mean, I think, one of the most remarkable musicians I’ve ever known. I mean, there was no question that Nadia was more skillful than any of us could ever be in terms of musical ability. Every Wednesday for those three years we used to sing Bach Cantatas, and she would get some musicians to come and play the parts, and a singer, and then one of us had to play the figured bass. Boy did Nadia … She was severe about that. And she would come out and play things, you know, wonderful things that no one was … a wonderful figured bass with all sorts of imitations and everything. It used to drive us crazy, you know. No, I think… She was wonderful, you know. She showed, she would … I remember writing a piece that was a whole bunch of major sevenths, and Nadia said, “Well, you know, if you do that, it spoils them. Maybe the first two are all right, but more …” And then she went, out of her memory, she remembered that there’s a place like that in The Rite of Spring, and she played it over on the piano and she showed to me that Stravinsky, in these parallel major sevenths, had made a trill, which made them all fit into a chord, in the middle. I mean, and just out of her head, like that. I mean, all the time. I wrote a little chorus and immediately she said, “Well, you know, in Idomeneo Mozart did this,” and then she’d play it all and show you. I mean, it was all like that. It was just fantastic. She was difficult, full of humor sometimes, and sadness. My wife disliked her very much because she was terribly domineering. Bach Cantatas in those years didn’t have parts, so that after 10 o’clock at night in Paris a number of the students that copied well would go to her apartment and she’d give us some whiskey, and we’d copy parts from the Bach Cantatas until 3 in the morning. And then in Paris, you’d get a bus to go home. Mad. Anyhow … And finally she said to me, “You know, Carter, if you’ve made a blot on your music, I would never ask you again,” and so I made a blot. [Laughter] She was like that.
[ 97 ] What would you say about her overall influence?
[ 98 ] Well, it was all what I’ve been telling you this whole time: that it was this sense of very intense concern for music and for what you were doing and for me, having it have a meaning and paying attention, that’s what it was, mainly that, it was how to pay attention. She made me go back and start on ordinary harmony exercises, and she would show me that if the the alto did this and the soprano did that, it would be much better, and it was. I mean, it was always like that, just the tiniest little thing. So that gradually your focus became more and more intensified over what you were doing. I got to doing eight-part counterpoint for her. I saw her very near the end of her life when she was practically … You know she had terrible vision problems. She knew that she was going to have some kind of … The doctor had told her when she was very young that she was going to have trouble with a detached retina or something like that. So she felt it was very important to memorize everything. So during my lessons, very often she would memorize Shakespeare sonnets in English, and then ask me to explain whether she pronounced them correctly. We used to have that often. And then at the end when I finally saw her, this lady who was half blind, I walked into the room and it was the same day that Boulez was giving Lulu at the Paris Opera. She said to me immediately, “You know, Lulu may be a good work, but it’s certainly hard on the nerves.” [Laughs] And, you know, this was picking up something that we talked about in ‘35 and this was in ‘70 or ‘80 or whenever it was. And then we had a long talk about Dallapiccola and she said, “He’s a talent but not a genius.” And I complained, “He’s a genius and not a talent.” And then she turned around like this, started playing Mozart on the piano like that. Playing some part of Don Giovanni. It was very, very moving. Is that enough?
[ 99 ] Okay. One more question. For an educated adult listener who doesn’t have much exposure to or knowledge of modern music, how you advise him or her to find a way into it? Where do you start? What would you recommend?
[ 100 ] Well, I think that the first thing always is that the listener should find what are the important pieces of modern music, the good pieces, the wonderful pieces, the ones that everybody in the field thinks are very good, and listen until they understand and listen to them over and over. I said it’s the only thing you can do. I mean after all that’s the way you learned how to listen to Beethoven if you ever learned how to do it, I don’t know that either. I mean it’s not so simple to hear some of those things in Beethoven. The Eighth Symphony is a pretty complicated piece.
[ 101 ] Should people be better off to start with Beethoven and then go forward?
[ 102 ] I have a feeling that if they started with contemporary music, they’d have trouble with Beethoven. [Laughter] How’s that?
[ 103 ] We skimmed over that one I think. See, because this is for those people that are trying to find their way through the …
[ 104 ] Now a lot of the films that we see have contemporary music in the background. I mean, they have some other stuff, but you know, in the frightening scenes, the spooky scenes, there’s twelve-note music sometimes. In fact, when I was out in Ojai and they gave a festival of my music, one of my good friends, Fred Rzewski, was staying with a man who wrote movie music and the man came up to me angrily and said, “You know, you can’t write twelve-tone music except in horror scenes.” [Laughs] Of course I don’t think that way. And then a lot of pop music has had things in it that depend on contemporary music. It’s not as obscure as people make it out to be, I don’t think. In many ways, for instance, The Rite of Spring is one of the most lively pieces ever written. It’s full of life and violence and strength. And it didn’t become a recognized piece in concert halls until Walt Disney put it on a film. You saw volcanoes and then everybody understood what it was about.
Footnotes
1. Walter Piston went to Paris in 1924 and returned to Harvard in 1926, Carter’s first year there as an undergraduate.
3. Carter 2002.
5. These performances, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, took place on January 15, 16, and 17, 2004.
8. In other words, “Go this way if Brahms’s music is played.”
9. Nadia Boulanger and American Music: A Memorial Symposium, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2004.
10. Carter 1977.
10. Monsaingeon 1985. Also see Carter Ca. 1985/1995.
Bibliography
Carter, Elliott. 1977. “France Amérique Ltd.” In Paris-New York, 7–11. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou. Reprinted in Paris–New York, 21–26. (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou/Editions Gallimard, 1991.)
Carter, Elliott. Ca. 1985/1995. “‘Elle est la musique en personne’: A Reminiscence of Nadia Boulanger.” In Elliott Carter Collected Essays and Lectures, 281–92.
Carter, Elliott. 2002. Harmony Book Edited by Nicholas Hopkins and John F. Link. New York: Carl Fischer.
Leibowitz, René. 1947. Schoenberg et son école: l‘étape contemporaine du langage musical. Paris: J.B. Janin. Translated by Dika Newlin as Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949).
Meyer, Felix and Anne C. Shreffler. 2008. Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press.
Monsaingeon, Bruno. 1985. Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited. English Translation by Robyn Marsack of Mademoiselle: entretiens avec Nadia Boulanger (Paris: Editions Van de Velde, 1981).