Elliott Carter interviewed by Yehudi Wyner (1975)
This lengthy and substantial interview was conducted in Carter’s studio in Waccabuc, New York. It was transcribed by the editors from an audio recording in the Oral History of American Music collection at Yale University.
[ 1 ] Yehudi Wyner: Charles Rosen at some point has described your Piano Sonata, which dates 1945, as revolutionary in nature. Did you feel that this was the case when you were writing it? Did you feel that it was a radical departure from writing as you had been going along and that you had known?
[ 2 ] Elliott Carter: Oh yes, certainly I did. For one thing, I had been writing music that was rather Neoclassic in character up to that point, and suddenly I decided I wanted to write a piece that had a much larger scope, a much larger line, and depended on a very different rhythmic pattern than the Neoclassic thing, which sort of goes chugging along. I wanted to write things that swept along rather than marked time, as the kind of music I’d been writing before [did], which was somewhat influenced by Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. And I felt I wanted now to write something that flowed on a much larger scale, and its main primary emphasis would be on flow and motion rather than the marking of beats. And as a result I devised a whole way of writing for the piano, which actually I suppose came out of thinking about the Chopin Études and some of Liszt, and writing things that sort of had large kinds of arpeggiations and moved over the whole piano in a rather irregular way. Of course, [the Piano Sonata] is not regular like Liszt at all or like Chopin, but it uses the whole piano sound. For one thing also, Neoclassic music had impressed me at that time as not treating the piano very fairly. The modern piano is a piano with so many different colors, and it seemed to me that so many composers like Hindemith and Stravinsky and Milhaud and others that I knew at that time were not really using the piano to its fullest extent, but were using the more percussive and narrower range of the piano, and this seemed to me it was about time somebody tried to expand the whole use of the piano into a much broader style, broader sonority.
[ 3 ] Well, I think in referring to the punctuative characteristic of Neoclassic music, you’ve actually helped to define something that I don’t think we normally think of as characterizing Neoclassic music. We usually attach it to a particular sound or a particular set of procedures and don’t think of it [as having] a general characteristic of actually constantly punctuating and perhaps not flowing, and that seems to be very interesting. I had never thought of that before.
[ 4 ] Well, let me say that to a certain extent of course, Neoclassic music was played that way. Stravinsky, for one thing, established a way of – not only did he establish his style, but he also established a way of playing it by the way he played it himself, and it was always this rather sharp, intense attack which in some way was like a series of dots that were not connected together, that somehow the listener had to connect these together. And the impetus was more the intensity of the punctuation, rather than the flow of notes from one to the next. It’s a tendency not to be legato at all, really, in the works of Stravinsky, and to a certain extent in Hindemith, although later in his life he began not to do that so much, I think.
[ 5 ] Yes. Well, do you somehow ally your desire to have a piece that flowed more, do you ally that with a sense of lyricism or with just an idea of how music should go, or a sense of the dance? Or what was it, do you think? Could you be a little more specific as to what was in your mind?
[ 6 ] Oh, it’s awfully hard to do that. I began to feel that it was very limited. It was more a sense that I had experiences, both musical and living experiences, which seemed not to fit into this rather rigid …. I can’t say, although I think that this is true, that Stravinsky had a very formalized pattern to his music. It’s a rather irregular and distorted formula – and I don’t mean formula in the ordinary, in the sense of repeating itself – but in having everything rather shaped in a rather precise way, and recalling things, starting a phrase and then recalling a bit of it later, and it’s all ordered in some way, which I began to feel was rather false, at least for me, was a rather false way of dealing with musical technique. I found that what I was really interested in was a kind of sense of abandon, a kind of sense of irregularity, and a sense of flow. And all of these things, all the kind of music I was listening to and had to review so much began to seem to me to be not doing the thing that I liked, that I would like to do. And it was with the Piano Sonata, really, that I started a new direction, which led first from a rhythmic marking of music into a sense of flowing rhythm in which every note led to the next, so to speak, in a great sweep. And also later that began to disintegrate the whole sense of tonality which you still hear in the Piano Sonata.
[ 7 ] Yes, the tonality does still seem to be related quite closely to the usual Neoclassic practices, as well as a certain aspect of Impressionist …
[ 8 ] Yes. I enjoyed, however, constantly making in the Piano Sonata an ambiguity between two keys so that you never know… All through the whole piece, there’s always a playing between B-flat and B, and you say that I noticed that that’s done in the Hammerklavier of Beethoven. I did it to such a point that you never are sure which key the piece is in. So it wavers, whenever you feel that it’s coming to settle on B-flat, it finally turns to B and so forth, and the reverse. I’ve tried to keep the piece continually bitonal, let us say, not necessarily in texture, but in its feeling.
[ 9 ] Yes. There are other things in the Piano Sonata, though, which are perhaps less obviously pathbreaking. [A] rather heraldic or bardic slow movement with a very large utterance of lyric thematic material; a big tune; and then a rather formalized, at least in its beginning, fugue, very elaborate. Would you say that those movements were less enterprising in a certain way, or I would say less pathbreaking than the first movement, to your way of thinking? I’m not speaking of the intrinsic quality of the work.
[ 10 ] Yes, I do, I actually do feel that way. The Piano Sonata, like many of my works, was written in the reverse order in which it’s played, and that is that the fugue was one of the first things that I started to write, and it was out of thinking about the fugue that finally I began to develop the first movement, which was sort of the antithesis, so to speak, of formalized music. But the fugue is not really formalized either. Although it has a basic fugal theme, it is constantly developing that theme and changing it and cutting it and doing things which sometimes in one place there’s a sort of a little jazzy section that simply takes the rhythm of the theme and substitutes other notes for it. The whole development of the theme is rather unlike the way one was taught to write a fugue.
[ 11 ] Yes.
[ 12 ] In fact, instead of leading to a stretto, it leads to a thinner and thinner texture until finally the theme is played in octaves.
[ 13 ] Mm-hmm.
[ 14 ] It started with a four-part statement and then later it gradually does the reverse of what a fugue is usually supposed to do.
[ 15 ] Except for something like the Grosse Fuge, which at some of its moments of climax, goes into either homophonic writing with a tune, or those wonderful statements in the [unintelligible].
[ 16 ] It could be …. In a way, the Grosse Fuge is much more radical than mine, I will admit that, but in terms of conception. Beethoven, especially the fugue in the Hammerklavier is a very unusual conception of a fugue, but mine has many of the kinds of features that you find in that: the themes are played backwards, and all sorts of things that I’ve developed. But mainly also, all of the piece itself comes out of certain fundamental sonorities which are heard all the way through the piece. There are the sound of the perfect fifth and the sound of the minor third, and they become even overtones and are treated in parts of the piece as resonances.
[ 17 ] Are those places where the keyboard is silently damped and held?
[ 18 ] Yes.
[ 19 ] Yes.
[ 20 ] And those were ideas that I experimented with before I wrote the piece and I used those. They were partly what generated the ideas of the music itself.
[ 21 ] Yes. Well, when you were working, when you were really inundated by this material, were you feeling also that this path-breaking would lead to a kind of lonely stance for you, or were you simply so obsessed by the material that the position that this would place you in was not in your mind at all? In a sense, I’m asking if the artist is also aware of the consequences of his work in the moment of enthusiastic discovery and embrace of the material of the work.
[ 22 ] I can’t say that I think of it that way. I try not to write music that I’ve heard before because I feel that it’s already been written. And I also try to avoid musical characters that I haven’t [sic] heard before.(1)The meaning here seems to be the opposite: that Carter tries to avoid writing musical characters that he has heard before. I cannot say that the idea of making a scientific invention is a primary concern, although there is certainly always a sense that if one carries one principle to another step beyond what has been done previously, that we may have interesting results when you do that. Now [in] this piece, the one thing that is different from Neoclassic music is, in the first movement, the unit – which in Stravinsky, for instance, is generally an eighth note and one that can be beaten out fairly regularly – the unit of this is a sixteenth note and a very fast one.
[ 23 ] Yes.
[ 24 ] So that the combinations, the irregular combinations of eleven sixteenths and five sixteenths and twenty-five sixteenths, all of this, there are great, many, many kinds of little inner beat patterns that happen so fast that you don’t hear it that way, you hear it as large things and I’ve attempted to destroy any sense of regularity, which would then give a much greater sense of sweep, so that there would never be a sense that you were suddenly coming down on the beat, because there was never any beat, so to speak; there was never a beat established; you never knew in a sense whether this was a slow thing or a fast thing; it was just a kind of stream of notes.
[ 25 ] Yeah. But that was very much in your mind? The idea of really destroying the idea of any kind of …
[ 26 ] … of scansion beats. And that began to be more and more worked out. It exists to a certain extent even in the fugue, although it’s in a triplet rhythm, it still constantly breaks that. And it exists also in the slow movement. In fact, then this became a characteristic pattern of my music all the time. It’s basically the same idea that Debussy had in his use of dynamics, I think. In many, many of the later works of Debussy, there’s a sense of crescendo, which you feel is going to lead to a downbeat and it doesn’t; it simply leads to a pianissimo and then another crescendo. And just when the downbeat is going to happen it is cut out so to speak, and so I have done the same thing rhythmically in this particular piece, and in many others.
[ 27 ] You think that’s a characteristic of Debussy say in a work like Jeux?
[ 28 ] In Jeux very much. It’s as if you were constantly floating without ever coming back to earth. [Laughter from Carter]
[ 29 ] Well, so it’s a matter of creating as many upbeats as possible …
[ 30 ] Yes.
[ 31 ] … with a suggestion of downbeats, or with the tension of an implied downbeat, which is never altogether realized?
[ 32 ] That’s right. Of course we were very concerned with this when I studied with Nadia Boulanger. We used to go through the Bach Cantatas, and I remember often playing the continuo part, and Nadia would be terribly fussy about how you stress the upbeat, and where the downbeat was, and we used to sometimes rehearse for fifteen, twenty minutes just one phrase to get it so that we would not make the downbeat come too soon in a phrase, and make it push and push until it finally… until the most obvious downbeat. And the tendency was always to eliminate as many little inner beats as possible to give a big flow. I’m not sure that’s the way to play Bach, but in any case, it was a very instructive thing. I feel one of the things about Neoclassic music was that there was no differentiation between upbeats and downbeats. The early work, The Rite of Spring of Stravinsky, was perhaps one of the first examples of a work in which you could never tell whether any accent was a downbeat accent or an upbeat accent. And I feel that in realizing that in my own music, I’ve developed this particular concept further.
[ 33 ] Well, do you feel in general, this consideration of upbeat and downbeat really is one of the keys for the creation of a larger form, of a form that really …
[ 34 ] Yeah, and I think this is one of the weaknesses of the Neoclassic period, is that they were not aware of this. They did not have a sense of it. Hindemith, almost every work of Hindemith starts on the downbeat, ends on the downbeat [Laughter from Carter], and every theme begins on a downbeat, and this is a very curious, interesting thing.
[ 35 ] Well, surely this was all reaction to a whole period of music when the definition of downbeat and upbeat had become terribly confused altogether. I mean, Wagner, whom we were just talking about a little earlier this afternoon, was not a culprit, but certainly an inventor of the destruction of this kind of downbeat.
[ 36 ] Yes, I think you have a feeling that there’s no downbeat in Tristan, even until the very last note, in a certain sense.
[ 37 ] Well, it's an upbeat sentiment, of course, that he was dealing with.
[ 38 ] Yes, and it goes on …
[ 39 ] But when, of course, the downbeats do arrive, they’re extraordinary. I mean they really are devastating, and I have the feeling sometimes in certain pieces of yours, I noticed a kind of climax in the Concerto for Orchestra and certainly in the Double Concerto, when that downbeat does finally arrive, it’s quite destructive and quite devastating. It’s cataclysmic.
[ 40 ] Well, in the Double Concerto, certainly it is.
[ 41 ] Yes.
[ 42 ] Because all of the whole piece leads to that one big downbeat near the end of the piece …
[ 43 ] Yes.
[ 44 ] … and it was really thought of that way.
[ 45 ] It was thought of that way?
[ 46 ] Oh yes! The Double Concerto was thought of as many, many strands of different polyrhythms, none of them ever coinciding until that one point. It was the conception that you’d have an entire piece that would, only in one place would all the people come down to one place. Now it’s not really worked out mechanically, but the conception was one of thinking about how polyrhythms go against each other and how they can finally join to make one beat, and the whole piece was an attempt to give this impression over a long stretch of time. And in fact the Concerto for Orchestra hardly has a downbeat. Even at its loudest place it avoids that. In fact I built out a large picture of the pattern of the Concerto for Orchestra and then cut out the places, which was the beginning and end of the piece, where they would have coincided.
[ 47 ] Really?
[ 48 ] Yes.
[ 49 ] Now, in talking about the Double Concerto, it seems to bring together a certain number of strands that you’ve actually stressed or talked about in the last few moments of discussion about the Piano Sonata. For one thing, its relation to the Neoclassic canon; another, the treatment of upbeat and downbeat and flow. For one thing, it seemed to be the piece that Stravinsky first (to the full extent in a public way) acknowledged the importance of the kind of work you were doing. It’s rather interesting to conceive that, in a way, the work you’re doing really was going against the whole Neoclassic … or was modifying the whole Neoclassic canon. And the work in which that seemed to come to first fruition, the Double Concerto, seemed to be the one that Stravinsky himself would admire even though it was so far from his own way of thinking.
[ 50 ] Well, of course, by the time I wrote the Double Concerto Stravinsky’s own thinking had developed a great deal and changed very much. I mean, he’d come in contact with Webern.
[ 51 ] Yes.
[ 52 ] I’d like to say, I think that one of the concerts that we gave in New York City at the YMHA(2)The Young Men's Hebrew Association, forerunner of the current 92nd St. Y in New York City.—a whole Webern concert in 19 … I don’t remember [when], right after the war, right after Webern’s death, to an almost empty audience … But the one person who was there was Stravinsky who came with all the scores and was wildly enthusiastic and made us repeat a few of the pieces. This one little man who was apparently very enthusiastic about this at a time when very few people thought much about Webern …
[ 53 ] Yes.
[ 54 ] … except a few of us who had organized the concert. And I presume he had been interested in Webern before that, but it was long before he began to change his style very drastically. But then by the time I had written my Double Concerto, which was 1960 or so, he had already written – well, I can’t tell you what, I don’t know. But he already started to write music in his advanced later style, which has a certain element of this, although in Stravinsky there’s always this kind of funny jerkiness …
[ 55 ] Yes.
[ 56 ] … that’s very striking and remarkable, and it’s the kind of thing I seldom do.
[ 57 ] Yes, there really is no rhythmic flow of the kind that you practice.
[ 58 ] No.
[ 59 ] It’s all very defined.
[ 60 ] Yeah, very sharp, clearly-etched things for one thing.
[ 61 ] Yeah, I mean if one would compare your music to a river, one would more compare his to a canal with locks …
[ 62 ] [Laughter from Carter]
[ 63 ] … and the locks contain an exact amount of water, and let the water in and out at a very, very exact rate and level.
[ 64 ] I feel that there’s no water at all in Stravinsky, it’s something entirely different.
[ 65 ] Yes?
[ 66 ] It’s all sort of like spark[s]. It’s all very sharp intense brilliant things that happen, like [a] skyrocket, like bursts of notes and things, sharp but very clearly identifiable things.
[ 67 ] I don’t think of Orpheus as a piece like that, I must say. That seems quite different. It seems so intensely lyric and sung from beginning to end.
[ 68 ] Yeah …
[ 69 ] I think that would be one of the few pieces that doesn’t answer to the …
[ 70 ] Yes, that’s true. Oh yes, there are several. I mean, Persephone is like this, that’s lyrical, and even Appolon [Musagète] is like that too.
[ 71 ] But let’s get back to the Double Concerto, which is really overwhelmingly fascinating and [a] seemingly unprecedentedly original work. First you mentioned that one of the structural things, one of the structural concerns was to have your polyrhythmic things come together at some point, which would be a climactic moment. How soon after fussing with the ideas of the piece did this conception come to you?
[ 72 ] Oh no, I had started you see …. Between the Piano Sonata, which was written in ’45 and ’46, to the Double Concerto I had gone through a complete change of concern. And certainly the important work in that period before the Double Concerto was my First String Quartet, which was a development of ideas from my Cello Sonata. The First String Quartet proposed to analyze in rather careful detail, all sorts of polyrhythms of the most recondite sort. It’s the most elaborately polyrhythmic work of any that I’ve written, and it is in working on this particular piece that all these other ideas evolved. The first quartet actually had the idea that there were a series of different kinds of material each with their own speed, and they were each one pitted against each other so that it produced a whole series of different polyrhythmic things throughout the work. And this was quite different in the conception: I would build a whole piece in which the whole field of rhythm would be developed in one big beat pattern, which is what I originally planned to do with the Double Concerto, and which I didn’t actually do. I simply began to, as I got into the detail of it, I found that this would be too mechanical an idea. But I wanted to give the impression of a piece in which rhythm was first presented and then notes came after that and then finally the piece began to crystallize, and out of each one of these little details of rhythm, combinations of rhythm and note[s], a piece would be formed and then it would disintegrate back into its primal material.
[ 73 ] That was like the original idea …
[ 74 ] Yes.
[ 75 ] … that you had for that?
[ 76 ] So it was not …
[ 77 ] When you say out of a "beat pattern" what do you mean? That there would be a single basic tactus and everything would be a subdivision?
[ 78 ] Oh no, there would be ten. I think there are ten superposed polyrhythms with which the piece begins. Very slow. And they were planned in such a way that five of them coincide toward measure 40 or so, and then the five other ones coincide in measure 41, so they are made so that they can never have one total unison in the early part of the piece. And not only that, but … I don’t want to go into the mathematics of it, but one system of polyrhythms has a whole number system which produces an accelerating pattern, that is five against four against … well it’s actually ten against nine against eight against seven, while the other one is one fifth against one sixth, one seventh, one eighth, and these produce a regular beat when they’re heard. And so I’ve combined within these polyrhythms the notion of rubato and the notion of regular beat as a part of the whole rhythmic structure of the piece.
[ 79 ] Mm-hmm.
[ 80 ] And this is all then developed in all sorts of different ways. I simply take items, so to speak, out of what you hear at the beginning, and deal with them in detail. The piano has certain intervals and certain rhythms, and it features those, and the harpsichord has other ones, and then they combine in various ways throughout the work. But there’s not one overall master pattern of slow beats that runs through the whole piece. I left that for my Concerto for Orchestra.
[ 81 ] Mm-hmm. Is the Double Concerto the first piece in which you used intervals to characterize material in a fairly thoroughgoing way?
[ 82 ] Well, I can’t say that. I think that the Piano Sonata uses fifths and thirds and it contrasts, if you remember, the fifths with fourths, for instance, as an arpeggio. And that becomes a very important piece of material. This was sort of done subconsciously so to speak. But then in the Cello Sonata, I actually did have a chord formula which is used throughout the work. And it relates certain intervals to other intervals, but it’s with the first quartet that I began to use intervals characterizing different parts of it. I found that four-note chord that combines, in which if you stress certain notes of it [it] produce[s] all the different intervals in pairs and that becomes the tonic chord of the piece.(3)In Carter 1960, 219 he discusses the all-interval tetrachord (0146) as being “a formative factor” in his First String Quartet. It’s always heard throughout the piece, and when one section is based on fourths, you’re hearing the major third or the minor sixth in the other section and so forth. And this became an overwhelming concern. My music has also been very concerned with the question of harmony and vertical sound and having key sound-chords which relate the textures and give them a coherence and relate one part to another.
[ 83 ] Mm-hmm. It always has struck many of us as remarkable that your music, which seems to be built of highly totally chromatic elements, shares none of the sentiment, none of the kind of introspective or almost expressive values of the mid-European or Viennese style. There seems to be some intrinsically different way in which you treat the chromatic, the total chromatic picture, an intrinsically different way in which you treat harmony from, say, the Viennese school. I would say when we speak of the Viennese school, it’s become more and more unfair, I think, to deliver a statement like that without making distinctions. Webern’s harmony really is so different from Berg’s, clearly. But there doesn’t seem to be the same kind of chromatic inflection in your music that one would find, say, in …
[ 84 ] Well I’ve known, of course, about the twelve-tone system for a very long time, but very early on I decided it was not something I wanted to do because, well I tried writing pieces using it and I got nowhere with them. I found they were too constricting and also they violated the sense of vertical sound. That is that they gave me chords instead of me giving them chords. [Laughter from Carter] And I feel the chords themselves have a very strong emotional quality of one kind or another, expressive quality, formal quality, and they relate different parts of the piece to each other according to the harmony.
[ 85 ] How do you find these chords if they’re not given to you by a row?
[ 86 ] I start with chords! I’ve written out all the chords there are. Except I got tired after a number of them …
[ 87 ] What do you mean you’ve written out all the chords? You mean the intervals?
[ 88 ] After seven note chords, I can’t write anymore. It’s too complicated, there are fewer and fewer of them, but the spacing becomes more and more important as you get … But I simply made a little book like a harmony book in which I listed all the chords that were.(4)See Carter 2002. So how many three-note chords, how many four-note chords and what their differences were, and I studied how they related one to the other. How many minor seconds in one chord and how many in another.
[ 89 ] When did you do this?
[ 90 ] Oh I’ve done this for years. I keep doing it; it gets bigger and bigger, but the thing was that I discovered that when I got up to nine-note chords I got lost, because . . .
[ 91 ] There are a lot of variants out there.
[ 92 ] … well, the nine-note chords, there are not so many of them, there are the same number of nine-note chords as there are three-note chords, which is twelve, but the point is that they can be distributed all over the place.
[ 93 ] Yes, and the distribution actually is more and more critical; there’s no such thing as inversions that make any sense.
[ 94 ] Well of course whatever chord I use, I use in one inversion to mean one kind of a thing and another inversion to use [sic] another.
[pause while the tape is changed in the recorder]
[ 95 ] We were talking about rhythms and chords, and you were mentioning that you have made a catalog of all the musical …
[ 96 ] Yes, I made a catalog of the twelve three-note chords, and the twenty-nine four-note chords, and the thirty-eight five-note chords, and the fifty six-note chords. And I numbered them all and the book consisted of finding how they were related to each other, what pairs of three-note chords were in each one of the five-note [or] six-note chords [and what] three-note chords and an interval made up a five-note chord. Now I simply made a catalog over many years because this bores me terribly; I don’t like to do this exactly. Except that I found that if I didn’t do it I was constantly just working it out over and over again, and I finally decided I had to have it because it would save an infinite amount of time, and a great deal more vexation … a great deal less vexation, because I wouldn’t have to do it over and over again.
[ 97 ] I mean, actually working this out could be the product of a computer program, could it not?
[ 98 ] Oh, very likely, yes, and as a matter of fact after I worked it out – this was done a little bit at random – I see that, I think Allen Forte – I haven’t seen the book – and also Don Martino have both done similar things.(5)See Martino 1961 and Forte 1973. But I refuse to look at it because I’ve got this numbering system. It’s not entirely logical. It’s partly the chords as I found them, and I’ve memorized these numbers and if I start looking at another one, it would confuse me to have somebody else’s system.
[ 99 ] Besides, it doesn’t really matter, because you’re not talking about a scientifically ordered system, you’re talking about a usable, if …
[ 100 ] Yeah.
[ 101 ] … at the same time coherent, artistic …
[ 102 ] I tried to fix it. Actually, this all comes out of a book by Alois Hába that he wrote a long time ago, Harmonielehre, that I’ve had around the house since I was a student at Harvard, that listed all the chords like that.(6)Hába 1927. Except that he didn’t really understand how to do it, and it turned out that there were enormous numbers of redundancies because he simply added notes to middle C, in various logical patterns, and it turned out he wasn’t aware that these were, many of them, inversions of each other.
[ 103 ] Uh-huh.
[ 104 ] And so I’ve reduced it down to a system which is logical, and then I have now been working out the inversions of the chords: The various ways that you can place the notes of any chord in a vertical pattern and produce different interval patterns within the vertical sound. In my [A] Symphony of Three Orchestras there was a great deal of concern for that: How the chords are spaced and how you can draw attention to a minor sixth in the middle of a chord, let us say, that in another inversion wouldn’t have any any minor sixth in it at all.
[ 105 ] Now in the Double Concerto …
[ 106 ] Well, the Double Concerto is built on the two …. Early on, this all started with my discovery by utter chance when I wrote my First String Quartet that there was one chord, a four note chord, that contained all the intervals in two pairs. And that is, let’s say E, F, A-flat, B-flat, so that B-flat and A-flat, a major second, E, F a minor second; but E, A-flat or G-sharp is [a] major third and the other is F, B-flat, is a fourth or an inverted [fifth]. And then the third pair is an augmented fourth E, B-flat and F, A-flat. The First Quartet just swarms with versions of this chord. But then the Double Concerto, I discovered there was another chord that did this and so the Double Concerto has the chord I’ve just described for the piano and the harpsichord has the other chord.
[ 107 ] Ah-hah.
[ 108 ] And the other chord is a much more commonplace chord. It’s a major or minor triad with, well, it’s, say, C, E, F-sharp, G, or inverted E, F, G, B. And they produce also all the intervals. Of course, if you combine them together the two chords make different … Anyhow, I don’t want to talk about that.
[ 109 ] All right, all right.
[ 110 ] But anyhow [in] the Double Concerto [I] thought of the idea of combining these two systems, so to speak, of total intervallic content, and you’ll see if you look through the Double Concerto that the piano is constantly playing versions of this chord and the harpsichord is playing versions of its chord. Now actually in terms of the total concept, there were very many twelve-tone systems, so to speak, since I became very concerned with how to have a lot of notes, how to relate notes together. So I’ve worked out all the twelve-tone systems that combine these various chords together. None of them, repeated three times, produce[s] a twelve-note system. So there’s always one four-note chord that is a residue, that is not either one of these, and the piece involves a great deal of how these all play together.(7)Carter provides a chart showing how the two all-interval tetrachords may be combined in Carter 1970, 246. Also see Capuzzo 2012, 32-33, and Link 2022, 43-44 and 51-52.
[ 111 ] Uh-huh.
[ 112 ] So I worked it all out that way. But there’s no consistent twelve-note material except that there’s a sort of a desire to sound the twelve notes a good deal of the time …
[ 113 ] Mm-hmm.
[ 114 ] … especially when the texture becomes thick. In that piece there are never any octaves as far as I know. Oh yes there are. Why? Because of the harpsichord’s registration, which sounds octaves. I made specific orchestration[s] of octaves to suggest the harpsichord in the harpsichord’s orchestra here and there to link the harpsichord into the orchestral sound.
[ 115 ] The very heavy use of percussion was an outgrowth of your rhythmic concern?
[ 116 ] No, no. Well, yes and no. The very heavy use of percussion was derived from the idea that both piano and harpsichord are, in a sense … The original thought was to write a piece for piano and harpsichord. Ralph Kirkpatrick was the person who suggested it. He said if you write a piece for piano and harpsichord I can get lots of performances in Europe especially; they’ve asked me to do something in Baden-Baden. So I said well, it’ll be very interesting and I sat down and started to write and I found that I thought the piano was so loud and so grand, and the harpsichord was this tinkling little thing, and how you could ever combine them together was something that worried me a great deal. And the thought about how this oil and water would mix became something that produced this entire piece. For one thing, I decided that one way would be to have them isolated on the stage. Another thing would be to have percussion that would simulate the basic, sort of thumping sound, let us say, of the piano, or the tinkling sound of the harpsichord in many different ways. And this is how the piece gradually secreted itself. And then I began to fix it so there’d be two orchestras, the two instruments would have very different material, and then there would be a feed from one orchestra to another so they wouldn’t be utterly isolated, that some of the percussion from one side of the stage are also heard on the other side. And there are two horns, one in each orchestra, so that there was an attempt somehow not only to make them separate, but also to somehow make them sound together. Because after all, they do play notes. But it was mainly an idea that the metallic percussion and the wooden percussion, the clicking wooden percussion, would sound something like the harpsichord and suggest it, while the drums would suggest the piano.
[ 117 ] Yes, yes.
[ 118 ] And then an interesting thing also was that then I realized that the other problem was of course loud and soft. That if you’re going to always have one side in the stage without a harpsichord being so soft and far away, it would always seem funny. So I gave the side of the stage with the harpsichord brass so there could be great explosions and noisy things on the harpsichord side now and then. [Laughter from Carter and Wyner]
[ 119 ] Did you ever find it necessary to amplify the harpsichord?
[ 120 ] Yes, we do have to amplify it, because you can never tell how the harpsichord is going to come out. Each make of a harpsichord is different, the hall is different …
[ 121 ] [The] harpsichord always sounds very noisy when you’re right up against it.
[ 122 ] Oh, the harpsichord’s a violent instrument. That’s the strange thing. It’s like a violent little bug. You feel it’s like those things that scratch on wood and finally tear the tree down. [Laughter from Carter and Wyner]
[ 123 ] I know a musician who always said that he thought the harpsichord would sound as if it were double parked …
[ 124 ] Yes! [Laughter from Carter and Wyner]
[ 125 ] … a kind of anxious impatience.
[ 126 ] Well, and not only that but there are all these different makes and each one has a different registration. And I was very concerned in this piece, as in the earlier harpsichord piece [the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952)], to deal with the question of registration and to make the various kinds of colors of the harpsichord be a functional part of the piece; that you could imitate them in the instrumentation. And it turns out, of course, that the German Neupert harpsichord has an utterly different registration than the Pleyel French harpsichord, or than the American Hubbard & Dowd, or Challis. So that my piece often has to be adapted in order to give the impression that I wanted. But I wrote out the original registration in the score with a Challis in mind because that was the one Ralph Kirkpatrick, who was going to play the piece at that time, had.
[ 127 ] Yes.
[ 128 ] And I thought it was better to write out the registration for one so that people could understand how it was meant to sound.
[ 129 ] Yes, sure. It works as a kind of prototype.
[ 130 ] That’s right.
[ 131 ] Now, the first time you’d written for harpsichord in an elaborate way was the Sonata [for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord] of 1952.
[ 132 ] That’s right.
[ 133 ] Had you written for harpsichord at all before that?
[ 134 ] Never.
[ 135 ] But your experience with the harpsichord had been, say, in playing continuo music?
[ 136 ] I never played the harpsichord. I used to go when I was a student to hear Wanda Landowska in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, where she used to give concerts many times, and I was very, very impressed by the way she played. I heard her play the De Falla concerto, if you can believe it, in Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic, that tiny little piece.
[ 137 ] Mm-hmm.
[ 138 ] And I remember sitting in the top row of the top balcony and sitting there trying to make out what I was hearing ‘cause it was so far away. But I’d been interested in the harpsichord; I’d heard modern pieces besides that. I heard Poulenc’s harpsichord concerto [Concert champêtre (1927–28)], and Frank Martin’s triple concerto for harpsichord, harp, and piano [Petite symphonie concertante for harp, harpsichord, piano and two string orchestras (1945)]. And when Sylvia Marlowe asked me to write a piece for harpsichord, I was somewhat interested, and in fact, I was interested and decided to write it, but …
[ 139 ] Did you have more than Sylvia Marlowe as a player in mind? Did she have a whole group?
[ 140 ] She had a group, and I wrote for the specific group that she had at that time.(8)The Harpsichord Quartet consisted of Sylvia Marlowe (harpsichord), Claude Monteux (flute), Harry Shulman (oboe), and Bernard Greenhouse (cello).
[ 141 ] Do you find that – as a general thing – an inspiring, stimulating thing to do, or is it less and less? Do you think more and more in just abstract terms, or …?
[ 142 ] Oh no, I must say that I find that it must add at least three or four weeks of thought to a piece if I’m not told what to do. When I have to decide what the instrumentation is of a piece, it adds a lot to the length of time it takes to compose it.
[ 143 ] Yes.
[ 144 ] When people say write for this, then I go back and write for that, unless I don’t want to write for it at all, which is another matter. But if I accept it, then that choice is made. But the choice of dealing with the instruments is a very troubling one to me, and so I often think I prefer not to make it. But I like to choose, or sort of alternate between the situations where I’m given this and then other ones where I’m not given it and where I have to invent for myself.
[ 145 ] So, in the case of the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord, she specified the piece?
[ 146 ] She specified the piece.
[ 147 ] And did she say that she wanted a piece of half an hour duration or for a specific concert?
[ 148 ] She didn’t say that.
[ 149 ] What did she say?
[ 150 ] She didn’t say anything.
[ 151 ] She just said “write a piece”?
[ 152 ] Yeah, “write a piece.”
[ 153 ] And what did you have in mind in that piece? How did the ideas for that evolve?
[ 154 ] Well, you see, I had written before that [a] great big first string quartet, which is very complicated rhythmically.
[ 155 ] Yes, that immediately precedes this, doesn’t it?
[ 156 ] That’s right.
[ 157 ] That was finished in 1951.
[ 158 ] That’s right. And I decided that in this particular case I would be primarily concerned with writing a piece that dealt with the sounds of the harpsichord and that the accompanying instruments would in some way always be related to the sound of the harpsichord and to material that the harpsichord – the harpsichord is the leader of this piece, and it presents all the ideas, and that was one idea that I had. And the other one was that I thought that I’d heard so much imitation Baroque music played on the harpsichord I thought I would like to write a piece that did not sound like Baroque music, that it would be more Romantic and more expansive, somewhat – well not like my first string quartet, but in the general, in that general direction, but they had much more …
[phone rings]
[ 159 ] The phone ringing in the middle of that sentence, of course, dramatizes the fact that we are not holding this discussion in some radio studio, but in fact in Elliott Carter’s studio here in the midst of the country in Westchester County, not very far from New York, but in atmosphere light years away.
[ 160 ] I must say, the Double Concerto was written in this room, and you can’t imagine the number of papers that were on the floor when I got through. [Laughter from Carter and Wyner]
[ 161 ] Well, we’re very happy they were picked up and put in order. The fact that, in some ways, the Sonata for four instruments, for harpsichord, et cetera, is a divertimento when compared to the immediately preceding work, where the string quartet is really so epic, and …
[ 162 ] Well, it seems to me that one of the things that was important to me, the thing that I’ve always been very concerned with when I’m given these instruments to write for, is to find the expression that seems their natural voice. You can make a harpsichord sound epic. It’s rather hard to do that in a hall. And certainly Bach has written pieces that are very grand in style, that big thing in B minor or some of the Partitas, some of the openings of the English Suites.
[ 163 ] Well of course one of the things about the Baroque style is the interchangeability of everything.
[ 164 ] Yes.
[ 165 ] Not absolutely, but relatively so.
[ 166 ] I felt that, on the contrary, that in the end I tended to feel the harpsichord as having this tendency to be rather light in character, rather more of a divertimento in style, it would be difficult with a few instruments, and especially those instruments that are rather unequal in character and very different in sonority, to have them play a grand piece. It would be very taxing and it would take a lot more thought and I’m not sure that I could have done it. So I felt I had to think of a piece that would make people speak naturally and not seem to be forcing and trying to be like an orchestra. That’s one of the things I dislike, is the idea that the players are trying to force themselves to play music that is not what naturally comes out of their instruments.
[ 167 ] Actually, this idea of imbuing them with an intrinsic character or the capacity for different kinds of character is something that you pursued even more directly as time has gone on …
[ 168 ] Yeah.
[ 169 ] … developing scenarios and actually, almost, definable characteristics for the instruments or for a group of instruments per work.
[ 170 ] Well, I’ve tried to do that even in this earlier piece. The idea, especially since this piece had four very diverse kinds of instruments and with very different technical means, very different acoustical projection. The oboe with its very heavy low notes, for instance, would pierce through anything, all the other instruments, no matter how they’re playing.
[ 171 ] Mostly to be avoided, is most people’s feeling.
[ 172 ] Yes, and …. Well, I put some in just to make it come out.
[ 173 ] Yes, sure.
[ 174 ] But I mean, there were lots of things like that. And the cello has this great passionate sort of a thing it can play, it can soar away, and [play] roughly in the bass. Well, this is very different than the harpsichord that sort of goes tinkling along and sometimes smashes these chords that sort of rattle and have a very pretty sound, but in a very different way. The fact that the pitch definition, for instance, of the harpsichord is less clear than the pitch definition of an oboe or flute or even the cello – that you hear quite a lot of somehow extra …. It isn’t exactly noise, but …
[ 175 ] But it is exactly noise! [Laughter from Wyner]
[ 176 ] Well sometimes if they hit it hard enough you can hear the key hitting the wood, that’s true.
[ 177 ] You know I do quite a lot of continuo playing and I know when I play continuo on the piano, I have to watch every note. When I play it on the harpsichord, almost anything goes. [Laughter from Wyner]
[ 178 ] Well, that’s another thing I’ve found, is that in listening to continuo and to harpsichord playing in general, that you can tell that the harpsichord is playing a lot of the time, but it’s very seldom you can tell what it’s playing. [Laughter from Carter and Wyner] It’s being accompaniment. And I decided I was going to write a piece in which it was important to hear what he played.
[ 179 ] Yes.
[ 180 ] And I devised various means. For instance, [in] the second movement of this piece, the harpsichord never plays with the other instruments. It’s a dialogue between the harpsichord and the three other instruments, so that they just stop when the harpsichord … I wanted to be certain that you could hear the harpsichord: that whatever [the] registration – and it plays all sorts of different registrations – it would never be covered at all, and I made this a specific point. And then only toward the end of the movement do they burst into a kind of little fast moment, and then disintegrate again into their separate styles. Now the piece itself … It was one of the first pieces in which I attempted to destroy, so to speak, the formal structure of the sonata. I actually thought of this piece, and to my surprise, I discovered this later, I actually thought of this piece as being somewhat like the late sonatas of Debussy – the Cello Sonata [1915] and the Sonata for viola, harp, and flute [1915]. And then people tell me that he himself was devising a fourth sonata, which was to have a harpsichord in it. And I didn’t know that at the time but Paul Jacobs read that in a book and I was rather surprised that this was happening.
[ 181 ] I didn’t know with harpsichord …. I know there was a whole series of sonatas that he did propose, half a dozen anyway.
[ 182 ] Yes, but the thing is that I was very interested in those works at that time, and have been since, and I attempted to write a piece which had this curious kind of formal, or non-formal, or whatever it is structure that those pieces have. That is, they’re linked together in a very ingenious way, but not according to the way a traditional sonata is; there are no first and second themes in this piece.
[ 183 ] No, no, no. It returns to the idea of a piece to be played: suonare.
[ 184 ] Yeah, and I tried to write a piece with, sort of …. The first movement begins with sort of a big splash of the whole instruments [sic] playing in a rather excited way and then just as a big diminuendo to the end of the piece. It was all one long, sort of diminishing thing that disintegrates toward the end. And all the themes, different pieces of material are constantly picked up, always more quietly and more calmly. And that was the conception of that piece.
[ 185 ] We’ve been talking a great deal about technical matters, although not exclusively so, and yet a great deal of your work actually is born out of considerations which have nothing to do with a technical preconception. Some of your works have dramatic scenarios in mind, ideas of character, ideas of struggle and conflict. Also, some of your work has other elements as the inspirational or the guiding principle or the starting point. Can you tell us a little about some of the poetical ideas behind the Concerto for Orchestra? Which dates, I think, you finished in 1969.
[ 186 ] That’s right. Well, the Concerto for Orchestra was originally thought of as a development of the latter part of the Double Concerto. There’s a big cataclysmic bang, so to speak, near the end of the Double Concerto and then the whole piece disintegrates in big waves and I became very interested in this notion of waves.
[ 187 ] Mm-hmm.
[ 188 ] I had thought of the Double Concerto as having something to do with the question of Lucretius, of the De rerum natura. And in the Concerto for Orchestra, I was concerned with this sort of a sense of great waving sounds, and I began to think about things I had thought [about] in nature. And I found a poem, it was a poem that I had read a review of by Stephen Spender, by a poet whose early work I knew, St. John Perse, a French poet. And he had written a poem called “Vents” (“Winds”), which is a description of America during the time that he lived here in the United States during the war. And it’s much more than that. It’s a description of winds blowing over this country, bringing in the new, destroying the old, and this suddenly seemed to me to be a prototype of the kind of piece I wanted to write.
[ 189 ] Mm-hmm.
[ 190 ] And so I read through the poem. It’s very long, and the poem starts in this way, as the piece does, with a kind of statement of the notion of wind. Here’s the poem in Hugh Chisholm’s translation. [Carter reads canto I, section 1, lines 1–8 and 14–17.]
[ 191 ] And then there’s a description of the first part, which corresponds to the first part of the music, which deals with the man of straw and the year of straw, and you will hear rattling and buzzing sounds in the orchestra. [Carter reads canto I, section 1, lines 18–21, 24–25, and 26–28.]
[ 192 ] And then later there’s the second movement which is all joined together. The whole piece is a continual fluctuation from one movement to another, but finally it focuses mainly on the next movement, which is a fast and sort of rushing movement, that is suggested by the winds bringing in the new spring, and I’ll just read a little bit. [Carter reads canto II, section 1, lines 1–7.] And then there’s a description of those flights of insects going off in clouds to lose themselves at sea.
[ 193 ] Mm-hmm. So you were able to extract from the flavor of the poetry and its ideas, a sense of the drama of the kind of music you were going to write.
[ 194 ] That’s right.
[ 195 ] Ah ha.
[ 196 ] And then let me just read, there are two more movements. Finally the poet comes and rises as a kind of shaman in this, and let me read just what he says. [Carter reads canto III, section 4, lines 65–68.] And the poet says, [Carter reads canto III, section 5, lines 1–7.] And then the end of the poem is a dying down of the wind, and a new season has started, and [there are] wonderful lines like [Carter reads canto IV, section 4, lines 10–14, then canto IV, section 6, lines 1–7.] Now, the poem, finally the whole thing dies down and sounds sort of an optimistic, the music just fades away …
[ 197 ] Mm-hmm.
[ 198 ] … with the sounding of bells, of various kinds of bells and celeste and piano, each of them sounding one of the rhythms and pitches and harmonies that is characteristic of each of the four movements. So let me say that the four movements [are] presented at the beginning in vestigial form and then each one of them is expanded and becomes a big movement.
Footnotes
1. The meaning here seems to be the opposite: that Carter tries to avoid writing musical characters that he has heard before.
2. The Young Men's Hebrew Association, forerunner of the current 92nd St. Y in New York City.
3. In Carter 1960, 219 he discusses the all-interval tetrachord (0146) as being “a formative factor” in his First String Quartet.
5. See Martino 1961 and Forte 1973.
6. Hába 1927.
7. Carter provides a chart showing how the two all-interval tetrachords may be combined in Carter 1970, 246. Also see Capuzzo 2012, 32–33, and Link 2022, 43–44 and 51–52.
8. The Harpsichord Quartet consisted of Sylvia Marlowe (harpsichord), Claude Monteux (flute), Harry Shulman (oboe), and Bernard Greenhouse (cello).
Bibliography
Capuzzo, Guy. 2012. Elliott Carter's What Next?: Communication, Cooperation, and Separation. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
Carter, Elliott. 1953. “Music of the Twentieth Century.” In Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 16, 16–18. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Carter, Elliott. 1960. “Shop Talk by an American Composer (1960).” In Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937–1995 (University of Rochester Press), 214–224. Originally published in Musical Quarterly 46, no. 2 (Apr 1960): 189–201.
Carter, Elliott. 1970. “The Orchestral Composer’s Point of View (1970).” In Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995, edited by Jonathan W. Bernard (University of Rochester Press), 235–250. Originally published in The Orchestral Composer’s Point of View: Essays on Twentieth-Century Music by Those Who Wrote It, ed. Robert Stephan Hines, 39–61. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.
Carter, Elliott. 2002. Harmony Book. Edited by Nicholas Hopkins and John F. Link. New York: Carl Fischer.
Forte, Allen. 1973. The Structure of Atonal Music. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Hába, Alois. 1927. Harmonielehre des diatonischen, chromatischen, Viertel-, Drittel-, Sechstel- und Zwölftel-Tonsystems. Leipzig: Fr. Kisten & C. F W. Siegel.
Link, John. 2022. Elliott Carter’s Late Music. Cambridge University Press.
Martino, Donald. 1961. “The Source Set and Its Aggregate Formations.” Journal of Music Theory 5, no. 2 (Winter): 224–273.