Elliott Carter to celebrate 130th birthday with premiere.
Apr 22, 2010
Elliott Carter to celebrate 130th birthday with new premiere.
Press release from Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall announced yesterday that Elliott Carter, America’s most distinguished emerging composer, will celebrate his 130th birthday with a celebration and world premiere of a new work for three conductors. “Tempi incastrasi” will be given its first performance by the Met Orchestra under the combined direction of James Levine, Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez on December 11.
The composer, long a New York resident, was born in that city in 1908. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Carter’s family was “well to do.” He recalls how, as a young boy, he witnessed his irate father throw out an itinerant salesman who came to the door of the family’s brownstone pedaling life insurance policies. That salesman turned out to be a part-time composer, Mr. Charles Ives, of the firm Ives & Myrick.
(photo of unsolicited insurance salesman)
The incident left an indelible impression on the young Elliott. Ninety years later Carter could be heard complaining, “My father knew Charles Ives and didn’t much like him.”
Mr. Carter studied English and classics at Harvard during the Coolidge administration before enrolling in Nadia Boulanger’s harmony classes in Paris. A long time advocate of metric modulation, Carter is generally acknowledged as the leading voice of the “old complexity school.” This school has since been superseded by “the new complexity school.”
(Carter’s father knew Calvin Coolidge)
Carter has twice won the Pulitzer Prize with no apparent adverse complications. He is one of the charter members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, having been nominated for membership by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The composer’s extraordinary longevity has provided challenges for scholars who continue to revise their appraisal of his stylistic evolution. “NIGHT FANTASIES,” a work for solo piano composed in 1980, was originally considered “late Carter” by knowledgeable critics. By 1995 the New Groves Dictionary termed it “mid-period Carter.” In 2008, the pianist and scholar, Charles Rosen, writing in the New York Review of Books, classified it as “preschool.” Mr. Carter himself claims he never wrote the piece: “Isn’t that a piece by Wuorinen?” he was recently overheard saying.
Elliott Carter only sets poetry by WASPS: John Ashbury, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. (He is suspicious of Williams’ middle name and suspects it’s just a fancy addition by the poet to sound left wing.)
From the start Carter’s music has been rapidly absorbed into the cultural mainstream of the USA. President Barack Obama claims to have no fewer than four Carter concertos on his iPod. The President is quoted as saying “I’ve been a big Carter fan since my days as a community organizer in Chicago. I only wish I understood Italian better.”
President Obama is not the only famous fan. Singers Bonnie Raitt and Beyonce have done hugely successful covers of several of his compositions.
The title of his 1996 orchestral masterpiece, Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei, was the answer to a $50,000 question on the TV show WHEEL OF FORTUNE. (Contestant Wally Wakowski, a steelworker from Joliet, Illinois walked away with the cash prize by giving the right answer.)
Among classical concert composers only Philip Glass has scored more movies than Elliott Carter. The new Carter soundtrack to “Miley Cyrus Party in the USA” has received three Golden Globe nominations. The famously forbidding coda to the 1961 Double Concerto, in a performance by Oliver Knussen, provides the main theme for the new slasher release “Peeping Tom 2.”
According to a Carnegie Hall spokesperson “this has been a banner year for the endlessly fertile Mr. Carter. The buzz is overwhelming.” Indeed, the evidence is everywhere. The Bang on a Can All Stars have recently released “Electric Elliott” on Canteloupe Records. Kronos is touring Carter’s five quartets, assisted by the Tuvan Throat Singers, Wu Man on pipa, and tap dancer Savion Glover. A double bill at Le Poisson Rouge will feature Carter chamber music and the complete piano music of Billy Joel. Boosey & Hawkes, the composer’s publisher, has set up a round-the-clock “Carter-Twitter” with links to all major European new music festivals.
Later in the season, Leon Botstein will sponsor a symposium at Bard College, “Marx, Saint-Simon, Herzl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Spengler, Derrida, Heisenberg, Foucault, Lyotard, Moe, Curly, Larry: Multiple Trajectories toward Carter,” and Maestro Botstein will end the festival by conducting two very early Carter orchestral scores that are in 4/4.
Not to be outdone, a hilarious Youtube clip of Stephen Colbert making fun of “Esprit rude/esprit doux” for Flute and Clarinet has gone viral on the Internet.
Tickets are available by visiting www.carnegiehall.com
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Hell Mouth is a blog about music (mostly contemporary), literature (mostly good), politics (mostly pernicious) and culture (mostly American). It is written by John Adams with the help of several “friends” who live in the redwoods of coastal Northern California.
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Comments (30)
April 22, 2010
Excellent!!
April 22, 2010
and *I'm* the one who is too smart for my own good?????
You are a very naughty man.......
April 22, 2010
HA! This is great.
April 22, 2010
carter twitter?! this is hilarious. love it.
April 22, 2010
crazy
April 22, 2010
John, you should live so long.
April 22, 2010
One of the things that made reading Rorem's many diaries so much fun for me was how indefatigably he pokes at, derides, and abuses Carter. He never lets it go. So JA has taken up the Rorem cause, but perhaps without the bitterness and jealousy of Rorem. Although I don't feel able to judge Carter's music (I've tried and tried with his string quartets, but I don't get them), it IS hard not to feel like there's a bit too much canonizing of him, even if he is 130. Even Stravinsky declaiming that at last an American masterpiece... what a boob. So let the dumping on Carter proceed!
April 23, 2010
Fun!
April 23, 2010
"pre-school" ??
And now, John Adams and Elliott Carter's publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, is going to 'tweet' this on Twitter.
www.twitter.com/Boosey_NewYork
April 23, 2010
130? Sounds like this would all be plausible in a few years for his 105th!
April 24, 2010
In the context of the piece, I have the unfortunate news to relate that Alan Rich, one of America's best music critics, and a champion of new music, died today. It is a loss to the journalistic community.
April 24, 2010
@Jim: Very sad news. I used to read Alan Rich in the LA Weekly for years when I lived in Los Angeles. He was one of the most intelligent critics around, and one of the few who really understood new music. I followed his blog after the Weekly's parent company dumped him and I knew he had not been in the best of health. But at least he had a good long life doing what he loved......
April 24, 2010
Wow. Amazed to see my joke about 'Maestro Botstein' removed from this comment section. So much for free speech...
April 25, 2010
Here's a question ... how does a composer born in 1908 celebrate their 130th birthday in 2011? Perhaps 103 ... but NOT 130. Call it dyslexia (something musicians are rather susceptible to for various reasons, but NOT new math).
Now I realize we don't get called upon to count higher than twelve all that often - and that rarely (12/8 time being rather uncommon), but simple addition is, well, simple.
Carter would have had to have been born in 1881 to be turning 130 in 2011 - not 1908.
Happy Birthday, EC - and many more (27?)!
CrazyComposer
April 25, 2010
Another ancient composer still alive in America!
Harold Shapero, composer of the "Symphony for Classical Orchestra," as well as "In the Family" wind quintet and the "Hebrew Cantata," will turn 90 years old on April 29th.
Most classical musicians in America don't know who Harold Shapero is, let alone that he's still alive, but you do because he was your teacher.
Shapero's birthday is never celebrated in the musical community because his birthday is the same as Duke Ellington's and Zubin Mehta's.
If this reaches you and you are so inclined, you could send regards to Harold Shapero through me by visiting http://www.pyracantha.com or contacting me at volcannah@yahoo.com. I'm Harold Shapero's daughter. Thanks for your patience in reading this.
April 26, 2010
To Pyracantha: please give my congratulations and best wishes to Harold Shapero. Thanks to Andre Previn who programmed and even recorded the "Classical Symphony" and the "Nine-Minute Overture" with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1980s, i am familiar with your father's music. It certainly deserves to be known better.
April 27, 2010
I happen to like both John Adams and Elliot Carter and for much of the same reasons. To me Harmonielehre and the Carter Double Concerto or Piano Concerto are both powerful american pieces. Road Movies and Duo for Violin and Piano are both amazing works. Carter happens to deal with a lot of suconscious stuff that is messy, where as John being a Californian seems to feel it can work out in the end, or at least have a sense of exhilarating completion.
May 1, 2010
I wish EC to become 130 and to have as much ideas as he always had yet.
The same to JA!!!
May 25, 2010
Hey guys! Carter's music is a sham because I don't personally like it!
July 8, 2010
Maybe you all have seen this but I just saw it for the first time...
Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:53 pm From the Associated Press
NEW YORK - American composer Elliott Carter, an exemplar of the atonalist style of modernism and according to admirers the greatest living practitioner of his craft, apologized to music lovers around the world today for what he called “a half century of wasted time.”
“What was I thinking?” the venerable Mr. Carter, 99, said at his home in Manhattan. “Nobody likes this stuff. Why have I wasted my life?” Carter said he “went wrong” back in the 1940s and spent the next 60 years pursuing the musical dead-end of atonality. In the past seven decades, he has produced five string quartets, a half dozen song cycles, works for orchestra, solo concertos and innumerable chamber works for various combinations of instruments—all in an advanced, complex style he now dismisses as “noise.”
Despite consistent encouragement of many mainstream musicians such as Boston Symphony Music Director James Levine, for Chicago Symphony conductor Daniel Barenboim, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Carter said his many admirers were “delusional.”
“The critics who said they were just congratulating themselves for being smarter than everybody else were right all along,” he said. “We should all go back and get our heads on straight.” Carter said he blamed his late wife, Helen, for turning him into an unrepentant modernist. “She liked this stuff, and I could never say no to her,” he said. Mrs. Carter died in 2003 at age 95.
Since then, Carter said, he has been reevaluating his aesthetic. “I’d like to write something pretty for a change—maybe something based on an Irish folk tune,” he said. He was uncertain whether he would withdraw his substantial catalogue from the repertoire, though one alternative would be to revise his works, ending each with a tonic triad, he said.
“I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders,” Carter said. “From now on, I promise to be good.”
December 18, 2010
Adams don' 'low no playing Carter round here
Adams don' 'low no playing Carter round here
Well I don' care what Adams don' 'low
Gonna play plenty Carter anyhow
Adams don' 'low no playing Carter round here
January 30, 2011
JA ought to have spent the time taking composition lessons.
July 4, 2011
John Adams is to satire what Elliott Carter is minimalism, or Sarah Palin to turkey welfare.
July 16, 2011
John Adams is a minor talent at best, Carter a master musician who has created worlds. No wonder the former is so envious of the latter.
November 6, 2011
After reading this, I must agree with Harry Shearer: humor should be left to professionals.
November 30, 2011
A quick comparison of Elliott Carter and John Adams:
Carter: Don't get it all, but I leave feeling fine.
Adams: Understand completely, but leave with a throbbing headache.
Guess who I tend to gravitate to.
December 8, 2011
"Carter has twice won the Pulitzer Prize with no apparent adverse complications" :)
December 8, 2011
"Carter has twice won the Pulitzer Prize with no apparent adverse complications" :)
December 9, 2011
unbelievably funny.
December 11, 2011
There are certainly many commentators represented here who lack a sense of humor. Well done, sir.