Conversations with Elliott Carter

If the Aldeburgh Festival began (almost) with a bang (see ‘Beside the Seaside’ below) it ended (almost) with the sound of a tiny cymbal - the final note of Elliott Carter’s Conversations which received its world premiere in Snape Maltings last Sunday. Performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard on piano, Colin Currie on percussion and conductor Oliver Knussen on a rather precarious-looking chair, the seven-minute piece packs in a great deal within its short span. Luckily Knussen and his musicians played it twice on the night.

With two other recent pieces on the bill, Helen Grimes’ exuberant Everyone Sang (2010) and Charlotte Bray’s haunting violin concerto, Caught in Treetops (2010), it was an evening (indeed a weekend) for new music at the Festival. One hopes that Carter would have felt in good company. In 1994, in a piece reprinted in his Substance of Things Heard, Paul Griffiths wrote:

You do not have to be eighty-five years old to feel marooned in the past while time races on, but you probably have to be that age - and specifically to be Elliott Carter - to have the reverse feeling of desertion by time’s skidding hurriedly backwards from a point you thought was not only yours but everyone’s. At a public interview before the world premiere in Chicago of his newest orchestral work, Partita, Carter reacted passionately to a question about the future. How could he have any certain hope for his music, he said, when the last decade had seen a rush of young composers - by whom he probably meant anyone under seventy or so - ‘writing like Brahms, and doing it badly’? His tone was regretful, bewildered, but not bitter: he has too much gaiety of mind ever to turn sour - or indeed, ever to write like Brahms. We therefore have the paradox of an aged composer producing some of the most exhilarating music around, and doing so with majestic accomplishment (if that does not seem too settled a term for this athlete of the mind) in his new piece.

But perhaps the youthfulness is not so paradoxical; maybe only the old, in these jaded times, have their innocence intact, and stay able to be surprised by immediate sensory impressions, as Carter is evidently surprised and delighted by sounds. Simplicity and directness have always been as much his blessings as the vaunted ‘complexity’. (Why should this always be introduced as a problem? Who complains of the complexity of a forest?) Indeed, the abundance, to give it an apter name, comes out of a simple certainty about the nature of a composer’s task… [p.22]

Listening to Conversation on Sunday evening - how the piano often seemed primarily percussive and the percussion instruments, especially the vibraphone, took on the more melodic role expected of the piano - we were reminded of a paragraph in Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler’s ‘centennial portrait’ of Carter:

Carter has drawn on existing traditions for key points of his creative process and his artistic philosophy, preferring to prolong and rejuvenate them rather than call them into question. This applies to his preservation of the idea of a self-contained work of art, set down in writing with maximum precision, and to his focus on working with conventional tonal material (for example, precluding electronic sounds and largely avoiding experimental performance techniques on conventional instruments). It applies equally to his understanding of the role of the performer, whom he employs primarily as an interpreter of his ideas and not, as in aleatoric music, as a ‘co-author.’ And finally it is no less applicable, at least in intention, to his understanding of listeners: although Carter has often said that he never thinks of the audience while composing, but only of the performers, his efforts to make the musical events audible, and his penchant for casting his musical discourse in quasi dramatic roles, doubtless spring from a desire to make statements of maximum concision and urgency and to communicate them to his listeners. [Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, pp.16-17]

Let’s hear finally from Elliott Carter himself, as quoted in Bálint Varga’s essential new book, Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers:

Each of my works is an adventure into a new conceptual, expressive, and musical domain which I have not yet explored. Their style is not something consciously thought about, but is a reflection of the expressive and musical intention. To work out a series of stylistic devices and then use them as formulae bores me as a prospect and it bores me in others who do it. Self-repetition is to me a sign of fatigue. [p.43]

In a 1985 postscript to Varga, Carter wrote: ‘The plan of your proposed book seems interesting and I hope you have the best of luck with it. It is courageous of you to include something about an American composer—for all of us have had a very hard time penetrating European indifference to our work.’ There was certainly no indifference on Sunday evening, as rapturous applause followed that delicate cymbal note in the closing minutes of the 64th Aldeburgh Festival.

Words and Music

Advance copies of Bálint Varga’s Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers have just arrived, and what a remarkable publication it is. Birtwistle, Boulez, Cage, Carter, Henze, Kurtág, Ligeti, Nono, Reich, Tippett and Xenakis are just a few of the artists who agreed to discuss their music and their influences. In this post we extract a few choice morsels but urge you to seek out a copy in your favourite bookshop, as we are unable to reproduce the compelling flow of conversation and ideas within the confines of a blog post.

Gunther Schuller

To get back to Darmstadt: in the early fifties there came about an alliance between the German radio stations, composers, publishers, modern music journals, and festivals. Radios, as you know, are subsidized by the state and can broadcast new music without any great risk. A political/business linkup developed: a festival premiered a new work, it was recorded or taped by a radio station, and then the tape was broadcast throughout Europe. And everybody became richer and more famous. As a result of a terrific publicity machinery, everything was made to sound bigger and better than it really was. That is how lesser composers, like Pousseur or Kagel, became touted as “great” composers. We were told in Darmstadt that they and Boulez and Stockhausen were the masters of our time, and we should all compose like them.

There were three composers in Darmstadt in those early years who thought this was all pretty silly: Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, and me. We were young and fairly cocky, and didn’t necessarily swallow Stockhausen’s line. I am proud of that. In the end—around 1957—I left Darmstadt, never to return.

Pierre Schaeffer

I am going to tell you why, at a particular moment in my life, I embarked on an adventure which I called concrete music.

I am not a composer. I have a degree in engineering but I have always regarded writing as my calling. As for my profession: I was one of the pioneers of broadcasting. I set up an experimental studio during the German occupation (today, they would call it an atelier) with the aim of developing the bases of radio art. Is it possible to create art devoid of the visual aspect? Is blind art viable?

Those were great years even though we had to work clandestinely during the occupation. We also participated in preparing the liberation of Paris. The first broadcasts went on the air a few days before the withdrawal of the Germans: it was rather a perilous undertaking.

It was after the war that the development of radio art really got under way. We wanted to find out all the possibilities inherent in this genre based only on text, background noise, and music—a genre that freed the imagination. Logically enough, I attempted on one occasion to create an experimental work in which I set out to explore at what point background sound, the condensing of noise turns into music. (In other words, musique concrete was the outcome of an accident, just as most other innovations. One stumbles on something one was not looking for.)

Toru Takemitsu

The pieces I wrote during the past several years have had a great deal to do with water. I love the sea. It has many faces. Numerous currents are whirling in it, each with a tempo, a color, and a temperature of its own. This phenomenon reminds me of the structure of music.

Twenty-five years ago when I started composing, I carried out concrete musical experiments with water. During a visit to France I was surprised to find that Pierre Schaeffer was working in the same direction. In my Water Music (1960) I use the sound of dripping water. I collected material from rivers, wells, and the sea and in the process of concentrating my attention on these sonorities, I grew fond of water.

Nature is important for my music in other ways as well. All four seasons are beautiful in Japan. I live on the shore of a lake and forty thousand cherry trees blossom in the neighborhood. Still, I prefer the autumn when trees, the grass—nature as a whole—change from day to day. One cannot catch the actual moment of change, only its result is tangible. It is a phenomenon that is of interest for me also as a composer.

Iannis Xenakis

Metastasis, that starting point of my life as a composer, was inspired not by music but rather by the impression gained during the Nazi occupation of Greece. The Germans tried to take Greek workers to the Third Reich — and we staged huge demonstrations against this and managed to prevent it. I listened to the sound of the masses marching toward the center of Athens, the shouting of slogans and then, when they came upon Nazi tanks, the intermittent shooting of the machine guns, the chaos. I shall never forget the transformation of the regular, rhythmic noise of a hundred thousand people into some fantastic disorder . . . I would never have thought that one day all that would surface again and become music: Metastasis.

I composed it in 1953–54 and called it a starting point because that was when I introduced into music the notion of mass . . . Almost everybody in the orchestra is a soloist, I used complete divisi in the strings which play large masses of pizzicati and glissandi. In other words, I do not use the term “mass” in a sociological sense.

Another experience of my youth dates from the time immediately preceding the war. I used to make outings to the countryside near Athens. I would take my bicycle, select a spot to erect my tent and listen to the sounds of nature. Crickets, for instance: their chirping was coming from every direction and was changing all the time. Those are also mass sounds, you see? But I also liked listening to the wind and the sea or the rain as it was lashing at the side of the tent.

Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers by Bálint András Varga is published by the University of Rochester Press and will be available soon from all good booksellers.

The image at the head of this post is taken from the book. The drawing, by Johannes Maria Staud, was made 'at the time of preparing the score of my opera Berenice in 2003/4.'

Talking to Morton Feldman (and 64 others)

Imagine being able to ask composers like John Cage, György Ligeti, Steve Reich or Karlheinz Stockhausen detailed questions about their influences and their methods of composition. This is exactly what Bálint András Varga did for his new book, Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers. Here, as a taster for this fascinating book, are excerpts from three of his conversations. First György Ligeti:

Noises do not influence me directly, but neither do I cut myself off from them altogether. The outside world makes an indirect impact. Music works with acoustic material, no doubt, but I do not think that the sounds of live or dead nature would influence me in a decisive manner. Various types of movement do. In my view, you see, music mirrors the processes of motion through sound. Machines play an important role… I have, after all, also written a piece for one hundred metronomes.

Although Atmosphères and Apparitions are not programmatic in character—I did not set out to render the sensation of flying in either piece—flying did have an indirect influence on their floating, on the continuous transformation of their musical patterns.

Without asking for my permission, Stanley Kubrick used extracts from Atmosphères, Lux aeterna, and the Requiem in the music of his science fiction film 2001. I was angry with him but I did like his work (apart from the mystical beginning and ending). While composing, I did not think of anything “cosmic” (Atmosphères is meant to convey “atmosphere” rather than “air”), but the film made me aware of the possibility of associating infinity with my music.

As far as Lux aeterna is concerned, the words only served as a chance for me to compose music which is in fact musica aeterna: as if it has been sounding from time immemorial and would be going on forever—we only hear a part of it. It emerges from nowhere, it is here and slowly disappears.

Interviewing Morton Feldman, Varga writes: I must plead guilty to having known precious little at the time about Feldman and his music. All I knew was that he was considered an important composer and that was enough for me to reach for my microphone. It will not be difficult to imagine my acute embarrassment in meeting this unique man face to face. I felt hopelessly European, hopelessly bourgeois, hopelessly underinformed. However, I made a brave effort to conceal my uneasiness and to conduct a conversation with Feldman as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

[On whether Robert Rauschenberg’s white pictures influenced John Cage]
What influenced John Cage in Rauschenberg was an answer to a philosophical question about life and art. Robert Rauschenberg is exactly my age. And brilliant. He said something that was very influential to a lot of young artists at that time. I think this is the influence of Rauschenberg, with his white paintings, to Cage. He said that he does not want either life or art. He wants something in between. A very influential statement: neither life nor art but something in between. And Cage would see this beautiful white thing in the shadows of the environment. He lived in a very beautiful apartment, Cage, and he saw where art and the outside environment could collage.

John Cage is only involved with music forms….That there is nothing there behind the material. So in that sense, John Cage is not a mystic.

Don’t you think that his music exudes an atmosphere and in doing so, it communicates something beyond the music, it communicates a way of thinking?
I think it asks a lot of questions. I think it’s the atmosphere of asking questions.

Whereas yours?

The atmosphere of answering them (laughs).

In that case, one must envy you: you seem to have the answers. Few people can claim that.

Only for my music. Only. You see, that’s another problem: I don’t feel that it’s a community. I could never listen to a piece of Boulez and get some insight from the piece. I could listen to a piece of Boulez and could say to him what I said once to Ligeti, who I like very much, we are very good friends, and I said to him: “György, you are too gifted to write European music”.

II.
Sounds do not surround you.

There are sounds right now.

I don’t hear them.

You don’t hear them?

No.

What sounds do you hear?

Nothing. I hear them but they are indigenous. In a place that builds modern buildings—do you hear the drilling that’s going on? It is absolutely like having a lion in a jungle. I mean it is indigenous to the landscape. It would be interesting if you would hear an Islamic chant. What’s happening here? OPEC, OPEC! (Vienna - where the interview took place - is the headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). In other words: I hear it like everyone else but it is not a source of . . .

. . . inspiration.

It’s not a source of anything. Most of the time I think of it as pollution. Noise pollution.

How about the sounds of nature, such as the wind, birds, and so on?

I have no contact with them. They don’t interest me at all. I can live very well without them.

So in composing, the sounds always come from within.

Yes, only when I am composing. Otherwise, you are crazy. I don’t go around hearing sounds. Some people do! Stockhausen, I am sure, is one of them.

Let’s turn to Karlheinz Stockhausen for our final snippet. Here the Master describes what one might find in one of his best known pieces:

In Hymnen there appear national anthems, that is, completely banal material as well as numerous other situations (recordings made in a Chinese shop, at a student protest demonstration in Aachen, at a ship’s christening in Hamburg, at a soccer match with crowds of people shouting, the squawking of birds, and boys shouting in a school yard). Linked to the American national anthem, you hear odd short-wave sounds (Morse signals, whistling, shrill screeching), as if someone has turned on a radio station at night, with distorted broadcasts. In the context of the “International” the words of a croupier: “rien ne va plus Messieurs Dames,” “faites vos jeux Messieurs Dames,” etc., are heard. Out of the “Rouge” called by a croupier in a roulette hall emerges a four-part fugue in four different languages on the word rouge, with all the different variations of the color red as listed in the color catalogue of a London paint company.

Longer excerpts will follow over the coming weeks. Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers by Bálint András Varga will be published towards the end of this month by the University of Rochester Press.

György on György

Bálint András Varga’s recently published György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages is a compelling view of the composer at work and his unquenchable thirst for artistic and human impressions. Rather than trying to find a representative piece from the interviews to excerpt, we decided to use one of Kurtág’s pieces on Ligeti: these demonstrate the composer’s love and admiration for his great friend in terms that cannot fail to move the reader.

The following is taken from the opening of Kurtág’s speech read in the presence of Ligeti at a ceremony in Munich in May 1993, where Ligeti was presented with the Siemens Prize. Kurtág is inhibited about speaking in public, but put together a beautifully inventive series of memories presented as scenes in a kind of theatre, as he explains in his introduction.

Dear György Ligeti,
Honored ladies and gentlemen,

How to speak—when one is not a master of words? How can I evoke scenes from the time we spent with Ligeti without having a minimum of eloquence at my disposal to connect my narrative with what came before and afterward?

If I could compose my memories like music I would have to tell them simultaneously —the chief strands in the middle—as if on a podium—and then imagine the scenes—for example, what Ligeti experienced earlier and I only know from his or others’ descriptions—let’s say high up—in a back corner—the consequences of the central events also somewhere at the side or the top center; and a series of merely illuminating incidents over the course of many years—so to speak—all around us.

1
So, first scene (central—on the podium):

Christmas Eve 1957—according to a telegram I still have, at 11:02 p.m. — Paris—Gare du Nord. Ligeti arrives in Paris for the first time in his life. I wait at the station. The pianist György Szoltsányi, my friend and our host that evening, finds it strange that someone should want to travel so late on Christmas Eve. He invites Ligeti as well to his home at 48 Boulevard Garibaldi.
“The metro is still running,” I say.
“No, let’s walk!”
And without hesitating Ligeti leads me through the streets of Paris, I who have lived here for over six months—naming every intersection and the streets beyond.

(back corner, top, left):
Ligeti’s early childhood. His obsessive pastime: perusing maps and memorizing them by heart—among them the map of his dream city, Paris—while already working on his fictitious country, Kylwyria.

(front, top, right):
The spirit of the Kylwyria construct seems to be hereditary—also in his early childhood, his son Lukas spent years writing the encyclopedia of his invented planet, with examples from its scientific history, literature, fine arts, and music.

(front, top, left):
The musical examples from this encyclopedia will later form an important starting point for my Játékok—or Games—for piano (and now a summary—all around us): For a long time, a lifetime, Ligeti led me onward. No, I must correct myself immediately: I followed him—sometimes right behind him and other times years or even decades later. I call it my “Imitatio Christi” syndrome. The first years of our friendship were marked not only by his intellectual leadership. Without being immediately influenced, I oriented my taste—even steps in my private life—according to his example.

2
(podium, center):
The Budapest Academy of Music, twelve years earlier—the beginning of September 1945. The entrance examination in composition. A very serious looking, friendly but distant young man, perhaps also distant because of his glasses, waits beside me. He seems older, but as I flip through his compositions it strikes me that he is a generation older. Choral works, probably also the second Cantata. From the Latin text I assume not very logically that he is a Calvinist theologian. There are also instrumental works and I see, or rather feel intuitively, that these are no student compositions. They comprise a self-contained, mature world, reigned over by a striking order in the note texture. My feeling: I have met a master.

3
(still on the podium, center):
Early July 1958. Now it is I who arrive, and he who waits for me at the station in Cologne. He talks about Stockhausen’s most recent works on the way to the hotel and then straight on to the radio station where I would listen to the recordings over the next two days, telling me of the Groups for Three Orchestras with three conductors, and of its Alban Berg-like violin cadences and the segments with the dramatic, wildly jostling and quarreling brass instruments. These are the sections that strike me the most vividly when I hear the Groups in Stockhausen’s presence at the studio. Artikulation, also a new work, overwhelms me entirely. I experience the work as the first true Ligeti—marked by a density of events, a directness in its statement and a fine balance of humor and tragedy that still seem to me unsurpassed, even compared with his later development.

(top, back, right):
I speak of my impressions from those days, not of the absolute value of the compositions. But even later these two—Artikulation, Atmosphères—remain for me absolute masterpieces—representing two basic aspects of Ligeti’s work. Apparitions seemed to me rather a station on the way to them.

(top, front, left):
Today I view Apparitions entirely differently, but my loves nevertheless remain: Artikulation, Atmosphères.

(top, front, right):
After my return to Hungary—we would not see each other for ten years—I began my new life with Opus 1. From then on, my ideal and aspiration was to formulate in my language something similar to what I had experienced with Artikulation in Cologne.

(top, back, left):
He had written me in Paris: “You must get to know the studio in Cologne before you go back to Hungary”—knowing how difficult it would be for me to leave the country again. And in fact, these two days were musically far richer and more meaningful for me than the entire year in Paris. What I failed to see was that although he earned practically nothing for years, he underwent great sacrifices to pay for my room and board.

The piece continues in Bálint András Varga’s György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages (one of ReadySteadyBook’s selections of the month for November 2009), available now from all good booksellers. It is followed by a speech given in 2007 in Berlin in memory of Ligeti. Kurtág begins, ‘Obituary, speech of mourning? For me he’s more alive than ever.’