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.

“Haydn’s Ribbits and Beethoven’s Cheep-Cheeps”

In a previous post we shared Daniel Albright’s intriguing preface to his recent book Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance, and Song. Below we reprint some typical passages from several of the book’s chapters. Perhaps “typical” is not even the best word, considering how playful and inventive his writing and thinking is. As Paul Griffiths (renowned author of The Substance of Things Heard: Writings about Music and The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué) noted with regard to Music Speaks: ‘“teasing” -- in the senses of gently mocking, of pulling out, and indeed of titillating -- is . . . [Albright’s] modus operandi.”

For Wittgenstein, music isn’t like speech; instead, speech is a special case of music. Some of the things you say to me I understand in the way I understand Mozart; some of the things in the way I understand Cage; some of the things in the way I understand Britney Spears. But in all cases, speech is a game with sounds, just as music is a game with sounds–neither strictly possesses meaning, or conviction, but meaning and conviction may glide around either....

[If] language is beset by the same problems of jarring and incommensurable, un-unifiable models that beset music, then music and language are in exactly the same uncomfortable situation. Yes, Strauss’s tone poem Till Eulenspiegel lurches wildly from narrative to speech-inflection to exasperating tangles of unconstruables; but a written chronicle of Till’s adventures would behave identically. So we are left in paradox: the more we try to understand music as language, the more strongly it resists that understanding; and the more we try to understand music as the opposite of language, the more sweetly, strongly, plainly it speaks to the ear. We understand the siren’s song only at the moment when we stop trying to understand it. [pages 13-14]

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Poets have always been listening. The meanings they seek to convey in their poems often seem to lie half outside the words, in the rush of wind or water, in the thunder, in the cries of birds, as if poets were trying to translate into human language a poetry that pre-exists in the whole body of the world’s sounds. Composers also listen; and when they read poems, they listen both to the music of the words themselves, and to the music on the far side of the poems, the music that the poets themselves were attending to. So–when Haydn sets a passage in The Seasons in which frogs appear, he sets the orchestra a-croaking. The philosopher Schopenhauer greatly deplored this tendency in Haydn, on the grounds that music should strive to align itself with the deep urgencies hidden in the heart of things, and not to imitate external phenomena. But it’s futile to try to argue Haydn out of his ribbits, or Beethoven out of his cheep-cheeps in the song Die Wachtel, The Quail. In a poem about sound, the external sound is an irresistibly potent metaphor for the poem’s meaning. [page 105]

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At the beginning of Ottavio Rinuccini’s libretto to La Dafne, Ovid himself descends from Elysium to warn the spectators that they’re about to see a play about the dangerousness of love: beware, you might fall in love with a girl only to find her turned into a tree. Immediately after this brief prologue, Apollo kills a dragon with his bow and arrow. The whole protocol of this opening is all wrong by the standards of Greek tragedy: if there is a prologue, it is a god (as in Euripides’ Hippolytus), not a poet; and monsters are killed offstage and enter the play as a form of narrative (also as in the Hippolytus). The early opera writers quite liked combats with monsters: in the third intermedio from La Pellegrina (music by Marenzio), Apollo slays the monster at Delphi. To some extent we might say that opera labored to bring into the theatre what was in the world of the Greeks indecorous—obscene in the root meaning of the term, that is, incapable of being presented onstage. Ovid’s poetry seemed to offer opportunities for sex and violence beyond what was permitted in serious Greek or Roman drama.

In later times, actual Greek tragedy made its way onto the operatic stage, but hesitantly and in much altered form. The most important Greek tragedy, for operatic purposes, was Euripides’s Alcestis, the subject of substantial operas by (among others) Lully, Handel, and Gluck. I suspect that part of the reason for this popularity was (1) the fact that the plot—a harrowing of Hades for a beloved wife—was the closest thing in Greek tragedy to the plot of Orpheus, the gold standard in operatic story lines; (2) the story had a happy ending, unlike that of Orpheus, though with some wrenching and hammering a happy ending for Orpheus was usually contrived (Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo had an unhappy ending according to the published libretto of 1607, but not according to the published score of 1609); and (3) the luxury-uxorious aspect of the tale flattered an increasingly bourgeois taste—here was a G-rated opera fit for the whole family. [pages 122-23]

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The great master of the inconsequential ballet was of course Meyerbeer, who thought it a fine thing to provide, in Le prophète (1849), a little relief for the bloodthirsty, war-torn Anabaptists in the form of a delicious ballet in which provisions-sellers on ice-skater, simulated with that newfangled contrivance the roller skate, take a break from their capitalist enterprise by dancing. Wagner considered that a Meyerbeer opera was a series of effects without causes, “a monstrously piebald, historico-romantic, diabolico-religious, fanatico-voluptuous, frivolo-sacred, mysterio-jaunty, sentimento-knavish dramatic hodge-podge.” You might get the impression that Wagner disapproved. But you have only to hear Wagner’s words to understand that Meyerbeer’s time has come: no pithier description of the Postmodern sensibility exists. Rauschenberg’s goat plugged into an automobile tire, Serrano’s Piss Christ, Schnittke’s Dr. Faustus, the whole canon of Damien Hirst–what are these but more recent manifestations of the piebald, diabolico-religious, sacro-frivolous, mysterio-criminal? Maybe the patron saint of our age is Giacomo Meyerbeer. [pages 163-64]

Music Speaks is available from all good booksellers. Read more on Google Book Search.

Paul Griffiths' Ophelia

Paul Griffiths – music critic and historian, novelist, biographer, librettist and beyond – is about to publish a new work entitled, Let Me Tell You, a short novel using only the vocabulary allotted to Ophelia in Hamlet. This constraint, the publisher notes, gives the discourse a haunting and poetic quality. Read an extract here.

Griffiths wrote the libretto for Elliott Carter’s opera, What Next?, which had its premiere in 1999 under Daniel Barenboim. Anyone within reach of Vienna in December will be able to hear the Neue Oper version. Its composition and premiere are covered in Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents by Felix Meyer and Anne C Shreffler, for publication shortly.

Also from our own lists we recommend Paul Griffiths’ acclaimed biography of Jean Barraqué, The Sea on Fire, and his collection of essays, reviews and interviews, Substance of Things Heard, which includes a section on Carter and a superbly evocative piece on Canadian composer, Claude Vivier. “Griffiths writes more eloquently and with greater insight than any of his peers...Illuminating, translucent, sagacious,” said the Times Literary Supplement. We wholeheartedly agree.

Let Me Tell You is available from Reality Street Editions. The Sea on Fire and Substance of Things Heard are available from good music booksellers or from Boydell & Brewer.

What Next?

Paul Griffiths is one of the University of Rochester Press’ favourite authors. His biography of Jean Barraqué, The Sea on Fire, is a scholarly and imaginative triumph, while his collection of occasional pieces and reviews, The Substance of Things Heard, was described as “illuminating, translucent, sagacious” by the TLS. Griffiths is also an accomplished librettist, and here he writes about recent performances of his collaboration with one of modern music’s greatest composers:

New York, December 12, 2007: Yesterday was Elliott Carter’s 99th birthday, celebrated with the fourth and last performance of a terrific production of his lone opera, What Next? A librettist’s point of view may not be unbiased, but for me this was the best presentation the piece has had. Jeffrey Milarsky, conducting the young AXIOM ensemble, led a musical performance that found so much rapture, wonder and wit in this extraordinary score, and Christopher Alden directed a staging that brought the drama of disconnection into tight focus. There was also an outstanding cast. Susan Narucki gave a driving intensity to Mama's pleadings, Katherine Rohrer was lustrous and warmly firm as Stella (a brilliant idea to make her star song so sexy), and Amanda Squitieri was dazzling in the coloratura role of Rose. Morgan Smith made sense of Harry or Larry as a young man whose anger bursts out as song, and Matthew Garrett let us hear the vocal magic Zen retains in his bewilderment. Ninety years younger than the composer, Jonathan Makepeace sang the part of Kid trimly in tune. That the production took place at all was due to the faith and campaigning energy of George Steel, who, as executive director, has remade Columbia University’s Miller Theatre as the prime venue in the city for exciting music and adventurous programming.

Having seen his opera staged in his native city, Carter now moves into his second century with undiminished creative energy. In the past year he has written, apart from several smaller pieces, a piano concerto that Daniel Barenboim will feature at the centenary concert in Carnegie Hall a year from now.

The New York Times agreed. Stay tuned, as they say, to this blog for something special on the Elliott Carter front in 2008.