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.

‘Que la musique sonne’

There are few composers - at least among those who lived beyond their three score years and ten - whose musical output can be contained on two CDs. Edgard Varèse, whose work is celebrated over three evenings at the Southbank Centre this weekend, completed and published a relatively modest amount of music, but his influence on the work of a wide range of musicians continues - 45 years after his death.

Anyone captivated by the range of Varèse’s music - whether through the Southbank or Sage, Gateshead, celebrations or Riccardo Chailly’s award-winning recordings - should investigate Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary edited by the Paul Sacher Foundation’s Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann. ‘No-one interested in this composer, or indeed the 20th century modernist adventure as a whole, should be without [this book],’ wrote Bayan Northcott in BBC Music Magazine in 2006.

Exquisitely illustrated with material from the Varèse archive, the book contains essays by a range of contributors. There are, of course, pieces on the major compositions, alongside others on the lost early works - destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire; the influence of jazz on his work (it is said that Charlie Parker begged Varèse to teach him composition); the truth about that mythical phone call from a teenage Frank Zappa; his influence on American music; the Whitney connection and his New York patrons; even the art collection of Varèse and his wife, Louise.

One of the most thrilling pieces is ‘Converging Lives: Sixteen Years with Varèse’ by his pupil, assistant and music executor, Chou Wen-Chung. In 1937, Chou was a refugee at 14,

Somehow, despite the chaos and the smell of death around me, I learned of Ravel’s passing, and it dawned upon me that not all composers were dead historical figures. Transfixed by the idea that there were actually ‘living’ composers, I resolved to be one myself.

Some years later, having studied music at the New England Conservatory, Chou found himself in New York, searching for a teacher. He met Colin McPhee who told him, ‘Varèse is your choice,’ but warned him ‘Varèse is a volcano. His music consists of explosion after explosion…you must resist him or you will be buried.’

Varèse telephoned and invited me for a visit. When he asked to see my music, I was embarrassed to show him the first movement of Landscapes (1949)…In this piece I had tried to let fragments of ancient Chinese melodies drift across the sonic space of a western orchestra without conforming to western concepts of musical structure. So I could hardly believe it when I heard him say, ‘Come next week at the same time.’ Wondering how I could afford his tuition, I hesitated. He exploded, offended that I thought he was offering to teach me for money. He then explained how he had benefited from Debussy, Busoni and Romain Rolland without paying ‘a sou’. All he wanted was for me to ‘pass on the heritage’. Then he added with a twinkle in his eyes, ‘but perhaps you will find me a big old Chinese gong someday?’ He did not have to wait for long. In his later years, he was often shown in photos playing the enormous tam-tam I gave him. After his death, Louise gave me his favourite Chinese gong which he had bought on the street in Paris at about the time he finished Ionisation. This exchange of a tam-tam for a gong must have some symbolic meaning.

Chou goes on to describe how he came to edit Varèse’s work after his death, including a definitive version of Amériques for Chailly. ‘His art rests on a delicate balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian, or logical construct and metaphorical suffering,’ he claims. ‘While I would spare no effort collecting information regarding Varèse’s intentions, planning and sketches, I would also attempt to examine every issue from his viewpoint emotionally as well as rationally.’

The book ends with a series of statements from other composers, including Pierre Boulez (‘Was he ever tempted to imagine that he was born too late in a world too young?’), Elliott Carter (‘After his death he was played much more frequently and with greater care. How he would have been cheered by this!’), Dieter Schnebel (‘I can still picture him, fifty-five years [after encountering him at Darmstadt] as if he were standing before me.’), Peter Eötvös - who collaborated with Frank Zappa, shortly before the latter’s death, on some as yet unreleased recordings, and others.

Anyone within reach of London or Gateshead this weekend should treat themselves to the music of Varèse, a pioneer who remains unique, and this superb book. How many other composers have influenced jazz musicians, composers such as Birtwistle and Schnittke, and rock musicians from OMD to Can to jazz-rock combo Chicago?

Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, edited by Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann, is published by the Boydell Press in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation. There is a limited quantity of this lavishly-produced volume left, and further reprints are unlikely. More information about the Southbank concerts may be found here.