Elliott Carter
Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was born December 11, 1908 to Elliott Carter Sr. and Florence Chambers. He attended Harvard University, where majored in English and also studied music. He earned his master's degree in music from Harvard in 1932, studying with Walter Piston and Gustov Holst. He moved to Paris to study with the renowned pedagog Nadia Boulanger both privately and at École Normale de Musique de Paris where he earned his doctorate in music in 1935. He married Helen Frost-Jone on July 6, 1944, and they had one son David Chambers Carter. They lived in the same Greenwich Village apartment from 1945 until her death in 2003.
Carter's earlier works were mainly neoclassical, influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and Paul Hindemith. His two ballets, commissioned in 1935 for the Ballet Caravan, Pocahontas and The Minotaur, would be his longest pieces during this period, though neither were very successful. His works during WW2 were mostly diatonic and lyrical, but in the late 1940s his music became increasingly chromatic as he explored his unique harmonic and rhythmic style. Though he did not use twelve-tone rows, he did employ what is called musical set theory to construct his harmonies and melodic structures.
He spent much of his career teaching, first at St. John's College in Annapolis from 1940 to 1944. During the war he worked for the Office of War Information and afterwards he held posts at the Peabody Conservatory from 1946 to 1948, Columbia University, Queens College, New York from 1955 to 1956, Yale University from 1960 to 1962, Cornell University starting in 1967, and the Juilliard School from 1972.
Having been encouraged to pursue musical studies in his youth by the composer Charles Ives, he continued to study his music, editing his it in the 1950s, which returned his interest to the experimentalists. He continued to reexamine the parameters of music, composing his Cello Sonata and the rhythmically complex String Quartet No. 1 - the first of five such quartets spread throughout his long compositional career - and Variations for Orchestra. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1960 for his second string quartet and the same for his third quartet in 1973. In 1961, his Double Concerto for Harpsichord, Piano, and Two Chamber Orchestras earned him rare praise from Igor Stravinsky and demonstrated his use of unusual instrumentation and use of canonic texture.
Carter's compositional output from his last three decades remains impressive and certainly continues to show his creative approach. Many of these works continue to be performed regularly, including his Oboe Concerto (1987), Violin Concerto (1990), String Quartet No. 5 (1995), Clarinet Concerto (1996), Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1993-1996; "I Am the Prize of Flowing Hope"), his only opera What Next? (1999), and his Cello Concerto that was premiered by Yo-Yo Ma. Often he engages each instrument or section with a unique set of chords or sets and even rhythms, allowing for the various voices to be treated as individual characters within his counterpoint.
Once, when an interviewer asked him about his writing such difficult music, he replied, "As a young man, I harbored the populist idea of writing for the public." He continued, "I learned that the public didn't care. So I decided to write for myself. Since then, people have gotten interested." Indeed, his music has become part of the standard repertoire, both academically and at public concerts and festivals. Carter's music has influenced countless musicians, his career having spanned eight decades. He wrote music every morning until he died of natural causes on November 5, 2012, at his home in New York City.
I accessed the following websites on June 21, 2022 for the information found on this page:
https://www.elliottcarter.com/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elliott-Carter
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/arts/music/elliott-carter-avant-garde-composer-dies-at-103.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Carter
Carter's earlier works were mainly neoclassical, influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and Paul Hindemith. His two ballets, commissioned in 1935 for the Ballet Caravan, Pocahontas and The Minotaur, would be his longest pieces during this period, though neither were very successful. His works during WW2 were mostly diatonic and lyrical, but in the late 1940s his music became increasingly chromatic as he explored his unique harmonic and rhythmic style. Though he did not use twelve-tone rows, he did employ what is called musical set theory to construct his harmonies and melodic structures.
He spent much of his career teaching, first at St. John's College in Annapolis from 1940 to 1944. During the war he worked for the Office of War Information and afterwards he held posts at the Peabody Conservatory from 1946 to 1948, Columbia University, Queens College, New York from 1955 to 1956, Yale University from 1960 to 1962, Cornell University starting in 1967, and the Juilliard School from 1972.
Having been encouraged to pursue musical studies in his youth by the composer Charles Ives, he continued to study his music, editing his it in the 1950s, which returned his interest to the experimentalists. He continued to reexamine the parameters of music, composing his Cello Sonata and the rhythmically complex String Quartet No. 1 - the first of five such quartets spread throughout his long compositional career - and Variations for Orchestra. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1960 for his second string quartet and the same for his third quartet in 1973. In 1961, his Double Concerto for Harpsichord, Piano, and Two Chamber Orchestras earned him rare praise from Igor Stravinsky and demonstrated his use of unusual instrumentation and use of canonic texture.
Carter's compositional output from his last three decades remains impressive and certainly continues to show his creative approach. Many of these works continue to be performed regularly, including his Oboe Concerto (1987), Violin Concerto (1990), String Quartet No. 5 (1995), Clarinet Concerto (1996), Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1993-1996; "I Am the Prize of Flowing Hope"), his only opera What Next? (1999), and his Cello Concerto that was premiered by Yo-Yo Ma. Often he engages each instrument or section with a unique set of chords or sets and even rhythms, allowing for the various voices to be treated as individual characters within his counterpoint.
Once, when an interviewer asked him about his writing such difficult music, he replied, "As a young man, I harbored the populist idea of writing for the public." He continued, "I learned that the public didn't care. So I decided to write for myself. Since then, people have gotten interested." Indeed, his music has become part of the standard repertoire, both academically and at public concerts and festivals. Carter's music has influenced countless musicians, his career having spanned eight decades. He wrote music every morning until he died of natural causes on November 5, 2012, at his home in New York City.
I accessed the following websites on June 21, 2022 for the information found on this page:
https://www.elliottcarter.com/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elliott-Carter
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/arts/music/elliott-carter-avant-garde-composer-dies-at-103.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Carter
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String Quartet No. 1 (1951)
Mélanie Clapiès, Emma Frucht, violins Roger Tapping, viola Coleman Itzkoff, cello Recorded live at Yellow Barn August 2, 2018 The Big Barn, Putney, Vermont Figment IV
Matthew Eeuwes, viola |
Elegy for Viola and Piano
Jodi Levitz, viola Keisuke Nakagoshi, piano |