Elliott Carter's Analysis of his Piano Sonata (1945-46)

In 1948, Elliott Carter penned an analysis of his Piano Sonata for Edgard Varèse. His analysis of the first movement, in particular, makes one ask why Carter did not subsume its recurrent two-tempo structure under “first group” of its sonata form. Given Carter’s sophistication, was he experiencing a moment of music historical “agnosia,” since two-tempo expositions inform familiar Beethoven works such as Piano Sonata, op.31, no.2 and String Quartet in Bb, op.130. This paper explores Carter’s “agnosia” by way of internal and external evidence. Internally, it revisits the thematic chart he attached to the 1948 analysis and goes on to posit the idea that the work’s quintal neo-tonality so saturates its thematic network themes as to distort the composer’s analysis of the form, historical precedents irrespective. Externally, the paper compares three works by Beethoven to Carter’s Sonata as regards its two-tempo structure, using concepts borrowed from Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory (1999). Finally, the author revisits writings of Carter and his circle that may explain why his analysis downplayed historical precedents to the Piano Sonata.

ELLIOTT CARTER (1908–2012)Of Challenge and of Love (1994)

This chapter considers Elliott Carter’s Of Challenge and of Love. This substantial and impressive cycle shows stylistic consistency in its uncompromising atonality and rhythmic complexity, but it is an immensely satisfying vehicle for a singer and pianist of exceptional skill, stamina, and musicianship. Vocal writing is, by turn, gritty and muscular, exuberant and lyrical. Piano parts are dramatic and often texturally intricate, but there are plenty of ‘windows’ to allow the voice to come through. Carter is fond of the device of ‘metric modulation’ and there are several examples here. He obviously relishes the mathematical and proportional aspects of rhythm, and frequently ties notes across beats, promoting elasticity and freedom. The music is also enlivened by pungent, accented passages.

Elliott Carter and Musical Silence

This article examines Elliott Carter’s most extensive forays into the theory and practice of musical silence: the 2005 composition Intermittences and the 1957 lecture “Sound and Silence in Time: A Contemporary Approach to the Elements of Music.” Taken together, the piece and the lecture present an opportunity to ask significant questions about the role of silence in Carter’s music. The evaluation of Carter’s lecture in this article situates his understanding of musical silence in the broader context of musical expectation and reveals the influence of Alfred North Whitehead. Analyses of passages from Intermittences clarify the interaction of notational and registral silence in the work. A comparison of four recordings of Intermittences explores how performers realize the work’s notational silences as acoustic ones.

Harmony in Elliott Carter’s Late Music

From around 1995 until his death in 2012, Elliott Carter retooled his harmonic practice in order to make his composing both more efficient and more flexible. That the two all-interval tetrachords (AITs) and the all-trichord hexachord (ATH) were Carter’s primary harmonic focus in these years is well known. But, as many analysts have discovered, the rich and varied harmonic relationships that strike so many listeners in this body of work are not always easy to relate to these three “core harmonies.” In this paper, I propose a way of doing so via a secondary category—“derived core harmonies”—formed by aggregating the three core harmonies with and without common tones. The result is a compact yet comprehensive harmonic vocabulary of five-, six-, seven-, and eight-element set classes that readily accounts for passages in Carter’s late music in which the core harmonies are not easily inferable, and integrates seamlessly with the work of other authors, including Jonathan Bernard, Marguerite Boland, Guy Capuzzo, Adrian P. Childs, Laura Emmery, David I. H. Harvey, J. Daniel Jenkins, Tiina Koivisto, Joshua B. Mailman, Andrew W. Mead, and John Roeder. Classifying Carter’s harmonies as “core,” “derived core,” and “non-core” provides a means of distinguishing between referential and non-referential harmonies, and thus a basis for identifying harmonic tension, ambiguity, and the expectation of return. It also facilitates multi-layered harmonic analyses of Carter’s late compositions, transpiring across multiple time scales.

Percussion Studies de Arthur Kampela

As peças musicais intituladas “Estudos” demonstram ainda formar um campo vasto de investigação nas áreas da música. Uma delas situa-se no fato de que no século XX, o gênero Estudo potencializa-se por sua diversidade de propostas e, principalmente, por seu suporte como ambiente de experimentação nos áreas da comosição e performance musicais. Neste artigo, nos concentraremos nos Percussion Studies do compositor brasileiro Arthur Kampela nos quais destacamos uma diversidade de abordagens pedagógicas voltadas à escuta, à performance e à composição musicais. Nesse sentido, nos concentramos no Percussion Study II (1993) – dedicado ao compositor Elliott Carter –, abordando três principais aspectos da obra: (i) a relação som-ruído na obra de Kampela; (ii) temática morfológica e desfamiliarização instrumental e, por fim, (iii) implicações ergônomicas do gesto na complexidade rítmica.

Carter, Elliott (Cook Jr.) (1908–2012)

Born in 1908 into a wealthy New York City family, Elliott Carter enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, spending time in Europe and learning French at an early age. The composer Charles Ives mentored the young Carter, taking him to concerts in New York and encouraging his developing interest in music. Carter’s childhood, characterized by immersion in a culturally enriched environment and exposure to the modern world, provided the elements from which his artistic aesthetic and musical language would later be forged. When Carter entered Harvard College, he focused his studies on English literature, Greek, and philosophy, although musical activities continued in the form of lessons with Walter Piston and Gustav Holst, as well as singing with the Harvard Glee Club. Carter completed a master’s degree in music at Harvard in 1932, after which he moved to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger for three years. He received a doctorate in music from the École Normale de Musique in Paris in 1935.

Elliott Carter Now

Anyone writing about Elliott Carter today must deal with the lack of a critical biography and the reticence and occasional inaccuracies of his own biographical statements, and the lack of a consensus about his music as evidenced in particular by the respect his work finds in Europe as opposed to a decline in critical reputation and performances in the USA. Unique qualities in the music become clearer if attention is paid to its opposition of dark and light themes, and to the role played by quasi-mathematical calculations in Carter’s compositional process. A better understanding of his entire career will arise only as the extraordinary output of his last decades becomes more familiar.