Musical Style

Carter’s musical career began with the aspiration to write the kind of iconoclastic music he heard from Stravinsky, Varèse, and the American ultra-moderns. Hampered by what he felt was his lack of technique, Carter went to Paris in 1932 to hone his craft under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger. When he returned to the US, he adopted an American neoclassical idiom pioneered by his contemporaries Copland, Harris, and Barber, but with a contrapuntal sophistication that owed more to his study of J. S. Bach.

A long period of transition in the 1940s led to first the Cello Sonata (1948) and finally the First String Quartet (1951), in which Carter broke decisively with his earlier style and reconnected with the spirit of the avant-garde that had been his first love in the 1920s. While drawing on the achievement from his predecessors, Carter, at this time, developed a strikingly original style, especially in his approach to time in music. By the time his Second String Quartet won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960, Carter had completely reinvented himself as one of America’s leading post-war modernists.

One of the guiding ideas behind Carter’s middle-period music in the 1950s and 60s is what David Schiff, in his invaluable book The Music of Elliott Carter (Cornell University Press, 1998), calls “the divided ensemble”. The performing forces are partitioned into groups (each with its own harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary); the music they play are interwoven like the voices in a Bach fugue, but with the human qualities of characters in a play. The instruments engage, defy, or ignore each other, and their generally antagonistic relationships (and fleeting moments of connection) give many of Carter’s works in this period a sense of tragic (or sometimes wistful) irony.

Throughout the 1960s, Carter developed his technique—compiling an elaborate Harmony Book and a polyrhythmic compendium—in an ambitious expressive program of representing human experience and social interaction in all its richness and complexity. The glittering virtuosity can be heard in such orchestral works as Carter’s Piano Concerto (1964–65) and his Concerto for Orchestra (1969).

Had Carter been a different composer, he might have been content to let his music of the 1980s and early 1990s stand as the capstone of his life’s work. Yet around the time of his 85th birthday, he set off on another new course. In the 15 years since then, Carter has composed more than 60 new works, including his first opera, six solo concertos, three large song cycles, and more than 20 instrumental miniatures.

The breadth and depth of Carter’s late music is even more astonishing for the simple elegance of its materials. His longstanding use of the divided ensemble remains, but the groupings frequently change and instruments take on multiple roles. Memory has become one of Carter’s favorite subjects, as has the contrast between physical effort and the agility, lightness, and velocity of thought. Perhaps most significantly, the idea of cooperation has become an abiding concern for the composer. In older works the instruments seem overwhelmed by their differences; the instruments in his later music apply these contrasts to the creation of something with a sense of shared purpose.

—John Link