Compositional Process in Elliott Carter's String Quartets

A Study in Sketches

Laura Emmery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429619519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Compositional Process in Elliott Carter's String Quartets is an interdisciplinary study examining the evolution and compositional process in Elliott Carter's five string quartets. Offering a systematic and logical way of unpacking concepts and processes in these quartets that would otherwise remain opaque, the book's narrative reveals new aspects of understanding these works and draws novel conclusions on their collective meaning and Carter's place as the leading American modernist.

Each of Carter's five string quartets is driven by a new idea that Carter was exploring during a particular period, which allows for each quartet to be examined under a unique lens and a deeper understanding of his oeuvre at large. Drawing on key ideas from a variety of subjects including performance studies, philosophy, music cognition, musical meaning and semantics, literary criticism, and critical theory, this is an informative volume for scholars and researchers in the areas of music theory and musicology.

Analyses are supplemented with sketch study, correspondence, text manuscripts, and other archival sources from the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library.

1
Elliott Carter’s First String Quartet

In search of Proustian time

Introduction

In 1950, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Elliott Carter set on to compose a piece in which he could explore many novel and unusual ideas about “musical themes, ways of development, textures and forms.”¹ In order to fully devote himself to the development of this new musical language that would allow an expressivity impossible in his pre-1944 musical vocabulary, Carter went to Tucson, Arizona, and settled down to a “very arduous year’s work building up a whole world of musical thought.”² The piece that emerged from his escape to the lower Sonora Desert was the seminal First String Quartet (1951).

Carter notes that from 1944 to 1950, he started thinking about and conceptualizing drastic new musical ideas, which find their fullest expression in the First Quartet.³ With his Piano Sonata (1945–46), he became concerned with instrumental virtuosity; in the Cello Sonata (1948), Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (1949–50), and Eight Pieces for Four Timpani (1950), he became increasingly interested in the individualization of the instruments and with polyrhythms, modulation of tempo, and chordal sonori-ties as a means of unifying a work.⁴ All these ideas merge in the First String Quartet, in which Carter achieves new heights of rhythmic complexity, precision, and logic. Speaking about the First Quartet, Carter remarks that it marked a turning point in his development and his most extreme adventure into “metric modulation”:⁵ shifts in tempo and meter become integrated with surface rhythms in such a way as to render the transitions from one tempo to another virtually seamless. Rather than just systematically shifting the tempo and meter, as he did in the Eight Pieces for Four Timpani (1950–1966), initially conceived as study pieces in metric modulation for the First Quartet, those shifts now intertwine with both texture and form.

This method of metric modulation evolved from Carter’s early interest in poly-rhythm, which he observed in the music of Alexander Scriabin, Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Henry Cowell, and Conlon Nancarrow. At the same time, he noted certain limitations to their system; most of their music was concerned with a local rhythmic detail, which to Carter seemed static. Carter stood in direct opposition to this static repetitiveness, considering “constant change-process-evolution” as music’s prime function.⁶ But rather than seeking answers for developing his new rhythmic expression in the music of his contemporaries, Carter instead shifted the emphasis to modernist writers, particularly Marcel Proust.

In order to push those rhythmic boundaries, Carter sought to restructure rhythmic expression in music and subject it to the same rethinking to which Arnold Schoenberg subjected harmony at the beginning of the twentieth century.⁷ Carter’s reference to Schoenberg is significant for several reasons. First, Carter sought to restructure the rhythmic expression not only because he wanted to write a composition that would be compelling to him without compromising any of his new ideas for the sake of satisfying the audience or performers⁸ but, more importantly, because he saw it as a necessary step in the logical path of music discourse. Schoenberg also described his method of composing with twelve tones as growing out of necessity: with the increase of chromaticism, tonality developed into extended tonality, and then the question arose whether one basic tone, the root, still remained the central, referential harmony.⁹ In Carter’s view, composers such as Ives, Stravinsky, and Nancarrow, who were seriously concerned with rhythm, had just scratched the surface of rhythmic expression.¹⁰ Their concept of rhythmic exploration was concerned with local detail, while Carter sought to elevate it to the large-scale structural level, just as the twelve-tone technique governed both the small- and large-scale structures of compositions.¹¹ Simply put, rhythmic expression had not caught up with the complexities of harmonic language.¹²

Carter’s path to new ideas was indeed an arduous one, taking seven years to formalize in the First Quartet. On some level, it parallels Schoenberg’s twelve-year process of developing his method of composing with twelve tones.¹³ For both composers, it was not only about developing new ways of expressing musical ideas but also about the acceptance of the method. Schoenberg decided to keep silent for two years, anticipating resistance and confusion,¹⁴ while Carter’s numerous unpublished drafts of his program notes for the First Quartet show how, fully conscious of the complexity of his new musical language, Carter was very concerned with both the audience and the performers.¹⁵ It was a concern Carter sought to conceal, diminishing its importance over the course of several drafts of his program notes, completely leaving it out from the final version, and eventually publicly dismissing the audience in his interviews. In the first draft of the program note for the First Quartet, Carter writes:

While writing this work, I often thought that it would never be played and if it were played it would be too much for most audiences to take. But I had these ideas and wanted to give them shape regardless of the consequences.¹⁶

Since the First Quartet was composed without a commission, this draft reveals Carter’s concern that the piece would never be performed. In the next draft, Carter strengthens this awareness, by acknowledging the demanding performance techniques of the work:

While writing this st[ring]q[uartet], it occurred frequently to me that the Quartet might never be played because of its technical difficulty and that even if played it might be almost too much to expect any audience, no matter how familiar with contemporary music, to accept.¹⁷

In the following version, perhaps the most honest one, Carter lays bare his exact feelings and thoughts about the quartet and its reception by the performers and the audience:

While writing this STRING QUARTET, I often was strongly aware of the risk (that it might be) of its never being played since the work is technically much more difficult than any previous one of mine – most of which performers grumble about and which do not always get good performances because of these demands. I also realized that if it were played it might be very hard on audiences even those familiar with contemporary music, since in this domain too my previous works had occasionally met with lack of understanding and this quartet was very much more difficult in this respect too.¹⁸

Perhaps worrying that if he voiced his doubts so would the audience, performers, and critics, he focuses on the critical acclaim of his quartet in his next version and mentions his previous doubts as an afterthought with a less critical language:

The quartet turned out to be more advanced than most of my previous works because I had been saving up a number of novel ideas awaiting just such a long stretch of time to form them into a composition of suitable character. It is a character that had to be invented at every step of the way for I felt that I was constantly pushing into an unexplored musical realm. I was pleased to find that this impression was confirmed later by critics who praised this aspect of the work. Yet while I was composing there were many times when I wondered if the piece would ever be played since I knew what I wrote would be very taxing both for performers and listeners.¹⁹

What made the First Quartet so much more difficult than any of his earlier works was the superimposition and juxtaposition of multiple textures of differing speeds, rhythms, and characters, combined with the harmonic language based on all-interval tetrachords (AITs). But with this new technique, Carter also achieved his primary compositional goal: the quartet captured the human experience of time. He explains in an interview:

I have tried in my pieces to give the concept of the passage of time as a dramatic idea, so that the pieces change as they go along in one way or another; different kinds of rhythm conflict with each other and so on. This was a sense that I wanted to give because after all, as we live our own lives, we are constantly involved in all sorts of different aspects of time. What’s happening now, what’s going on in our head about what’s happening now, which is also something about the past and something about the future, and how we feel about all of this. So that is what I’ve done.²⁰

To find the new means of expression and a way of organizing his ideas, Carter turned to literature. As Jonathan Bernard points out, the notion that literature was integral to Carter’s compositional process is hardly surprising, considering that he completed his undergraduate degree in English at Ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of examples
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Elliott Carter’s First String Quartet: in search of Proustian time
• 2 Elliott Carter’s Second String Quartet: formation of a new harmonic language and character-continuities
• 3 Elliott Carter’s Third String Quartet: separation in time and space
• 4 Connecting the dots: compositional process in Elliott Carter’s Fourth String Quartet
• 5 A synthesis: Elliott Carter’s Fifth String Quartet
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index