Found the Quote

In taking the hacksaw to Elliott Carter, Daniel Asia says of the rehearsals for the Concerto for Orchestra, under Leonard Bernstein:

It should be noted that Bernstein wasn't impressed by the fact that Carter wasn't aware that the clarinetist was playing in the wrong transposition for much of the piece ... why, when certain pitch relations were important to Carter, and he apparently couldn't detect errant pitches, shouldn't this suggest serious reservations about the composer and his music?

As I noted earlier, one of my correspondents wondered where Asia got this story, since he did not attend the rehearsals, and another suggested it was an urban legend, since he had heard the same thing about Schoenberg. I, too, thought I recalled something of the sort, and, rereading Charles Rosen's indispensable monograph Arnold Schoenberg (1975), I found this (pp. 49-50):

From time to time there appear malicious stories of eminent conductors who have not realized that, in a piece of Webern or Schoenberg, the clarinetist, for example, picked up an A instead of a B-flat clarinet and played his part a semitone off. These recurrent tales, often true, do not have the significance given them by the critics who believe that music should have stopped at Debussy, as each individual line in Schoenberg's music and even in Webern's later pointillist style defines a harmonic sense that, even when transposed, can fit into the general harmony of the work as a whole. (Here we must remember that harmony is conveyed as powerfully along a musical line as it is by a simultaneous chord.) The attenuation of the traditional concept of dissonance gives a considerable freedom to the movement of the individual instrumental voices, and for this to take place the central position in the hierarchy of musical elements can no longer be given to pitch. What is clear, indeed, is that the simple linear hierarchy must give way to a new and more complex set of relationships in which pitch is only one element among others, and not by any means always the most important.

So there you are -- Mr. Asia’s little gotcha moment has been addressed, and 35 years in advance.

And how stupid are clarinetists anyway?

Mr. Carter once said that while he could not, like Boulez, pick apart every detail of a performance, his music, when played correctly, sounded just as he imagined it. I will add only that for me, the reason Asia's story, true or not, doesn't suggest "serious reservations" about Mr. Carter's music is that the Concerto for Orchestra kicks neoromantic ass.

My review of the latest Carter release

Herewith the review I just posted at Amazon (I just love saying "herewith"):

Bridge Records continues its extraordinary survey of the music of Elliott Carter with a selection that covers entire career, from 1938 (when he was just turning 30) to his 101^st birthday. The centerpiece of the program is the Piano Concerto of 1964-65, a complex masterpiece from Carter’s heroic period.  The concerto has been recorded four times previously, and one might be tempted to react to yet another one with a shrug. But one would be wrong. Soloist Charles Rosen and former Juilliard Quartet violinist Joel Smirnoff, here conducting the Basel Sinfonietta, deliver a surprisingly intimate, even romantic account that reveals another side to a piece that David Schiff  described as an exploration of “the tragic possibilities of alienation on a visionary scale.” Bridge producer David Starobin said to me not long ago, “This is not a modern music performance,” which I think sums it up. It’s exquisite.

For the rest, Steve Beck completes the recorded catalog of Carter’s piano music with five of the composer’s late miniatures. (I especially liked his account of the rapid-fire Catenaires, which strikes me as fleeter and less punchy than Ursula Oppens’.) Tony Arnold sings two early songs in Carter’s own masterful orchestrations from 1979, and, in a rare treat, Rosalind Rees, soprano, and David Starobin, guitar, start off the proceedings with “Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred,” a faux-Elizabethan setting of Shakespeare that Carter wrote in 1938 for Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air.

The final track is the premiere recording of Nine by Five, subtitled Wind Quintet No. 2, written in 2009. It takes its title from the fact that four of the five players (the horn is the exception), double on higher and lower instruments at various points in the work. Despite its late vintage, it feels like a return to the Carter of the 1970s, with its extremes of range and dynamics, and it is one of the most attractive, colorful scores from the composer’s final years. The reading by the Slovenian group Slowind might not be as exciting or extroverted as the premiere performance I heard in New York in 2010 (or maybe I was just keyed up that night), but it’s well-balanced and taut, and it will do nicely. The piece is an instant favorite.    

 

P.S. The reaction to the announcement of this release was lukewarm over at Good Musicc Guide, given that most of the pieces may be thought of as minor, and there's a lot more of Carter's late work that still needs to be recorded, but I have to say this is a fine recording in terms of the performances and the sound quality. The early songs may not be up to Carter's later standards, though Schiff says "Voyage" is Carter's first real masterpiece, and I would rather have them than not, if only for the sake of completeness. And two of the piano Tributes are first recodings, though you'd never know it from the liner notes. 

Carter Memorial

I attended my first all−Elliott Carter program in April 1976, when Speculum Musicae performed at the YMHA on South Broad Street in Philadelphia. I was 18 years old. Fred Sherry played the Cello Sonata. Rolf Schulte played the Duo. Both were accompanied by Ursula Oppens on piano.

Last night, I watched Schulte, Sherry, and Oppens present the world premiere of Epigrams, the last piece Elliott Carter wrote. Little has changed in 37 years (and Rolf’s hair hasn’t changed at all). The biggest difference between last night and 1976 is that last night, Mr. Carter was not present.

The premiere was the centerpiece of a memorial concert at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre in Manhattan. Just about everyone who matters in Carter’s world was there. Friends greeted one another with kisses. The men wore ties. Carter’s son, David, delivered a brief speech from his wheelchair. Several of Carter’s musical friends and associates also spoke. I felt as though I had walked into the kind of wake I used to attend as a Catholic schoolboy. The only things missing were the smell of eucalyptus and the open casket.

My sense sense loss was strongest, however, during a brief film that included old interviews with the composer. It pained me to watch him speak from the grave. I was also reminded of how much I miss Charles Rosen, who appeared in several clips.

(Rosen spoke of the way in which Carter synthesized the legacies of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The legacy of Ives went unacknowledged.)

Besides Epigrams, the program included Mad Regales, for six voices a cappella, and What Are Years? — the song cycle on poems of Marianne More. Lucy Shelton was the vocalist. David Fulmer conducted. The performances were all excellent, if brief. (In a program lasting close to two hours, there was perhaps 40 minutes worth of music.) Mad Regales was especially memorable, thanks largely to the presence of the bass baritone Evan Hughes. Oppens introduced Epigrams as  “twelve examples of how not to write a trio” and said Carter had fun writing it.

From my perspective, it’s a small-scale tour de force, an exploration of the sonorities possible in the unwieldy combination of violin, cello, and piano. Carter enjoyed a challenge, and the challenge in this case was balance. Despite the brevity of the movements, it’s a substantial piece, and it seemed fitting that the last note of the last composition Carter would ever write was a single violin pizzicato preceded by several seconds of silence. Under the circumstances, it felt like a gesture of farewell.

Carter Lives

Daniel Asia spits on Elliott Carter's grave this week over at the Huffington Post. In a piece titled "Carter is Dead" (evoking Boulez' famous pronouncement on the music of Schoenberg), he says, essentially, that the late Mr. Carter had no real talent and never did anything right in his whole life.

The essay is not interesting, but its timing is. Not only did Asia wait until Carter was safely out of the way. He waited until Charles Rosen was, too. At that point, he must have known the coast was clear, and he could safely to poke his nose out of his burrow. His little presumptions are exactly the sort of thing that Rosen, the Huxley to Carter’s Darwin, was so adept at skewering. He would have chewed it up before breakfast, then tossed off three thousand words on Mozart’s use of tonality.

I suspect that Mr. Asia produced his essay in a spirit of malicious glee, fully expecting a firestorm of protest and ready to declare that the anger and defensiveness of Carter’s admirers is proof that he had somehow touched a nerve. But there really isn’t much here to get upset about, and even less to argue with. The criticisms, such as they are, consist of simple assertions. One either agrees with them or one does not. I do not. Here are some counter-assertions, for the record: Carter’s piano music does not “pale” beside Copland’s; the Eight Etudes for wind quartet hold up quite nicely, thank you; and the finale of the Cello Sonata is hardly “cute.”

I have never changed anyone's mind about music through argument, and no one has ever changed mine. Sometimes, through repeated listening, I have learned to like something I initially found daunting or dull, but I've never stopped liking a piece of music simply because somebody told me to. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, of course, even Mr. Asia, but my listening habits remain unchanged. It's not a matter of "I'm right and he's wrong." It's more a matter of "I'm cool, and he's a doofus."

What I find heartening in Asia's piece, however, is that he really isn’t saying anything Donal Henahan and Harold C. Schoenberg weren’t saying forty years ago. To a man, the sages from our paper of record didn’t think Carter’s music had a future, either, and yet, here we are, forty years later, having the same discussion. If the future is anything like the past, the controversy will continue, and so will the music.

Now, to clear the air, I offer the Adagio of the 1948 Cello Sonata, one of my favorite movements in all of music:

Carter Volume 9 - not an April Fools' joke

Was poking around Amazon a moment ago and came across the announcement that Vol. 9 of Bridge Records' Elliott Carter Edition will be issued May 1. I have pre-ordered my copy. Here is the description from the Amazon website:

This retrospective disc presents music composed by the late Elliott Carter over a period of more than 70 years. Unquestionably, the major work presented here is the late Charles Rosen's performance of Carter's Piano Concerto. Rosen, a great advocate of Carter's music, had recorded most of Carter's solo piano music over the course of his long career, though he never made a studio recording of Carter's brilliant concerto. The release of this radio recording, featuring the superb Basel Sinfonietta, conducted by Joel Smirnoff, was one of Rosen's last wishes. Volume 9 of Bridge's ongoing Carter series opens with vocal works of Carter's from the 30s and 40s, and proceeds to Steven Beck's electrifying accounts of late solo piano music, and the Slowind Quintet's performance of Carter's quintet, Nine by Five, completed during the composer's 101st year.

For me, the real excitement her involvesthe Piano Concerto (this will be the fifth commercial recording of the piece, but you can never have too many) and the first recording of Nine by Five. I attended the premiere of the piece in February 2010. and I remember it as a refreshing return to the kick-butt Carter of the 1970s.

Here is the complete playlist from Bridge:

Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred (1938) Rosalind Rees, soprano; David Starobin, guitar
Voyage (1943, orch. 1979) & Warble for Lilac Time (1943, orch. 1979) Tony Arnold, soprano; Colorado College Festival Orchestra, Scott Yoo, conductor
Piano Concerto (1964-65), Charles Rosen, piano; Basel Sinfonietta Joel Smirnoff, conductor
Two Thoughts about the Piano (2007) & Tri-Tribute (2007-8), Steven Beck, piano
Nine by Five (2009), Slowind Wind Quintet I can't wait. Thanks to David and Becky Starobin, as always, for their tireless efforts. This will be every bit as much fun as a concert by the Phillyorch would have been.

We don't need the Times' approval

On his blog at the New York Times, William Ferguson has posted a reply to New Yorker critic Alex Ross, who was apparently angry that Elliott Carter was not included in some year-end, postmortem Web mix called "The Music They Made." My advice to Ross would be to forget it. Neither he nor Elliott Carter requires the approval of the New York Times. And neither do I. I had not heard of Ferguson, but reading his post, titled "Why Elliott Carter Wasn’t in ‘The Music They Made,'" I have to say that he strikes me as something of a patronizing twit.

Ferguson says he admires Ross (though more for what he has had to say about Radio Head than anything he's written about classical music), and yet, he says, Ross and other classical critics "have missed the point." And the point, apparently, is that a musician who has died in the past year does not merit Ferguson's attention unless he or she has somehow influenced the popular culture. I get the impression that even the great Ravi Shankar would not have made the list if he had not been adopted by George Harrison like some sort of pound puppy.

We have come a long way from the days when the New York Times ignored pop culture. Now it ignores serious culture, because, the argument goes, serious culture is no longer mainstream. Imagine — Elliott Carter, one of the great composers of the century, is not "mainstream, “despite the appearance of his music on programs the world over. Neither, I imagine, is Charles Rosen, who died not long after Carter did and who performed the most mainstream classical music imaginable. In Ferguson's epistemological universe, intrinsic achievement counts for nothing. What counts is public relations — how well something penetrated the media consciousness.

I was reminded of Pauline Kael's reply to listeners of KPFA who asked her why she did not like or review more so-called "name" pictures:

"How completely has mass culture subverted even the role of the critic," she wrote, "when listeners suggest that because the movies a critic reviews favorably are unpopular ad hard to find, that the critic must be playing some snobbish game with himself and the public? ... You consider it rather 'suspect' that I don't praise more 'name' movies. Well, what makes a name movie is simply a saturation advertising campaign, the same kind of campaign that puts samples of liquid detergents at your door. The 'name pictures of Hollywood are made the same way they are sold: by pretesting the various ingredients, removing all possible elements that might affront the mass audience, adding all possible elements that will titillate the largest number of people."

Not to worry: Ferguson assures us that in the future, he will be open to our suggestions for including dead classical musicians in his year end mix. My response to that is essentially two words. In the first place, as I said, I don't need his approval, and in the second, the offer is too little, too late. Mr. Carter and Mr. Rosen are already dead. That hole cannot be filled by paying attention to less important figures in the years to come.

Beethoven is keeping me alive

I started a new job Monday in Norristown. The hours are 3 to 11 p.m., the commute is twice as long as I am used to, and I am still not sure what exactly it is I am supposed to be doing. This week I've been going to bed late and sleeping late. I have a couple of free hours before heading off to the office, time I spend fluctuating between anxiety and read. It doesn't really feel like leisure time if you're counting the minutes before the long drive. For the past couple of mornings (early afternoons, really), I have been listening to Charles Rosen's recording of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas Op. 31. The second CD of this two-CD set — “The Great Middle Period Sonatas” — will follow tomorrow.

This music has been the only thing that has prevented me from either a) resigning or b) throwing myself under a truck. My gratitude to both of these immortal artists for saving my life. The sonatas and the performance together are an extraordinary affirmation.

And remember, only three more shopping days until Beethoven’s birthday.

Mr. Carter at 104

Today is the 104th anniversary of the birth of Elliott Carter. Note the change in phrasing. Last year, we observed Mr. Carter's 103rd birthday. He was still celebrating birthdays then, and he would have celebrated another today if he had lived just one more month.

To mark the anniversary, as well as the passing on Sunday of Charles Rosen, I listened to Rosen's recordings of 90+ and the wonderful Piano Sonata from 1945. (Also listened to Rosen's excellent recordings of the Beethoven Sonata Op. 111 and Webern's Variations Op. 27.)

There are several works Mr. Carter wrote in the last few years of his life — some quite significant — that still cry out for commercial recordings, among them In the Distances of Sleep, a Sunbeam's Architecture, the Three Illusions, the Flute Concerto and Nine by Five. Now that the catalog is closed, I am hoping we may all see (or hear) all of it on CD. Bridge, that indispensable label, has already issued eight volumes in its Carter series. Vol. 9 is due, and I'm sure it is being planned, but money, of course, is always a consideration.

First Elliott, now Charles

I have just learned that the pianist Charles Rosen has died in New York City, just one month after the composer he had championed for most of his career, Elliott Carter. He was 85. I last saw him play at Tanglewood in 2008, performing the piano in Carter's Double Concerto opposite Ursula Oppens.

Mr. Rosen was not only a great pianist. He was also one of my favorite writers on music. I have learned more on the subject from The Classical Style than from any comparable text. His short monograph on Arnold Schoenberg is indispensable, and his essays in the New York Review of Books — especially those that followed the header "Charles Rosen responds" — were enlightening and wickedly entertaining.

Lordy, who will save us from Richard Taruskin now?

More on Carter's 103rd

The pianist Charles Rosen has posted his impressions of Elliott Carter's 103rd birthday concert on the New York Review of Book website. The post includes some nifty audio clips recorded at the concert, so you can hear what all the fuss was about. A clip from another new work, Three Explorations, appears at the bottom. The piece, on poems of T.S. Eliot, were premiered at Alice Tully Hall the week after the concert at the 92nd Street Y.

I was happy to see Mr. Rosen expressed reservations about Retracings III for solo trumpet, much as I did. I'm not a critic or a very well-trained musician, but the convergence of our opinions almost makes me think I heard the music as well as he did.

I must say, however, that I found his opening paragraph puzzling. The principal attraction of Mr. Carter's music, for me, has never really been the time issue, and when Mr. Rosen states that it captures perfectly our experience of time in the modern world, I have no idea what he means.

"We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed," Mr. Rosen says. "In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures."

It does? I honestly cannot remember ever experiencing time in this way. None of my friends has ever mentioned it, either. The theory of relativity does describe time as elastic, depending on speed and mass, but it's unlikely you will ever witness the effects of relativity firsthand unless you have access to a particle accelerator. If, today, our experience of time differs from that of medieval peasants, it's because we are ruled by it more rigorously and more minutely. Our employers break the workday into fifteen-minute intervals, and we are expected to account for every second. It's the pressure and the tedium that get me, not the complexity.

"These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system," Mr. Rosen continues. "We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities."

We might, but I doubt it.

I had a similar problem with the theorizing in James Wierzbicki's little study of Carter, which reminded me that while the composer's music is often extraordinarily exciting, his musings on the nature of time are much, much less so.

And oh — thanks to my good friend (an occasional commenter here on the blog) EH, who sent me the Nonesuch Carter anthology as a Christmas present. He must have found it on my wish list at Amazon. I was holding off on buying it, since I already have most of the music on individual CDs, but now that it's here, I'll give it up when you pry my cold,dead fingers.