Form and Dialectical Opposition in Elliott Carter's Compositional
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Form and Dialectical Opposition in Elliott Carter’s Compositional Aesthetic Marguerite Boland A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. 2017 © Copyright by Marguerite Maree Boland 2017 ii Declaration of Authorship I, Marguerite Maree Boland, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ________________________ Date: ________________________ iii For my daughter Alice Louisa Claire v Acknowledgements The writing of this dissertation has been a ten-year journey: a journey of research scholarship and a journey of ever-expanding appreciation of the music of Elliott Carter, for certain. But the writing of this dissertation has also accompanied me during numerous very significant personal journeys: a journey into motherhood, a journey of relationship transformations, a journey into deeper awareness of the social disconnect between the life of work and the work of raising our next generation, and the gender inequality that is often a part of that disconnect. On some level these personal travels have been woven into the fabric of my writing along side my academic reading, listening and discussions with colleagues. The reverse is also true: the research I have undertaken during the last decade has given me tools to understand not only my academic adventures but also my personal ones. This project is incomplete but it cannot be otherwise; there is so much to explore in Carter’s music and there is so much that life demands of an individual that to attempt to neatly close off or constrain one for the sake of the other becomes an unsustainable conceit. Nonetheless, what I have to offer here does open up a number of new ways of hearing and understanding Elliott Carter’s compositions and I have been able to come to these perspectives thanks to a number of people whose generous support has been invaluable to me over the years. Firstly, my co-editor and friend John Link has not only been a source of inspiration for me, his generosity in sharing his extraordinary knowledge and understanding of Carter’s music has been without bounds—my most heartfelt thanks. I am also immensely thankful to my supervisor Larry Sitsky, for his unwavering support and especially for his patience; to David West, for his wonderfully inspiring lectures on the Frankfurt School; and to Guy Capuzzo, for his thoughtful feedback on early drafts of my analytical chapters. I am extremely grateful to Kate Bowan, for her insightful feedback on drafts of the thesis and for making so many things at the University possible for me in the last year but also for many inspiring conversations over the years. I would also like to thank: Judith Crispin, for great discussions early on in the piece and especially for encouraging me to take the opportunity to meet Elliott Carter for the first time in 2006; Jenny Gall, for her collegiality and support through challenging times; Pauline Dusink, for always being there; and Betty Gordan, without whose generosity I would not have been able to vii undertake this pursuit. I also want to thank all the friends I have gained since becoming a parent for providing me with constant support, many confidence boosts, and many shared moments of joy with our children; my extra special thanks to Elizabeth Baker and Claire Henderson; Anna Ephraim, Zana Friend, Serina Mukerjee, Steph Kehoe, Susan Rundle, Ken Setiawan and Kim van Zutfen. My greatest gratitude goes to my family—without them this project would have been truly impossible. Most importantly, my love and thanks to my mother, Rosemary Livingstone, and to my father, James Boland. All musical extracts of Carter’s music used with kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes Asko Concert — By Elliott Carter © Copyright Hendon Music Inc All rights controlled and administered by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd Print Rights administered in Australia and New Zealand by Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd ABN 13 085 333 713 www.halleonard.com.au Used By Permission. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorised Reproduction is Illegal. Boston Concerto — By Elliott Carter © Copyright Hendon Music Inc All rights controlled and administered by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd Print Rights administered in Australia and New Zealand by Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd ABN 13 085 333 713 www.halleonard.com.au Used By Permission. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorised Reproduction is Illegal. “This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship” viii Abstract In his many writings and interviews, Elliott Carter frequently stresses the connection between human experiences of opposition and conflict and the opposition he composes into his musical interactions. While these concepts have received much attention in the scholarly literature over the decades, in this dissertation I examine the role of opposition in Carter’s music by bringing Carter’s aesthetic into contact with an Adornian tradition of dialectical aesthetics, something new to Carter scholarship. In particular, I harness Adorno’s concept of the social mediation of music materials to shed light on Carter’s linking of the musical and the human in his highly abstracted music. Central to this mediation is the way materials respond immanently to social conditions. I show how Carter conceives of musical form and temporality in terms closely aligned to Adorno, particularly with respect to non-repetition and freedom of formal design. However, I also argue that the way in which Carter worked with his musical materials did not remain static but responded to a changing modernism around the turn of the twenty-first century. Through an analysis of two of Carter’s late-late orchestral compositions, I examine how the notion of dialectical opposition finds expression in sonic images of lightness, effervescence and human fragility rather than the explosive oppositions of Carter’s middle period music. Part 1 of the thesis identifies traces of dialectical thinking in Carter’s writings and interviews and interprets these through an Adornian lens. Part 2 presents technical analyses of both the Boston Concerto (2002) and the ASKO Concerto (2000), focusing on how the repetition built in to the ritornello form of both pieces is re- formed by way of Carter’s dialectical handling of form and content. Part 3 offers a ‘second reflection’ in which philosophical concepts in Part 1 and technical concepts in Part 2 are drawn together into a critical analysis of how both materials and composer are mediated by the social. ix x Contents PART 1. CARTER, FORM AND DIALECTICAL OPPOSITION 1. Music dialectics and Carter contextualized 3 1.1 “a kind of dialectic” 3 1.2 Modernism and Carter revisited 9 1.3 Music dialectics and Adorno’s legacy 20 1.3.a – Adorno’s music aesthetics contextualized 22 1.3.b – Form-content dialectic 26 1.3.c – Mediated social critique 29 1.3.d – Post World War II music 32 1.3.e – Adorno and technical analysis 36 1.3.f – Music theory’s critical self-examination 41 1.4 Aims of this thesis 47 2. Tracing the dialectical in Carter’s compositional aesthetic 51 2.1 Introduction 51 2.2 Music history and “dialectical method” 60 2.3 Musical form and “time continuity” 71 2.4 The dialectic of musical motion: “human” and “inhuman” experiences of time 76 2.5 Musical form and Adorno’s Subject-Object dialectic 82 2.6 Carter’s dialectic of expression and construction 86 2.7 Conclusion 90 3. “a more significant human message”: Carter’s compositions as utopian vision 93 3.1 “a picture of society” 93 3.2 Glance at the socio-political connections in Carter’s oeuvre 98 3.3 Lightness and darkness: reworking the dialectic of material and form 105 3.3.a – Repetition 111 3.3.b – “the quality of inexhaustibility” 116 3.3.c – Sonority 119 3.3.d – The utopian in shades of light 122 3.4 Boston and ASKO Concertos: the dialectic of ritornello form 127 xi PART 2. TWO FORMAL ANALYSES 4. Analytical prelude 135 4.1 Circle of analyses: some analytical consideration 135 5. Boston Concerto – Analysis 145 5.1 Overview of Boston Concerto: text and texture, sonority and form 145 5.2 Ritornellos: the “rain” texture and its transformation 151 5.3 The “drama” of the concertinos 174 5.4 Form and continuity 180 5.4.a – “Linking” between movements 181 5.4.b – “Total” continuity effect 186 6. ASKO Concerto – Analysis 199 6.1 Overview of ASKO Concerto 199 6.2 “Thematic” material in the ritornello strand 201 6.3 Ritornello 1: “field of operations” 207 6.4 Two formal processes: motion through space and time 211 PART 3. SECOND REFLECTION 7. A critical interpretation of the Boston and ASKO concertos 223 7.1 Mediated social critique—the dialectic of form and content revisited 225 7.2 Genre and sedimented historical meaning 231 7.3 Composition and the “situated” composer 243 8. Conclusion 257 xii PART 1. CARTER, FORM AND DIALECTICAL OPPOSITION “ I feel about the future that in the end what we’re living through at the present time—a kind of strange mixture and confusion—will wear itself out and people will become much more sensitive and aware than they are now. They will have to be because as society becomes more complicated, more full of people and more different kinds of things happening, people will have to become much cleverer and much sharper. And then they will like my music ... [smile]” — Elliott Carter Elliott Carter: A Labyrinth of Time, 1h29’30” 2 Chapter 1 Music dialectics and Carter contextualized 1.1 “a kind of dialectic” Elliott Carter’s music has been characterized as a music of opposition.