Carnegie Hall Rental 11/5/13 3:10 PM Page 1
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
11-17 ASO_Carnegie Hall Rental 11/5/13 3:10 PM Page 1 Sunday Afternoon, November 17, 2013, at 2:00 Isaac Stern Auditorium/Ronald O. Perelman Stage Conductor’s Notes Q&A with Leon Botstein at 1:00 presents Elliott Carter: An American Original LEON BOTSTEIN, Conductor ELLIOTT CARTER Suite from Pocahontas Overture: John Smith and John Rolfe lost in the Virginia Forest Princess Pocahontas and her Ladies Torture of John Smith Pavane Sound Fields for String Orchestra Clarinet Concerto Scherzando Deciso Tranquillo Presto Largo Giocoso Agitato ANTHONY MCGILL, Clarinet Intermission ELLIOTT CARTER Warble for Lilac-Time MARY MACKENZIE, Soprano Voyage TERESA BUCHHOLZ, Mezzo-soprano Concerto for Orchestra This evening’s concert will run approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission. American Symphony Orchestra welcomes the many organizations who participate in our Community Access Program, which provides free and low-cost tickets to underserved groups in New York’s five boroughs. For information on how you can support this program, please call (212) 868-9276. PLEASE SWITCH OFF YOUR CELL PHONES AND OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES. 11-17 ASO_Carnegie Hall Rental 11/5/13 3:10 PM Page 2 Notes ON THE PROGRAM Elliott Carter: An Appreciation Ives, had for the most part fallen silent by Leon Botstein as a composer. If there was ever a persuasive instance For Elliott Carter, the initial encounter for thinking about the appropriateness with the music of Ives (whom he met of the analytical category of “late” style while still in high school), Stravinsky, it can be found in the case of Elliott and Schoenberg would be crucial in the Carter. His longevity and vitality were development of his approach to compo- extraordinary. Few have been blessed sition. But in contrast to Roger Sessions, with such a dignified and productive his older contemporary (whom he old age. Much has been written about admired) and fellow Harvard alumnus, Carter. It is hard to avoid being intimi- Carter exhibited few signs of his genius dated by the length, consistency, versa- and talent early. He was no prodigy, no tility, and centrality of the composer’s wunderkind in the way many other career. He was one of the towering fig- great composers, from Mozart to Korn- ures of 20th-century music, certainly in gold, were. What Carter did reveal America, and for decades was consid- from the start was the remarkable and ered by many this country’s greatest liv- wide range of his intellectual abilities. ing composer. What made Carter’s He taught at St. John’s College in career so central and interesting, how- Annapolis, where he was required to ever, is the extent to which it stands at teach not only music but also Greek, the crossroads of a century-old frac- philosophy, and mathematics. In the tious and intense debate about the impressive set of collected essays by nature and place of music in the mod- Carter, there is an affecting and elo- ern world. quent defense of music as a crucial component of liberal learning. Carter That debate began as the “long” 19th displayed a natural affinity to literature century came to an end, during Carter’s and language. He credited his interest early childhood. It has been common- in addressing through music the com- place to locate the public recognition of peting constructs and experiences of a generational reaction against the time to Proust and Joyce. Poetry held a compositional practices, musical cul- central, if not growing role as a con- ture, and habits of listening developed stituent of his musical imagination. between 1750 and the end of the 19th century in the year 1913, when Stravin- With uncanny discipline and patience, sky’s Rite of Spring was premiered in Carter pursued his compositional Paris and a “scandal” concert took career. Although he taught composi- place in Vienna on which music by tion, on and off, at Peabody, Columbia, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg was per- Cornell, Yale, Queens College, and Juil- formed. It is ironic that after World liard, Carter devoted his time essentially War I, when the emergence of compet- to composing. His leap to prominence ing approaches to writing new and took place in the 1950s with the First “modern” music deemed adequate to a String Quartet. From then on a series of radically changed world became most commanding works followed, including evident and apparent, the pioneer of the Variations for Orchestra (1956), a American musical modernism, Charles second quartet (1960), the Concerto for 11-17 ASO_Carnegie Hall Rental 11/5/13 3:10 PM Page 3 Harpsichord and Piano (1961), the If there was something quintessentially Piano Concerto (1967), the Concerto American about Carter it was his prag- for Orchestra (1970), a third quartet matic approach to influence. As if by (1973), the Symphony of Three Orches- trial and error, he absorbed and adapted tras (1977), and Syringa (1978), as well ideas around him to generate a unique as many smaller works. All this was way of composing. By teaching himself done before he turned 70. and resisting the role of being someone else’s disciple and heir, he fashioned the Carter, like Copland, was generous to col- means to lend his music a distinctive leagues. He accumulated a wide range of character. From Ives he took the fasci- colleagues and friends, ranging from nation with the experience of simulta- nearly contemporary composers (includ- neous hearing and the intersection of ing Wolpe, Piston, Sessions, Petrassi, aural memory and experience as well as Boulez, and Lutoslawski) to performers the practice of combining discrete con- (Charles Rosen, Ursula Oppens, Fred trasting but continuous elements, not Sherry, Gilbert Kalish, Daniel Barenboim, mere fragments, and weaving them into and James Levine), composer-performers a single fabric within the frame of a (Heinz Holliger and Oliver Knussen), and composition. In one Carter work the younger composers (Frederic Rzewski listener confronts disparate and chang- and Richard Wilson). Between age 70 ing constructs of time and of regularity and age 100, an astonishing series of and irregularity. works came into being, including songs, chamber works, an opera, and concertos From Schoenberg and his followers for oboe, the violin, and for horn, as well Carter adapted the idea of construing as numerous works for orchestra. all the pitch elements of the tempered scale as equivalent to one another and Throughout all these years Carter sus- without normative priority and there- tained the modernist project that came fore without implied hierarchical rela- into being in his youth. That project was tionships. He accepted the idea that to extend but yet confront the inherited tonality had run its course and that the traditions of musical composition in dissonance had been truly emancipated. ways that seemed consonant with the What he developed was an elaborate distinctive and seemingly discontinuous and intricate catalog of note sequences features of modern 20th-century life. that could be combined into chord Modernism sought to continue musical groupings, ranging from three to 12. culture and musical expression and com- These could be manipulated in inge- munication along a trajectory that was nious and nearly inexhaustible ways. understood to be progressive in the ways For those not given to cowardice, one in which it corresponded with, or perhaps can find these pitch groupings painstak- responded to, the historical moment. ingly outlined and analyzed in Carter’s That moment, from 1913 to the mid- book on harmony. Carter seemed to 1970s, when modernism began its select a particular pitch grouping as the retreat, witnessed a mix of tragic and raw material for a single composition. transformative events. In the light of In the most dense of the orchestral modern experience, Carter’s impulse was works, a 12-note grouping often never either restorative or nostalgic, even defines the material. during the period between 1939 and 1944 when he wrote the ballet Pocahon- Varèse’s influence on Carter can be tas and the Holiday Overture. Neither found in Carter’s attention to sonori- was his approach rigidly ideological. ties. Stravinsky left his mark in the 11-17 ASO_Carnegie Hall Rental 11/5/13 3:10 PM Page 4 interaction between materials and form Indeed, as Charles Rosen has argued, in relationship to elapsed time. And Carter wrote for a select few, primarily Bartók’s impact might be found in the musicians and those who are willing to vitality of rhythmic patterns and devel- learn how to understand and follow opment and Carter’s acute sensitivity to music. The task of the listener is not to time duration within clearly defined reject what seems at first an encounter movements. Inspired by all three of irritatingly “unintelligible,” but rather to these masters, Carter pursued the inti- stick with the new as if it were a new lan- mate connection between pitch groupings guage, and learn its order and logic and and particular sound color, developing then derive pleasure from it. For Rosen all correspondences between structural ele- great music demands this kind of time ments in pitch and rhythm and the spe- and energy if it is to be understood and cific use of instruments in a single loved. But for Taruskin this notion is work. In the end, however, Carter quite possibly inherently meaningless, in invented himself without propagating a the sense that the distinction between the school, a system, or training a group of purely musical and the extra-musical is imitators. He was a meticulous builder, artificial and a conceit. If music is a form an engineering experimentalist with an of life, which it is, it has an inevitable con- uncanny sense of practical utility.