Magna Carter

Magna Carter David Schiff January 23, 2013 | This article appeared in the February 11, 2013 edition of The Nation. From 1945 to the last day of his life this past November, the composer Elliott Carter lived in an apartment building on West Twelfth Street that likely went up around the time of his birth in 1908. Curious about music at an early age despite his family’s indifference, the young Carter attended the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue in 1924; a half-century later, he would compose, with his Symphony of Three Orchestras, a portrait of Manhattan as compelling as George Gershwin’s. Carter was immersed in the musical life of his native city for a century, yet he was never a member or a rival of any so-called New York School, nor was he drawn, except fleetingly, into entangling musical alliances. He found his musical voice only after he turned 40 and had moved to West Twelfth Street, when he finally figured out how to reconcile the influences of his two mentors. One was Charles Ives, whom he met when he was in high school; the other was Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied for three years in Paris during the mid-1930s after graduating from Harvard, where he had focused on philosophy, literature and mathematics, but not music. Ives had envisioned a distinctly American music expressive of the redemptive disorder of democracy. Boulanger demanded a technical mastery of the European tradition and thought Carter’s talents in that regard did not measure up to those of her most famous protégé, Aaron Copland. In the works Carter composed after returning to the United States from Paris in 1937, he often seemed to exist in Copland’s shadow, with only occasional hints of a distinctive voice, let alone musical genius. But with his monumental String Quartet No. 1 from 1951 and the Variations for Orchestra of 1955, Carter ended up redefining American musical modernism, fusing native rhythmic vitality with the sort of structural complexity previously heard only in the music of European masters like Berg and Bartók. The fusion also kept his work far removed from the populist style that had become synonymous with American music. The long incubation of these pieces steeled Carter to follow his own path, undistracted by musical fashion and keen to discover new things to say, right up to the final months of his epic life. He completed his last work, Epigrams, for a piano trio, in August 2012, three months before he died. I met Carter in January 1971, when Pierre Boulez, the French maestro of postwar musical experiment, was conducting Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra with the Cleveland Orchestra. I was in graduate school at Columbia University, pursuing what would turn into an ABD in English literature and living the out-of-time existence typical of postgraduates back then. My life seemed all the more suspended because I felt trapped: I wanted to be a composer, not an English professor, but could not imagine a career for myself in music. I had been devoted to Carter’s music ever since I was 15 and heard his elegant, jazz-tinged Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord. Soon I was prowling the aisles of G. Schirmer and Sam Goody for scores and recordings of the blockbuster masterpieces Carter was turning out in the 1960s: the Second String Quartet, the Double Concerto and the Piano Concerto (dedicated to Stravinsky, who praised it as the “Magna Carter”). These works had a rhythmic intensity I did not otherwise hear in contemporary music, and it would find its full tempo and strength in the Concerto for Orchestra, completed in 1969. Carter modeled the piece on the Whitmanesque poem Vents, by St. John Perse, which begins: “C’étaient de très grands vents sur toutes faces de ce monde” (There were very great winds over all the faces of the earth). The Second Quartet and the three concertos that followed marked a new phase in Carter’s mature development. In the late 1950s, the composer had encountered the avant-garde music of Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono and Berio. Once again he found ways to combine European and American developments on his own terms. His music became more disjointed, percussive and unsettled; he wanted the players in the Second Quartet to speak at cross purposes, like characters in a Samuel Beckett play. At the same time, Carter was able to shape anarchic elements into grand masterpieces that transcended their apparent disorder. Within the vanguard aesthetics of the period, Carter’s mixture of disjunction and craft seemed a contradiction in terms. Why, I heard on more than one occasion, did Carter care so much about form? Didn’t he know the masterpiece was dead? * * * When the Concerto for Orchestra premiered at the New York Philharmonic in February 1970, I was studying abroad. As soon as I learned that Boulez would be conducting the Cleveland performances, I decided to go. The dates fell during the break between semesters at Columbia, and come January I was looking out the window of a Greyhound coach trundling across the wintry wastes of Pennsylvania. Boulez, though still the four-star composer-general of the European musical avant-garde, was at the time becoming more active as a conductor. He was already renowned for his ability to bring lucid order to the most rambunctious of modern works. A few years earlier, in Cologne, Boulez and two other conductors had realized Stockhausen’s Gruppen, a composition for 109 players divided into three orchestras that were often required to perform simultaneously in different tempos—different by arcane ratios like 13:11. At the podium, Boulez behaved like a cross between a traffic cop and an IBM mainframe, in full command of the music and showing no trace of emotion. Until 1971, Boulez had not bothered to conduct any American music; he once quipped that there was no American music as good as Hans Werner Henze’s, “and that is not setting your sights very high.” But now he was pursuing a conducting career in the States and felt obliged to find some American sounds worthy of his genius; Carter’s Concerto, which presented technical challenges of coordination similar to those in Gruppen, fit the bill. My friend Peter Kogan, now a timpanist with the Minnesota Orchestra, played percussion in the Cleveland Orchestra at the time, and he arranged for me to attend the rehearsals and performances of Carter’s piece. Although I had played double bass in school and for community orchestras, I had never sat in on the rehearsals of a professional orchestra, and the rigid, contractually defined temporal discipline of the routine—ruled by a large, looming rehearsal clock—surprised me. For a Thursday night concert, there would be four rehearsals, the first being on Monday and each lasting exactly three hours, from 10 AM to 1 PM, with a single twenty- minute break. At 9 AM, the musicians were free to warm up on the stage; fifty-five minutes later, they were in their places as the concertmaster walked on and the principal oboe sounded an “A” so that the orchestra could tune. At exactly 10 AM, the conductor would appear and the music- making would begin; at 1 PM sharp, a union rep would nod to the conductor and the rehearsal would end. I soon understood how Boulez’s disciplinary and mathematical skills (he had excelled in math before taking up music at the Paris Conservatory) would be as important as his musical abilities: rehearsals would become a double struggle of time management, both around and within Carter’s music. The Monday morning before the concert, I found a seat in Severance Hall as the orchestra members gradually filled the stage. The composer soon arrived wearing a rumpled trench coat and carrying a large black case containing the blue-printed copy of his manuscript score (computers had not yet taken over the job of musical notation). I was the only other person in the hall and introduced myself to Carter. He asked if I wanted to follow the score, pulling an extra copy from his case. It measured twenty-four by eighteen inches, and some pages were packed with more than sixty staves of music (in a Beethoven symphony, by contrast, there are rarely more than twenty per page). Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra was one of eighteen works commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to mark its 125th anniversary. Leonard Bernstein, who had never performed Carter’s music before (and never would again), conducted the premiere performances and the first recording. Carter’s score could not have been more different from Bernstein’s contemporaneous work, Mass, with its famous “Simple Song,” yet Bernstein grasped its turbulence and sonic splendor: the concerto sounded complicated and complex without being oblique; its percussion-rich sonorities and sweeping motion seemed as much in tune with Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” as with Perse’s poem. This palpable agility impressed one of the work’s best-known admirers, Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, who would underwrite a later recording conducted by Oliver Knussen. * * * The orchestral concerto of the twentieth century was essentially a new genre. The most famous ones are by Bartók and Lutosławski, and both spotlight the virtuosity of the various sections of the orchestra: strings, winds, brass, percussion. Carter interpreted the form differently; in his concerto, every member of the orchestra becomes a soloist at some point in the score. Instead of dividing the orchestra along the usual family lines, Carter grouped it into four ensembles of instruments playing in the same register, as if each instrument in a string quartet had morphed into a mini-orchestra.

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