STOCKBRIDGE, MASS. --
ON THE morning I visited Elliott Carter last month, he was staying in a redness cottage in this quaint village in the Berkshires. Five miles up the road is Tanglewood, summertime home of the Boston Symphony, which was in the thick of hosting a 10-concert, 47-work festival of Carter's demanding medicine. Just down the road from the cottage is the Norman Rockwell Museum.
The weather was miserable. Audiences trudged through downpours to get to Seiji Ozawa Hall. A terrifying lightning storm threatened those trying to attain the restrooms in a neighboring building during one intermission. Still, good-sized audiences turned up, and loretta Young fans and musicians swarmed around the composer as if he were a rock star.
Despite the gloom, Carter appeared ever gay. I told him how I used to be able to follow his career either through live performances or with the help of recordings. But that was when he used to write a major piece on the average of once a year. Now works large and small come in such a torrent I struggle to keep up with him.
"I wish I could write so much more that you couldn't observe up with it at all," Carter replied with a mischievous laugh. This morning he was 99 years, 7 months and 3 weeks old, yet he wasn't exaggerating around his yield. He contributed two young pieces for the Tanglewood festival, and the retrospective included more than a dozen works he had written since he turned 95. In September, a flute concerto will birth its premiere at the Jerusalem Festival. In December, the Boston Symphony will unveil his third piano concerto, "Interventions," which the orchestra commissioned for its music music director, James Levine, and Daniel Barenboim as soloist.
A few days later -- on Dec. 11, Carter's centesimal birthday -- the Boston Symphony will give the New York premiere of "Interventions" in Carnegie Hall. Also on that programme will be Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," in laurels of the fact that the germinal score inspired Carter to become a composer when he first heard it as a teenager in Carnegie in the early 1920s.
The constant remark made about Carter during the Tanglewood fete was that he is unique in music history. No major composer has ever been so life-sustaining for so long. Verdi was 80 when he wrote his last opera, "Falstaff," which has always been considered a wonder of old age. Richard Strauss was 84 when he all over his vocation with his autumnal "Four Last Songs." Wearing a red shirt and suspenders in his cottage, Carter looked as though he might have stepped out of a Rockwell painting. But although Rockwell was born only 14 years before Carter, the painter glorified a bygone era. Carter, on the other hand, remains as unapologetic a Modernist as e'er, tirelessly composition what many still consider of as music of the future.
He has always prided himself on making every piece something fresh, typically experimenting with new harmonic methods and structural principles for major compositions. In his late late period, Carter has ground ways to become, if anything, less predictable.
Neither of the new pieces for "Carter's Century," as the Tanglewood festival was called, sounded remotely like anything he had written before. "Sound Fields," which can be heard on the Boston Symphony's web TV, is signally spare from a composer who is known for density. Carter invented that allowed him to let different kinds of musical characters speak at at one time, all moving at different speeds and in different ways. His music is often urban and tin can be noisy. In his thor- ny Third String Quartet, from 1971, the four instruments are treated like individuals, each with his or her possess voice, have tempo, possess everything.
Yet "Sound Fields" is rapturously ence identically. He likewise began to organize chords so as to create disorder from order. He wanted music to mimicker modern life and society.
The breakthrough was the massive First String Quartet in 1951. Carter has written that the quartet was an campaign to understand himself. He spent a year in the Sonora Desert close Tucson and it became his aspect of nature and military personnel, as experienced through the vagaries of time. Carter describes it as "a large experimentation in polyrhythms of all kinds. It really is the to the highest degree extreme realisation. I don't know how I did it, only I did.
More info
