Elliott Cook Carter, Jr.

I

Introduction

Elliott Cook Carter, Jr., born in 1908, American composer, regarded as one of the major American composers of the 20th century. Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky called Carter’s Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano (1961) the first true American masterpiece. Carter’s cerebral and complex compositions make rigorous demands on the listener.

II

Carter’s Life

Born in New York City on December 11, 1908, Carter was initially encouraged in his ambition to be a composer while still in high school by his mentor, composer Charles Ives. Carter received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Harvard University in 1930 and 1932, where he studied with American composer Walter Piston. He later studied in Paris with influential French teacher Nadia Boulanger. Carter later taught music at Juilliard and at Columbia, Yale, and Cornell universities. He was twice awarded a Pulitzer Prize, for his String Quartet No. 2 (1959) and for his String Quartet No. 3 (1971).

III

Carter’s Works

Although Carter began composing in a traditional vein, he soon came to the conclusion that “musical discourse needed as thorough a rethinking as harmony had at the beginning of the century.” His subsequent career was devoted to such rethinking, and his deliberate working pace, producing an important new score every two or three years, steadily added to his reputation.

Carter’s determination to avoid the classical approach to thematic development and to find ways of creating a fluid, changeable continuity within a composition led him to explore serialization—that is, the organization of pitch, rhythm, and harmony according to carefully determined patterns. He also arrived at a system he called metric modulation, in which he used a progression of rhythms to create “a sense of simultaneous existence of two tempos.” He first explored metric modulation in his Cello Sonata (1948) and developed it further in his first two string quartets (1951 and 1959) and his Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952). This idea culminated in the Concerto for Orchestra (1970), which dealt not only with simultaneous rhythms but with four movements existing simultaneously. In this dramatic work, musical instruments are grouped together by pitch rather than by family.

---

---

Carter stresses the individuality of each instrument in his chamber ensembles, even specifying that the players be seated some distance apart. At certain points in his piano concerto of 1967, every member of the orchestra plays a different note. Carter concentrated on large-scale works during the 1960s and 1970s but turned to music for smaller ensembles in the 1980s. His Partita (1993), a substantial orchestral movement commissioned for pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was eventually joined with two other pieces, Adagio Tenebroso (1994) and Allegro Scorrevole (1996), to form the three-movement Symphonia (first performed in 1998), his most important orchestral work in some time.

Carter’s later instrumental works include three more string quartets (1971, 1986, and 1995), the Brass Quintet (1974), the Quintet for Piano and Winds (1991), and the Quintet for Piano and Strings (1998). His orchestral music includes A Symphony of Three Orchestras (1976-1977); Three Occasions (1986-1989); and concertos for oboe (1987), violin (1990), and clarinet (1996). Carter’s first opera, What Next?, completed when he was age 90, premiered in Berlin in 1999. Two further works, his Asko Concerto for mixed ensemble and Tempo e Tempi, a song cycle for soprano and ensemble, were premiered in 2000. Carter also wrote song cycles based on the work of American poets such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. His writings on music and reflections on composers and other arts were published in 1996 as Elliott Carter, Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995.

	More from Encarta
	•  Important Notice: MSN Encarta to be discontinued. Learn more. •  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain