Elliott Carter

We mark the death of the American Composer Elliott Carter, who died six years ago today – on November 5, 2012 – one month shy of his 104th birthday.

When Elliott Carter was born on December 11, 1908, Theodore Roosevelt was President; an Indian’s head was on the obverse of a United States penny; Gustav Mahler was the conductor of the New York Philharmonic; and the United States was just beginning its run as a dominant nation on the world’s stage. If the twentieth century was “America’s century”, it was “Elliott Carter’s” century as well: there’s hardly an artistic, cultural, or political event that Carter did not actively observe from the early 1920s through almost yesterday. His musical interests and compositions trace a direct line through some of the most important musical trends of the twentieth century: the experimental, expressionist music of the 1920s; the musical populism of the thirties and early forties; the modernist impulse of the fifties and beyond. 

Throughout his compositional career, Elliott Carter has proven himself to be a quintessentially American composer. Not in an Aaron Copland, “folkloric” sense, but more profoundly. Carter’s mature vision of America mirrors, according to his biographer David Schiff:

“the energy, violence, and instability of contemporary life, sometimes finding pathos in this situation, sometimes elation, and at other times tragedy.” 

Elliott Carter in 1917, age 9

Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. grew up lucky. He was born into a prosperous family that had built its wealth importing lace. Elliott was groomed from the first to take over the family business. During his childhood, he spent six months of every year in Europe; he was fluent in French before he learned to read English.

But early on, Carter’s passions tilted towards music. He attended the prestigious Horace Mann School, and then went on to Harvard, where he earned a BA in English in 1930 and a MA in music in 1932. But even more important than his educational pedigree was the fact that Carter had the extraordinary good fortune to grow up in New York City during a particularly rich time in that city’s history. New York in the 1920s did indeed “roar” with energy and creativity, and in those days before the rise of Hollywood, it was the heart and soul of American culture. 

As a teenager Carter met and befriended Charles Ives, with whom he attended concerts. He was witness to the development of the American Musical Theater tradition, the dissemination of jazz, and the birth of a bona-fide “American” concert music, as composers like Aaron Copland and George Gershwin began to incorporate jazz and American folk and theatrical idioms into their concert works. As a teenager, Carter heard Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire performed in concert; he heard first performances of music by Edgard Varese, Carl Ruggles, Roger Sessions, Aaron Copland, and Ives himself. He heard Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s groundbreaking concerts of new music at Carnegie Hall. In 1925 he accompanied his father on a trip to Vienna, where he bought every available score by the composers of the so-called “Second Viennese School” – Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Vacations were spent attending the great European music festivals at Salzburg, Munich, and Bayreuth. 

I told you he grew up lucky! And like so many American composers before and after him, Carter “finished” his music education at the hands of Nad...