Carter the Empiricist

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Elliott Carter has long had the reputation of being a difficult, intellectual composer. The motivation for this view stems initially from his music itself: complex multilayered textures, elaborate rhythmic counterpoints, precisely-measured changes of tempo, an uncompromising (and for many, essentially American) toughness in the angular lines; all these are characteristics of Carter's music which make a strong impression. This reputation for intellectualism is supported to a certain extent by the composer's own writings on his music, in spite of their evident concern with expression and cultural context. Talk of giant polyrhythms and metrical modulations, and charts of chords, intervals and tempi, can all be somewhat daunting. Yet closer examination reveals that this view of Carter is far from accurate. If we are not simply to ignore Carter's writings on his music[1], then these writings must be examined critically, both in the light of a strong tradition in the USA of the composer as commentator/critic/theorist, and with regard to the music itself, to ascertain just how much is revealed in the writings about compositional process. 

Any consideration of the writings of American composers in general must start with an assessment of the literary output of Charles Ives. The general character of Ives' writing is anecdotal: in the context of individual works, as in many of the writings collected and published as the Memos[2] the information imparted is usually concerned with biographical reminiscence, frequently in conjunction with aesthetic and philosophical speculation, to be sure, but even these are thoughts around the music, which often in Ives' writings seems to serve merely as a pretext for divagations of this kind, particularly in the renowned Essays before a Sonata and the Postface to his edition of 113 songs[3]. The strongly personal, even eccentric character of Ives' writings, and his attitude towards composition and music in general, did surprisingly little to influence in a direct way the thought and style of later composers in their writings - only the experimental tradition headed by John Cage seems to approach Ives' combination of humour, personality and philosophical depth. 

Two other experimentalists made small but important contributions to the literary tradition in American music. Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources[4], published in 1930 yet substantially complete by 1919, attempts a systematization of rhythmic and tempo relationships through proportions based on the harmonic series, and also discusses properties of chromatic chords of various kinds. Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music[5] is in certain respects even more revolutionary, describing a microtonal musical system based on pure intervals, and exploring relationships within this system to an extent governed by Partch's compositional vision. Of the two, only Cowell's book had any significant impact on the development of musical thought in America, although even this was not extensive: while some of the principles expounded are certainly ahead of their time, their limited realisation in the course of the book and in Cowell's music may have prevented their full potential from being recognized. Partch's work stands as an impressive yet isolated statement of a singular compositional ideal. 

The populist movement in the arts in the USA in the 1930's can be regarded as a principal cause of the frankly educational activity of many American composers at this time, and also accounts for the prominence of such figures as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Arthur Berger, and Carter himself, as music critics and reviewers. Stemming from a growing social and political conscience on the part of artists in the face of the hardships of the Great Depression, the movement which led to the adoption of jazz and other vernacular styles in art music found its counterpart in lectures and writings which were largely aimed at bringing the experience of music, both new and old, to larger sections of the population[6]. 

A more serious strain of thought about music had meanwhile been developing with the growth of the universities in the USA. The advent of the Second World War brought an unexpected stimulus to the academic study of music, as to many other fields. Among the many refugees from Germany, Austria and elsewhere in Europe, musicians of all types arrived - among them the composers Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith. Less conspicuous than the influx of composers, but no less important in its effect on American musical life, was the arrival of a number of musicians who had studied with Heinrich Schenker in Vienna. These pupils, once established in the USA, began the process of disseminating Schenker's radical ideas on tonal music theory and analysis. Previously to this, Schenker's theories had had only limited influence outside the small band of disciples in Vienna, although this is not to say this his theories were completely unknown in America. Roger Sessions, for example, became aware of Schenker's ideas through his many visits to Europe in the 1920s and 30s, providing a critique of these by way of obituary in 1935, and reviewing the first edition of Der freie Satz in 1938[7]. 

The presence of Schenker's pupils in the USA helped create and sustain an academic climate favourable to analytical and theoretical endeavour. Although it would be impossible to claim a direct influence of Schenkerian thought on the concepts in atonal music theory developed later by such figures as Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte, it is clear that the presence of Felix Salzer, Oswald Jonas, Adele Katz, Adolf Weisse and others stimulated the growth of the discipline of music theory in all its manifestations - analytical and compositional. The American activities of Schoenberg were also to have an important influence on post-war music in the USA, although it is one of the ironies of twentieth-century music that the principal figure in the development of serial composition in the USA did not encounter Schoenberg directly as a teacher. The writings of Milton Babbitt are essentially concerned with compositional, rather than analytical, theory. The originally and later influence of his approach lies in his formalisation of relationships possible within the twelve­note system in mathematical terms, drawing on a pure number theory dealing with order and invariance relationships within a modulo 12 system. These issues were first explored by Babbitt in the 1940s, and resulted in an unpublished paper[8] and a series of influential articles[9]. This approach to compositional theory was soon extended and developed in various ways, all indebted to Babbitt's formalisation of pitch relationships in terms of mathematical properties: Princeton University, where Babbitt had taught from 1938, became a centre for this type of research. Donald Martino, a pupil of Babbitt, proposed a theory of 'aggregates' which, building on Babbitt's application of the principle of combinatoriality to the domain of twelve-note music, generates the relational properties of smaller pitch collections within the twelve-note set[10]. Others, most notably Allen Forte, have used the integer model for pitch relationships as an analytical tool for examining the pre-serial atonal music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. 

The theoretical tradition represented by Babbitt, Martino and Forte has been a potent influence on compositional practice in the USA from the early 1960s. It is easy to see how this current of theoretical thought might have influenced Carter, at a time when his own compositional style had reached maturity. Serial theory's concerns with global rather than processive relationships are mirrored by a corresponding (and at least apparently global) organisation in terms of intervals and sets in such works by Carter as the Double Concerto (1961), Piano Concerto (1965), and particularly by the Concerto for Orchestra (1969). Moreover, this 'global' aspect of pitch organisation is all that Carter does describe when writing about pitch organisation in these works, furnishing charts of 'chords' and 'pitch relationships'. One might go as far as considering the more technical of Carter's writings as being produced in response to a view, widely held at the time but only rarely articulated, that compositional credibility rested on at least some measure of theoretical consistency. Yet it is obvious that Carter did not share the inclination of such composers as Babbitt, Martino and George Perle towards systematic theoretical speculation; it will become clear in the course of the following chapters that Carter's pre-compositional organisation serves a very different purpose, providing a set of materials which are limited within a work according to the context of a particular instrument or ensemble, section in a form, or expressive character. These materials are then used with varying degrees of strictness, sometimes according to a referential sonority or intervallic relation, sometimes spun out in flights of elaborate and virtuosic compositional freedom. 

Hence 'Carter the Empiricist'. In recent years, he has distanced himself still further from the post-war theoretical tradition, which in any case is now less pervasive. David Schiff writes that "Carter's harmonic procedures consist of neither system nor general method. They are inseparable from the expressive and musical needs of the work in which they appear. (Hence Carter's great resistance to merely technical analysis of his music)"[11]. Further support for this view comes from the extent to which Carter sketches a work - there are over two thousand pages of sketches for the Second String Quartet alone[12], suggesting a long process of experimentation and rejection, of play with a work's materials, until the required effect is achieved. Finally, such a view is supported by the music: even in cases where pitch and chord charts are provided, these can often be seen to account for surprisingly little in the actual textures of a work. 

Footnotes

2. C.Ives, Memos, ed. J. Kirkpatrick (New York, 1972) 

3. Reprinted in C. Ives, Essays before A Sonata, ed. H. Boatwright (New York, 1961) 

4. H. Cowell, New Musical Resources (New York, 1930) 

5. H. Partch, Genesis of a Music (1949: 2/New York, 1974) 

6. Lectures of this sort form the basis of Copland's first book, What to Listen For in Music (New York, 1939). See E.T. Cone, 'Conversation with Aaron Copland', PNM 6/i (1968), p.65 

7. R. Sessions, `Heinrich Schenker's Contribution', in Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, ed. E.T. Cone (Princeton, 1979), p.231-240; `Escape by Theory', ibid., p.256-262 

8. M. Babbitt, `The Function of Set Structure in the Twelve-tone System' (unpublished: 1946) 

9. M. Babbitt, `Some Aspects of Twelve-tone Composition', The Score 12 (1955), p.53-61; `Twelve-tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants', MQ xlvi (1960), p.246-259; `Set Structure as a Compositional Determinant', JMT 5/i (1961), p.72-94 

10. D. Martino, `The Source Set and its Aggregate Formations', JMT 5/ii (1961), p.224-273 

11. D. Schiff, `In Sleep, In Thunder: Elliott Carter's Portrait of Robert Lowell', Tempo 142 (September 1982), p.8 

12. See M. Steinberg, Introduction to Elliott Carter: Sketches and Scores in Manuscript (New York, 1973), p.8