Elliott Carter turned 100 today (Dec. 11, 2008). Love his music, hate it, or remain willfully ignorant of it, this much must be said for Carter's output from the time of his First String Quartet (1950): It embraced currents in music history with a completeness not found in the works of any other American composer. Carter has said that the music which first gripped him was Stravinsky and Schoenberg, which makes one wonder about the music he wrote up until age 40 or so, tonal (if sometimes difficult) music like the Symphony No. 1 and the Cello Sonata, works not like Stravinsky and Schoenberg at all. Only beginning in 1950 did he write music clearly influenced by those twin giants; only then did he become "Elliott Carter."
It has always interested me that this Big Change in Carter's music came while he was living in Tucson, Arizona, my hometown. That's where he wrote the First String Quartet, in which he set out in the direction of serialism and the avant-garde, a direction the composer maintained and still maintains after all these decades. In an interview in 2002 for National Public Radio, Carter said: "I got my second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 and I went with my family out to Tucson Arizona deciding that I would return to the kind of music I had been very interested in when I was young.... So I decided I'd write a string quartet that did the kind of things that I was hoping I'd do when I was very much younger. It was like the modern style of the early times. I had had all of these ideas in my head for a long time, but finally I began to make them all into a shape."
To read this, it would seem the location (Tucson) was coincidental; the important thing was Carter's readiness to go back and explore the sounds of his youth. And yet, the question in my mind persists: Why did this happen in Arizona? I have a theory, which relates to the ancient Roman idea of "genius of place." This idea is simply that every place on earth has a kind of spirit, just as each era in history has its own "zeitgeist." The spirit of Arizona is as different from the New England and New York Carter knew as the 20th century was different from the 19th. Where the East Coast is green, Arizona is brown. Where East Coast vegetation thrives, Arizona's is spare. Where the skies are small in New England, they are enormous in Arizona, somehow spanning much more space. And so forth. The dryness and the heat, the lack of seasons -- all these things contribute to an Arizona genius that is much more in alignment with the dry, spacious, dissonance of Stravinsky/Schoenberg than anything found at Harvard, where Carter went to school.
My suggestion is that the genius of place had its effect on Carter, perhaps not directly, but certainly indirectly. I'll probably never know the composer's own thoughts on this, since I don't know him and have no access to him. But I'd like to think that artists, while not at the mercy of their surroundings, are somehow subtly in tune with them.
- Kenneth LaFave
This man is already old trying to do this kind of activities I think he should rest.
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