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Carter
Elliott Carter (1908-2012) was the foremost composer of classical music in America during the second half of the 20th century. Over the course of a career that spanned seven decades, he consistently produced works that critics hailed as creatively daring, intellectually demanding, and emotionally complex. Distancing himself from the various "schools" and movements that grew and waned in popularity during the postwar era, Carter cultivated a deeply personal musical style that he developed and refined up until the very end of his life.
This book of the composer springs from author David Schiff's life-long interest in Elliott Carter's music and his close personal connection with the composer which spanned over forty years. This critical overview of Carter's life and work explores aspects of the composer's life about which he was usually reticent--and occasionally misleading--such as his complicated relationships with Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Nicolas Nabokov, and his own parents. Schiff's study of Carter's complete oeuvre--from his politically charged Depression-era ballets to the deeply personal and reflective late works--is based on extensive study of the composer's personal sketches and letters. Featuring an in-depth look at the legacy project of Carter's final decade, seven settings of American modernist poetry by E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, this newest addition to the Master Musicians Series paints with a fine brush the story of America's
foremost composer of the second half of the twentieth century.
This book of the composer springs from author David Schiff's life-long interest in Elliott Carter's music and his close personal connection with the composer which spanned over forty years. This critical overview of Carter's life and work explores aspects of the composer's life about which he was usually reticent--and occasionally misleading--such as his complicated relationships with Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Nicolas Nabokov, and his own parents. Schiff's study of Carter's complete oeuvre--from his politically charged Depression-era ballets to the deeply personal and reflective late works--is based on extensive study of the composer's personal sketches and letters. Featuring an in-depth look at the legacy project of Carter's final decade, seven settings of American modernist poetry by E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, this newest addition to the Master Musicians Series paints with a fine brush the story of America's
foremost composer of the second half of the twentieth century.
296 pages, Hardcover
Published August 1, 2018
29 people want to read
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David Schiff
31 books2 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 25, 2025
Elliott Carter was a musical mastermind of rare integrity. His music is pure politically-correct Pink Floyd. He got that trick from his friend, the great Edgar Varese. It's a great Catharsis!
After the Second World War, he abandoned his tame variations on all the old 1930’s derivative but introspectively parochial American classical music that is now a largely forgotten piece of our past.
And he woke up to the wider world of atonal music that had seemed an infinitely better choice of musical vehicle -
Because it had a real Cutting Edge.
To present music as the careful juxtaposition of sonic events in their separate natures, as discrete rhythms and volumes of sound, scored either for orchestral or chamber instrumentation, was his method.
In his music time is suspended and all bets are off on its inherent meaning. Listening to it, we are left “pinned, wriggling on a wall” in the midst of an intense tonal conflict of which the apperception induces our total attention.
He wrote music with the kind of edge that made you want to go back and relive the insights it provoked within you.
Music like his piercing String Quartet No. 1, composed in the isolation of the painted desert of the Southwest around 1950. Do you see Cold War memories suddenly filling your mind as you listen to it on YouTube?
International musical stars like Stravinsky and Boulez were doing a sudden double-take at the old American isolationism and the country’s sudden musical acceleration into the nuclear age.
He was noticed. And how!
But to the end of his very long centenarian life he remained modest, quiet and unassuming.
And after Stravinsky went to his reward, during the turbulent Nixon era, he became the acknowledged world Grand Master of modern music.
To enter the world of his music is to enter a musical looking-glass, reflecting the shattered fragments of our hard-edged postmodern world AS IT IS.
He didn’t equivocate. And he didn’t apologize for his daring. He just kept working and composing.
If you’ve seen him in YouTube videos of his life past the age of 100, you know that to all appearances he remained a lively, homey little elf of a gent till the end.
He shared a brownstone Manhattan suite with his forever wife, devoted helpmate and the soul of his world, near the former World Trade Center and reacted to its collapse just like every shocked New Yorker.
Except then, he was moved to write a monumental atonal Grand Opera afterward, entitled What Next?
He was as overwhelmed by our world as the rest of us!
And when his dear wife died - when he was in his mid-nineties - he was crushed. So what did he do? He composed one of his most affecting masterpieces - the incredible Symphonia.
Helen Carter was one of the most durable doyennes of the Manhattan cultural establishment, and when she died it left a deep void in his life, that, as his fellow New Yorker Auden remarked, no amount of roses could fill. But the Symphonia is a monumental epitaph.
In the late YouTube live videos at his basic brownstone, we see this simple, ambling elf of an old nonagenarian man pause his pleasant monologue in the living room long enough to segue to his upright piano, strike an atonal chord - and once again submit to his attentive musical thought - excluding, of course...
Le réel, parce’que vil!
A world of carefully controlled complexity in his very own language.
Now, we can expect - a few years after his (by and large) unnoticed passing - that he is safely in the regions of Purgatory Proper, chatting amiably with his own ancient tutelary spirit, William Carlos Williams, both of them gazing with a kind of valediction over the edges of that sacred mountain, and beyond, to those vast and endless ‘crowds of people walking in a ring....’
Farewell to his nihilistic contemporaries, all.
He has left them far behind, safe at last! For there will always be enduring Value in what he wrote.
So that was The Maestro. He lived and thrived completely in the times, ever alert though always gracious.
He saw in his mind’s eye what his music tells you about - myriad, starkly beautiful and pristinely new worlds beyond ANY words.
After the Second World War, he abandoned his tame variations on all the old 1930’s derivative but introspectively parochial American classical music that is now a largely forgotten piece of our past.
And he woke up to the wider world of atonal music that had seemed an infinitely better choice of musical vehicle -
Because it had a real Cutting Edge.
To present music as the careful juxtaposition of sonic events in their separate natures, as discrete rhythms and volumes of sound, scored either for orchestral or chamber instrumentation, was his method.
In his music time is suspended and all bets are off on its inherent meaning. Listening to it, we are left “pinned, wriggling on a wall” in the midst of an intense tonal conflict of which the apperception induces our total attention.
He wrote music with the kind of edge that made you want to go back and relive the insights it provoked within you.
Music like his piercing String Quartet No. 1, composed in the isolation of the painted desert of the Southwest around 1950. Do you see Cold War memories suddenly filling your mind as you listen to it on YouTube?
International musical stars like Stravinsky and Boulez were doing a sudden double-take at the old American isolationism and the country’s sudden musical acceleration into the nuclear age.
He was noticed. And how!
But to the end of his very long centenarian life he remained modest, quiet and unassuming.
And after Stravinsky went to his reward, during the turbulent Nixon era, he became the acknowledged world Grand Master of modern music.
To enter the world of his music is to enter a musical looking-glass, reflecting the shattered fragments of our hard-edged postmodern world AS IT IS.
He didn’t equivocate. And he didn’t apologize for his daring. He just kept working and composing.
If you’ve seen him in YouTube videos of his life past the age of 100, you know that to all appearances he remained a lively, homey little elf of a gent till the end.
He shared a brownstone Manhattan suite with his forever wife, devoted helpmate and the soul of his world, near the former World Trade Center and reacted to its collapse just like every shocked New Yorker.
Except then, he was moved to write a monumental atonal Grand Opera afterward, entitled What Next?
He was as overwhelmed by our world as the rest of us!
And when his dear wife died - when he was in his mid-nineties - he was crushed. So what did he do? He composed one of his most affecting masterpieces - the incredible Symphonia.
Helen Carter was one of the most durable doyennes of the Manhattan cultural establishment, and when she died it left a deep void in his life, that, as his fellow New Yorker Auden remarked, no amount of roses could fill. But the Symphonia is a monumental epitaph.
In the late YouTube live videos at his basic brownstone, we see this simple, ambling elf of an old nonagenarian man pause his pleasant monologue in the living room long enough to segue to his upright piano, strike an atonal chord - and once again submit to his attentive musical thought - excluding, of course...
Le réel, parce’que vil!
A world of carefully controlled complexity in his very own language.
Now, we can expect - a few years after his (by and large) unnoticed passing - that he is safely in the regions of Purgatory Proper, chatting amiably with his own ancient tutelary spirit, William Carlos Williams, both of them gazing with a kind of valediction over the edges of that sacred mountain, and beyond, to those vast and endless ‘crowds of people walking in a ring....’
Farewell to his nihilistic contemporaries, all.
He has left them far behind, safe at last! For there will always be enduring Value in what he wrote.
So that was The Maestro. He lived and thrived completely in the times, ever alert though always gracious.
He saw in his mind’s eye what his music tells you about - myriad, starkly beautiful and pristinely new worlds beyond ANY words.
July 24, 2019
The American composer David Schiff studied with Elliott Carter in the 1970s, and Schiff has become more widely known as a friend to his teacher and advocate for/analyst of Carter’s music than for his own works. For many years the key overview of Elliott Carter’s output was Schiff’s The Music of Elliott Carter, a second edition of which was published in 1998. However, Carter was remarkably productive starting from that same year, when he turned 90 years old, and by the time the grand old man of American modernism died in 2012, he had written as much music as he had before 1998.
It was therefore obvious that a new survey of Carter’s music was needed, but this volume, titled simply Carter, is not a third edition of the classic The Music of Elliott Carter. For one, while Schiff’s earlier work featured samples from the scores, Carter contains only prose descriptions of the pieces. Evidently Schiff or his publisher felt that score samples would only scare potential readers away. That is a disappointment – just compare this volume to an earlier entry in Oxford University Press’s “Master Musicians” series, Malcolm MacDonald’s survey of Arnold Schoenberg which abounds in score samples (and is one of the best books on a composer that I have ever read). I hate to use the term “dumbing down”, but what else can you call it?
Another way in which this new Carter differs from Schiff’s earlier work is that it has a lot of biographical detail. Schiff goes into much more depth about Carter’s education and friendships with other arts figures than before. Also, now that Elliott Carter is dead, Schiff feels free to talk about Carter’s character flaws, lies or omissions, or blind spots that could not be politely covered while Carter was alive. That does not mean we have a hatchet job here – Schiff remains an admirer of Carter’s music and he still wants to share it with the musical public. Rather, he only aims to present the composer in all his complexity as a human being. And in one instance, Schiff’s frankness isn’t even about Carter himself, rather with Carter’s passing he finally feels free to criticize Paul Griffiths’ completely lame libretto for Carter’s opera What Next?, which many Carter fans feel was a low point in the composer’s career.
For those wanting an overview of Carter’s career that covers the post-1998 works, Schiff’s Carter is valuable. There is no other book that discusses all of Carter’s late vocal works (settings of American poets), which Schiff feels is a major part of the composer’s legacy. Still, without actually grappling with the scores there is only so much that Schiff can say. Besides the very general descriptions of the pieces, the book feels flimsy and artificially padded in that a whole 30% of the book consists of chronologies and biographical snippets of performers or friends of Carter – the latter especially is unnecessary because most of these individuals are prominent enough to be treated on Wikipedia or other general references.
So, those interested in Elliott Carter could start with this book, as it has some exclusive facts and is a quick read in general, but anyone really wanting to get into Carter’s classic output will still need to pick up a copy of the 1998 edition of Schiff’s The Music of Elliott Carter.
It was therefore obvious that a new survey of Carter’s music was needed, but this volume, titled simply Carter, is not a third edition of the classic The Music of Elliott Carter. For one, while Schiff’s earlier work featured samples from the scores, Carter contains only prose descriptions of the pieces. Evidently Schiff or his publisher felt that score samples would only scare potential readers away. That is a disappointment – just compare this volume to an earlier entry in Oxford University Press’s “Master Musicians” series, Malcolm MacDonald’s survey of Arnold Schoenberg which abounds in score samples (and is one of the best books on a composer that I have ever read). I hate to use the term “dumbing down”, but what else can you call it?
Another way in which this new Carter differs from Schiff’s earlier work is that it has a lot of biographical detail. Schiff goes into much more depth about Carter’s education and friendships with other arts figures than before. Also, now that Elliott Carter is dead, Schiff feels free to talk about Carter’s character flaws, lies or omissions, or blind spots that could not be politely covered while Carter was alive. That does not mean we have a hatchet job here – Schiff remains an admirer of Carter’s music and he still wants to share it with the musical public. Rather, he only aims to present the composer in all his complexity as a human being. And in one instance, Schiff’s frankness isn’t even about Carter himself, rather with Carter’s passing he finally feels free to criticize Paul Griffiths’ completely lame libretto for Carter’s opera What Next?, which many Carter fans feel was a low point in the composer’s career.
For those wanting an overview of Carter’s career that covers the post-1998 works, Schiff’s Carter is valuable. There is no other book that discusses all of Carter’s late vocal works (settings of American poets), which Schiff feels is a major part of the composer’s legacy. Still, without actually grappling with the scores there is only so much that Schiff can say. Besides the very general descriptions of the pieces, the book feels flimsy and artificially padded in that a whole 30% of the book consists of chronologies and biographical snippets of performers or friends of Carter – the latter especially is unnecessary because most of these individuals are prominent enough to be treated on Wikipedia or other general references.
So, those interested in Elliott Carter could start with this book, as it has some exclusive facts and is a quick read in general, but anyone really wanting to get into Carter’s classic output will still need to pick up a copy of the 1998 edition of Schiff’s The Music of Elliott Carter.
October 16, 2018
My interest in modern music peaked in the 1970s while in college. At the time I found composers like Stockhausen, Varèse, Cage, Cowell, Ligeti and many others of the avant-garde fascinating. This included Elliott Carter, as represented by his Double Concerto, Piano Concerto, and Concerto for Orchestra at that time. I even wrote to Carter something of a fan letter then, and he was kind enough to reply, admitting that he rarely received fan letters per se, and praising my taste in music (I still have that letter). As I have aged, my interest in avant-garde music has waned, as interest in such music has in general, to the point that I find such music somewhat nostalgic in a bizarre way. And thus I missed that Carter went on to live to 103 and continued to compose virtually up to his last days on Earth. That story is amazing in itself.
Ideally this book on Carter should be read slowly, interrupted by listening to his large body of works, many of which are available on YouTube. However I did read it straight through, and am in the process of sampling the many Carter works that I missed out on. The musical discussion for these works will be worth rereading after listening to them.
The other horizon that this books has opened for me is a desire to explore the many American poets mentioned in it. Carter throughout his life set 20th century American poetry to music, and the brief dissertations on the lives and works of these poets is fascinating. Another of my literary blind spots, modern poetry is something I'd like to explore further.
Overall this book is a nice overview of the music of Elliott Carter, with some biographic elements as well. The book is not technical; there are no musical examples given, no detailed analysis of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm. Carter's mathematical approach to music was a very important part of his compositional style, and though this is mentioned in the book, there are again no technical examples. As such this book is a good introduction to Carter's music, especially for the non-musician. I enjoyed it very much.
(P.S. Goodreads indicates the only edition is the Kindle edition. I read the hardcover edition, which I can assure you really exists.)
Ideally this book on Carter should be read slowly, interrupted by listening to his large body of works, many of which are available on YouTube. However I did read it straight through, and am in the process of sampling the many Carter works that I missed out on. The musical discussion for these works will be worth rereading after listening to them.
The other horizon that this books has opened for me is a desire to explore the many American poets mentioned in it. Carter throughout his life set 20th century American poetry to music, and the brief dissertations on the lives and works of these poets is fascinating. Another of my literary blind spots, modern poetry is something I'd like to explore further.
Overall this book is a nice overview of the music of Elliott Carter, with some biographic elements as well. The book is not technical; there are no musical examples given, no detailed analysis of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm. Carter's mathematical approach to music was a very important part of his compositional style, and though this is mentioned in the book, there are again no technical examples. As such this book is a good introduction to Carter's music, especially for the non-musician. I enjoyed it very much.
(P.S. Goodreads indicates the only edition is the Kindle edition. I read the hardcover edition, which I can assure you really exists.)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews