ELLIOTT CARTER

ORCHESTRAL WORKS

Variations for Orchestra

The Variations, commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra and written in Rome

in 1954-55, are a summation of the works Carter wrote after the stylistic
breakthrough of the Cello Sonata of 1948. The listener will hear passages
recalling the Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (1950) and the Sonata for Flute,
Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952) as well as the sweeping, heroic lyricism
of the Quartet No. 1. But the eclecticism of the work reaches far beyond
Carter’s own music. Aaron Copland once remarked on Carter's wide
knowledge of the music of his time; the Variations are a monumental
synthesis of many different kinds of modern music (and in an overt way that
Carter never again attempted). There are not only surface resemblances to
Schoenberg and Berg, but there is also Carter's closest approach to serial
technique. Charles Ives, who died while Carter was composing the work, is
invoked explicitly in Variation 7, and Ives's technique of superimposition is
the basis of the whole work's texture and form. Also present in the music are
the spirit of Debussy particularly of La Mer and Jeux; the rhythmic
experiments of Conlon Nancarrow and Henry Cowell; jazz (variation 8); and
even the rhetoric of the Great American Symphony of Harris, Copland, and
Schuman. In addition to these many stylistic strands, Carter also attempted
to use all possible variation techniques, including an array of canonic and
contrapuntal devices-Variation 2, for instance, is a free mensuration canon in
which the size of intervals varies along with the rhythmic values. The music
holds these opposing tendencies together with an ever present tidal force.
The daring eclecticism is only slightly less surprising if we remember that
variations are often encyclopedic in nature. The Goldberg and Diabelli
variations, Brahms's Handel and Haydn variations, and Schoenberg's
Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31, all attempt a grand overview of the musical
language of their time. Carter's Variations belong in this company.
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Carter's approach to both the variation form and the orchestra is novel.
There are three themes, or rather a traditional "theme" and two less
traditional elements, which Carter calls ritornelli. One ritornello, which moves
in small intervals, begins very slowly and accelerates throughout the work.
The other, a twelve-tone row, is first played rapidly and then slows down with
every reappearance. The variations are similarly grouped in threes. Variation
1 is light and fast; 2 is heavy and slow; 3 combines the previous two.
Variation 4 is a continuous ritardando; 5, the eye of the storm, is a motionless
study in shadowy sonorities; 6 is a continuous accelerando. Variation 7
juxtaposes three distinct kinds of music in the woodwinds, brass, and strings,
respectively; 8 continues the woodwind idea over a jazzy scherzando; 9
superimposes the three elements of 7 over a frightening clock-like pulse (a
transformation of the jazz beat of Variation 8). The lntroduction, Theme, and
Coda (emergence, presence, and dissolution) form yet another three-part
grouping, framing the whole. The orchestra mirrors the work's formal
dialectic. The instruments are everywhere divided into three opposed
elements playing contrasting kinds of music. Sometimes these elements are
fixed, as in Variation 7; more often they move around the orchestra in the
way of Klangfarbenmelodien, as in the Theme, where the first ritornello, the
theme proper, and prefigurations of Variation 1 unfold simultaneously each
moving through the orchestra. Just as Carter destabilizes the variation form,
turning the traditional sequence of independent pieces into a multiply
interactive complex, so the orchestra itself becomes a protean, ever changing
medium.

Piano Concerto

The Piano Concerto, written in Berlin in 1964-65, explores the tragic

possibilities of an alienated texture on a visionary scale. Carter has pointed
out on several occasions the influence of the Berlin setting, and the newly
built Wall, on the work. His studio was near an American target range, and
the sound of machine guns underlies the time-bomb mechanism of the
orchestra in the second movement. Carter sets the piano against the
orchestra (asking, if it is possible, that they be clearly separated spatially),
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and their conflict intensifies throughout the work. It's not a question of soloist
and orchestra simply elaborating different materials - we can find that in
Vivaldi; rather, here the piano and orchestra represent irreconcilable and
violently opposed principles. To connect these antagonists - and at the same
time to emphasize the distance that separates them - Carter surrounds the
piano with its own ensemble or concertino of seven instruments. The work
thus contrasts an isolated soloist whose character is free, fanciful, and
sensitive with an orchestra that functions as a massive and mechanical
ensemble and with a chamber orchestra as a well-meaning but impotent
intermediary; Carter himself has compared the three eloquent woodwind
solos of the second movement to the advice of Job's friends.

The expressive world of the Piano Concerto puts it far indeed from the
exhibitionistic entertainment of most concertos; one has to go back to the
Mozart C minor to find the concerto form used for such an austere and tragic
end.

The grim yet finally cathartic struggle of the piece takes the word
"concerto" back to its Latin root meaning-to strive or contend-yet gives that
meaning a connotation it could have, alas, only in this century. But perhaps
even more remarkable is the sense of hope with which the work ends.

David Schif

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Three Occasions for Orchestra

Rather exceptionally for Carter, who likes to conceive a piece as a 'single

unifying gesture', the Three Occasions were assembled gradually.
Commissioned to write a short fanfare for the Houston Symphony Orchestra
to mark the 15Oth anniversary of the founding of the State of Texas in 1987,
Carter came up with nothing less than A Celebration of some 100 x 150
Notes. Technically he set himself the challenge of creating a piece exactly
150 bars long and at a speed of 150 beats a minute from the interplay of
eleven fanfare patterns, each based upon one of the eleven possible intervals
within an octave. But the most immediate impact is the fantastical pace and
variety of textural change: from the whimsical celesta solo on minor thirds
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near the beginning, by way of the majestic pile-up of fifths in the middle to
the raucous and witty cut-off at the end. And all this within three minutes.

After conducting A Celebration in 1987, Oliver Knussen asked for a

companion piece and Carter decided to cast it in the form of a memorial to
that generous patron of new music, Paul Fromm, who had recently died.
Remembrance works on three levels. In the foreground, a solo trombone
intones, with broken eloquence, a kind of funeral elegy. In the background,
densely luminous twelve-note chords roll by at their own rate like a
procession of clouds. In the middle ground, fragmentary phrases gradually
accumulate like memories-culminating just before the climax in a near-
quotation of the drum and piano writing in Carter’s Double Concerto (1961)
which Fromm originally commissioned, generously funding the rehearsals and
recording.

Following his successful premiere of Remembrance at Tanglewood in

1988, Knussen approached Carter with a BBC commission for yet a further
piece to make up a balanced triptych - what Charles Ives would have called
an ‘Orchestral Set'. Carter's Anniversary, a gift to his wife Helen on their
fiftieth wedding anniversary, is also the most intricately structured of the
three pieces. Two self-generating melodic lines, constantly fluctuating in
speed of unfolding, interact throughout the piece, engendering about half
way through still a third line which ultimately rounds off the music on a rising
tuba phrase, as if to begin it all over again. Since this contrapuntal structure
rests in turn upon a variety of flowing and ticking textures, the overall
impression is of Time itself moving forward at many different rates, yet
simultaneously seeming to revolve around some still centre.

Violin Concerto

The history of the violin concerto since the classical period has tended to fall
into two distinct traditions. There is the dramatic tradition in which the solo is
treated as an obbligato within a symphonic argument - often having to wait
some while for its first entry, as in the violin concertos of Beethoven, Brahms
and Elgar - and the more lyrical tradition inaugurated by Mendelssohn in
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which the violin leads from the start. Carter's Concerto, jointly commissioned
and first performed in May 1990 by Ole Böhn and the San Francisco
Symphony under Herbert Blomstedt, carries the lyrical tradition to its
extreme. Over its three-movement span, the solo part never lets up for more
than four or five bars at a time. The orchestral accompaniment, by contrast,
is of a transparency, even sparseness, unprecedented in Carter's output and
the few tuttis are of the utmost brevity.

Nevertheless, the Concerto begins deceptively with a complex,

bubbling tutti that deliberately covers the soloist's first entry so that one only
becomes aware of it retrospectively as the orchestration thins. Nor is this the
only novel twist to tradition. The three movements are also linked by
apparently random but in fact exactly composed sounds, as if the players
were testing their tuning. And at the end of the Finale, after bringing
everything together on what sounds like a conclusive loud chord, Carter has
the soloist start up a brief cadenza and vanish in a whisper of orchestral
strings to create an unexpected ‘second ending' utterly the opposite of the
first.

Despite these refinements, the Concerto's three movements present

an almost traditional contrast of character. The first, marked Impulsivo, is a
kind of mosaic structure in which the solo cross-cuts material of many
different kinds for the orchestra to comment upon. The extended central
movement is a typically Carterian double structure in which the violin
presents a lagged recitative marked Angosciato (anguished) against slowly
rolling waves of orchestral sound marked Tranquillo. The Scherzando finale
seems to have the ghost of a baroque gigue somewhere behind it, with the
soloist skittering away in triplets end the orchestra never quite managing to
catch up.

Concerto for Orchestra

If the Violin Concerto is Carter's most linear work in its unfolding, the
Concerto for Orchestra is his most polyvalent. Its form is not, however,
generated by an opposition of themes in the traditional sense, but by an
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interplay of dynamic forces. On receiving his commission from Leonard

Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, to whom the work is dedicated, one
of Carler's first ideas was to divide the orchestra into four mixed groupings.
He then proceeded to heighten the contrast between them by evolving the
harmony of each from a different three-note segment of a twelve-note chord-
which itself returns from time to time as a tutti sonority-and by assigning to
each a different type of motion through Time itself. At this point, he came
across St John Perse's epic poem, Vents, evoking a vision of America swept by
great winds of change, destruction and renewal. The poem's imagery of
rustling grasses, clouds of flying insects, and so on, suggested many musical
textures to Carter and helped him to focus his overall trajectory as a
metaphorical passage from Autumn to Spring. But his final form, in which
each of the four groupings dominates a movement in turn though with
sounds of the other three continually audible in the background - would make
musical sense without any knowledge of Vents.

In the beginning, polyrhythmic waves of percussion activate the tutti

chord which approaches in a numinous whirring and bursts asunder into the
four orchestral groupings. The first movement is dominated by the medium-
low groupings of cellos, piano, harp and wooden percussion, evoking dry,
autumnal ‘blown-husk' sonorities in a spasmodic rubato motion that
constantly attempts to restart itself at a faster pace only to fall away. At its
climax, this process touches off the second movement: an aerial, insect-
swirling scherzo carried by the highest grouping violins, upper woodwind,
metal percussion-in flights of sound which, pre-echoed at their fastest during
the first movement, steadily get slower over the Concerto as a whole. The
music gradually ebbs into the ‘dead of winter’ third movement, focussed on
the lowest grouping of double basses, heavy brass, timpani and bass drum,
which unfolds a jagged recitative in a rubato tempo that keeps trying to
speed up from ever slower starts. At last the tension releases the vernal
finale, led by the medium-high grouping of violas, trumpets, middle
woodwinds and snare drums. In opposition to the second movement, the
fourth movement music has been steadily speeding up over the work. Now it
spirals faster and faster, provoking the final apocalyptic appearance of the
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tutti chord and a retreat of the whole visionary fabric into the distance to the
celebratory sound of bells.

The concept of a large structure as a kind of vortex of interacting

forces has its precedents in such pieces as the Jeux de vagues in Debussy's
La Mer - a composer Carter has long admired for the ‘time sweep' of his later
music. But it is hard to think of a post-war score remotely as rigorous in its
detailed organisation as the Concerto for Orchestra which at the same time
attains anything like its sense of openness and exuberance

Bayan Northcott

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A Symphony of Three Orchestras

Elliott Carter was commissioned to write A Symphony of Three Orchestras by

the

New York Philharmonic, under a grant from the National Endowment for the
Arts, for the celebration of the American Bicentennial. It was dedicated to
Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, who gave the premiere
performance on 17 February 1977 at Avery Fisher Hall.

Carter refers to his work as one of three orchestras, rather than for
three orchestras, because he wanted to stress the idea of the ensembles
sounding simultaneously, rather than antiphonally. The ensembles consist of
the following forces: Orchestra I contains brass, strings and timpani;
Orchestra II, clarinets, piano, vibraphone, chimes, marimba, solo violins and
basses and a group of cellos; Orchestra III, flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns,
violins, violas, basses and non-pitched percussion.

This complex work typifies Carter's sophisticated manner of

coordinating instrumental groups. Each orchestra plays four "movements" of
differing characters, as in a traditional symphony. Each movement, however,
is sounded while another orchestra is finishing its movement, creating one
twelve-movement structure of continuously overlapping sound. In his preface
to the score, Carter wrote:
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The listener, of course, is not meant, on first hearing, to identify the details of this
continually shifting web of sound any more than he is to identify the modulations in
Tristan und Isolde, but rather to hear and grasp the character of this kaleidoscope of
musical themes as they are presented in varying contexts.

More than simply a technical tour de force, this approach is an attempt to

reflect a fluid and complex reality in music:

I do not want to give the impression of a simultaneous motion in which everybody's

part is coordinated like a goose step. I do not want to write the kind of music that just
marches on and marches of. I want it to seem like a crowd of people, or like waves
on the sea - all things that signify a much more fluid and, to me, more human way of
living. (Quoted in Charles Rosen, The Musical! Languages of Elliott Carter, 1984)

The Symphony fulfilled Carter's longstanding desire to write a work

based on the poem "The Bridge" by American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932).
The Symphony, like the poem, suggests a continual descent. The music
begins in the highest registers, and begins to fall at the sound of the solo
trumpet. Just prior to the conclusion of the Symphony, the music is
interrupted by a series of violent crashes after which the opening of the work
is mirrored by the lowest registers of the tuba and double basses.

Robert Adelson

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Symphonia sum fluxae pretium spei

In planning his near 50-minute Symphonia for large orchestra as a triptych of

self-sufficient commissions - for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the BBC
Symphony Orchestra, and the Cleveland Orchestra respectively - Carter was
doubtless mindful that he might not be able to complete the whole. Yet his
creative risk more than justified itself. Not only did the finally finished
Symphonia prove even greater than the sum of its parts when Oliver Knussen
and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the first integral performance in April
1998, but since completing it, Carter has gone on to compose a stream of
further works, including his first opera.

Hence, no doubt, the title's additional motto, sum fluxae pretium spei -
"I am the prize of flowing hope". Carter took the phrase from a Latin poem,
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Bulla, by the 17th-century English metaphysical Richard Crashaw, in which

the creative fancy is likened to an airborne bubble reflecting the variety and
change of life. In the first movement, life is at its most multifarious: Carter
entitled it Partita not to evoke the Baroque form but in its Italian connotation
of a game. From its explosive opening, the music unfolds as a perpetual give-
and-take of contrasting figures, textures, speeds, dynamics, and silences. A
few recurrent devices provide markers in the exhilarating onrush - notably a
kind of chiming effect as single chord complexes are briefly ricocheted around
the orchestra - and longer solo lines emerge from the flux from time to time.
But nothing ever comes round exactly the same way twice.

Although the Adagio tenebroso momentarily echoes the slow flute

music from near the beginning of the Partita by way of a tenuous link, it could
hardly be more opposite in character: an obsessive 20-minute brooding on a
single, darkly ominous soundscape, as if the bubble were hovering over a
war-torn wasteland. Against litanies of slowly shifting chords, melodic lines
strive to evolve, only to fragment, while lumbering march rhythms emerge,
only to falter. So recurrent is the sense of climax postponed or subverted that
when, towards the end, the true climax does suddenly erupt, and equally
suddenly dissolve, it sounds the more terrifying in its seeming arbitrariness -
and the final pages of numbed chord-alternations, the more emptied of
feeling.

Where a more traditionally minded composer might have attempted to

resolve the extreme contrast between the first two movements in a final
synthesis, Carter risks a concluding movement that is equally distinct from
either-save only for the briefest allusion to the end of the second movement
in his finale's opening bars. Inspired by phrases from Crashaw evoking the
bubble as the windblown "flower of air", and by the diaphanous precedent of
Berlioz's "Queen Mab" scherzo, Carter's Allegro scorrevole proves a study in
evanescence, in which long, spiraling string lines ride upon volatile eddies of
arabesques and trills. Gradually, waywardly, the movement's airy textures
rise in tessitura until, shortly before the end, a sudden plunge to the depths
suggests that the bubble has burst- leaving the melodic line to fade into the
empyrean on a solitary piccolo. To conclude so ambitious a triptych in so
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apparently weightless a finale could have left a feeling of incompletion. Yet

somehow the sequence balances up; the concluding gesture magically
clinches the whole. But then it is hard to think of a recent parallel to the
scope, rigour and daring of what Carter has achieved here. Against all the
minimalisms, retro-styles and compromises with commercialism that have
marked the music of the last couple of decades, Symphonia embodies a
comprehensive and uncompromising reaffirmation of the modernist vision.

Clarinet Concerto

To which the Clarinet Concerto, composed rapidly in the later months of 1996,
could be heard as yet another, complementary, contrast. Commissioned for,
and premiered by the clarinetist Alain Damiens and the rest of the Ensemble
InterContemporain under Pierre Boulez, this is the most extrovert, indeed
divertimento-like, of Carter's six concertos to date. In order to turn to positive
account the Ensemble's odd balance of 13 winds and percussion against only
five solo strings, Carter decided to space the players on the stage in
homogeneous groups-five strings; harp and piano; three percussionists; four
brass; four woodwinds - and to focus each of the first six sections of his
continuous seven-part form upon the colouristic possibilities of one group at a
time. The opening Scherzando features mainly piano, harp, and pitched
percussion; the ensuing Deciso switches to unpitched percussion. There
follows a section marked Tranquillo with muted brass; a Presto with whirling
woodwind; a Largo backed by sustained strings; and a Giocoso using
unmuted brass. Across these sections, the clarinet continuously ripples,
cavorts, and soars, pausing only during the brief tutti links in which the player
moves on to the next accompanying group. In the seventh section soloist and
ensemble build up to a climactic confrontation, only to be silenced by Carter
in a few zig-zag gestures another instance of his genius for unexpected
endings.

Bayan Northcott © 1999

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Oboe Concerto
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The Oboe Concerto was written for Heinz Holliger who asked Paul Sacher, to
whom it is dedicated, to commission it for him. It is in one continuous
movement with the soloist accompanied in its widely varying, mercurial
moods by a percussionist and four violas. The main orchestra opposes their
flighty changes with a more regular series of ideas, usually on the serious
side, sometimes bursting out dramatically. Each of the two groups use
different musical materials which they develop throughout the work, and
these are associated with many contrasting and conflicting characters. Heinz
Holliger himself was of great assistance in giving me advice about his
instrument and even more through wonderful performances of other works.
The Oboe Concerto was composed during part of 1986-87 and first performed
in Zurich in June 1988 by Holliger and the Collegium Musicum conducted by
John Carewe.

Elliott Carter

===================

Variations pour Orchestre

Les Variations pour Orchestre, fruit d'une commande de l'Orchestre de

Louisville, furent esquissées en 1953-54, achevées en 1955 et créées le 21
avril. 1956. Ainsi que le eompositeur l'explique lui-méme, elles reposent sur
trois idées dont les deux premières sont des ritournelles, reparaissant ci et là
sans modification, mais dans des tempi et à des hauteurs différents. La
première, exposéé par tout l'orchestre peu après le début de l'oeuvre, se
ralentit à chaque apparition (Variations I, III, VIII, Finale), alors que la seconde,
d'abord exposée dans un tempo très lent par deux violons soli dans l'aigu,
s'accélère au contraire (Variations II, VIII et Finale). La troisième idée n'est
autre que le thème principal lui-même. La courbe formelle globale neutralise
progressivement les contrastes caractériels jusqu’au milieu de l'oeuvre (5e
Variation), pour les accuser de nouveau peu à peu jusqu'à la fin, et les
opposer violemment dans le Finale. Chaque Variation possède sa propre
structure, car l'auteur nous explique que la structure elle aussi, comme une
sorte d'attitude, de conduite musicale, aide à définir le caractère. L'oeuvre
toute entlère impressionne par le sens exceptionnel de la croissance
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organique et par une force expressive parfois presque expressionniste. De ce

point de vue également les Variations pour Orchestre occupent une position
de premier rang dans la succession de l'Opus 31 de Schoenberg. La
splendeur sonore et la somptuosité orchestrale de cette partition si
différentes de la nudité grandiose d'un Harris, d'un Copland ou d'un
Schuman, assurent à l'auditeur moyen un accès relativement aisé.

Double Concerto pour Clavecin et Piano avec deux Orchestres de

Chambre

De ce point de vue, le Double Concerto pour Clavecin et Piano avec deux

Orchestres de Chambre , que Carter acheva en 1961 pour répondre à une
commande de la Fondation Fromm, et qui fut créé à New York en septembre
de la méme année présente des difficultés beaucoup plus considérables.
Stravinsky l'a qualifié sans ambages de “chef-d'oeuvre”, mais la complexité
rythmique et structurelle de la partition est si grande, la vitesse de
déroulement de la pensée musicale si exceptionnelle que ce chef-d'oeuvre ne
révèlera la plénitude de ses richesses qu'au bout de plusieurs auditions. Les
deux orchestres de chambre, conduits par leur soliste respectif, s'opposent
antiphoniquement. Au clavecin se joignent la flûte, le cor, la trompette, le
trombone, l'alto, la contrebasse et deux percussionnistes (percussions
métalliques et lignophones). Autour du piano se groupent le hautbois, la
clarinette, le basson, le cor, le violon, le violoncelle et deux autres batteurs
(instruments à membranes). Les deux groupes sont non seulement séparés
dans l'espace, mais ils élaborent leurs propres intervalles et leurs propres
rythmes. L'ensemble du clavecin utilise des secondes et das tierces
mineures, des quartes justes et augmentées, des sixtes, septièmes et
neuvièmes mineures, ainsi que des dérivés métriques du rapport
polyrythmique de 4 contre 7. L'ensemble du piano, lui, se sert de secondes et
de tierces majeures, de quintes justes, de sixtes, septièmes et neuvièmes
majeures, ces rythmes dérivant du rapport de 5 contre 3. Ainsi chaque
groupe dispose de moyens d'expression différents. L'oeuvre progresse d'une
relative unité vers une différenciation croissante du matériau et du caractère
psychologique, pour retourner finalement à l'unité. Elle comprend sept
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parties, jouées sans interruption. Durant l'Introduction les deux groupes

(clavecin à gauche, piano à droite) accusent de plus en plus leurs différences.
La Cadence pour Clavecin concentre les caractéristiques propres à son
groupe. L'Allegro scherzando est surtout réservé à l'ensemble du piano l'autre
groupe se bornant à de brèves interventions. Dans l'Adagio les figures tour à
tour accélérées et ralenties des deux solistes et de la percussion
accompagnent les souffleurs des deux ensembles, puis le clavecin et le piano
font entendre un important duo, le premier de plus en plus lent le second de
plus en plus rapide, les deux se croisant ainsi l'espace d'un instant, puis
s'éloignant à nouveau l'un de l'autre. Dans le Presto, tous les instruments,
sauf les percussions, se joignent au clavecin, le piano interrompant par de
brèves réminiscencas de l'Adagio. Suivent deux Cadences pour Piano contre
lesquelles s'élève violemment le Presto, à présent avec le concours de la
percussion. Après une courte pause l'oeuvre se termine par une Coda fort
développée, qui inverse dans une certaine mesure le processus de
l'Introduction, en ce que les contrastes entre les deux groupes s'atténuent à
présent, et même disparaissent complètemerit pour flnir.

Harry Halbreich