Phenomenological approaches to the music of Elliott Carter
Convenor: Arved Ashby (Ohio State U.)
Martin Boykan (Brandeis U.)
Encountering Elliott Carter’s First Quartet
This paper will describe the first encounter with Carter’s First Quartet at a time when this path-breaking work was still unpublished, raising the question of how an obsessive study of the score could in the end prove extraordinarily liberating even for a composer who would never use Carter’s signature devices. I shall consider these devices not as a general feature of Carter’s style but rather as they relate to the particularities of this quartet. And finally, a comparison with the music of the European avant-garde from that era will throw some light both on the quartet’s innovations as well as on its unmistakable continuity with the tradition.
Marion Guck (U. of Michigan)
Qualities of action in a Carter work: limping, singing and dwindling in Au quai
This paper takes a ‘receptional’ approach, to use Philip Tagg’s term, in analyzing a recent, small work by Elliott Carter, the bassoon-viola duo entitled Au Quai. Rather than addressing such ‘constructional’ features as large-scale polyrhythms, I focus on dramatic qualities of action and how they are projected by the musical sounds, based on my current and therefore provisional listening experiences.
Several threads intertwine in the course of the analysis. Selected passages exhibiting the qualities cited in the subtitle are given close readings, including an extended passage that, first dwindles, then limps and finally sings. An opening motto including {D, C, A} suggests a diatonic sound, heard now and then throughout the piece. It also invokes a specific transpositional/ inversional pair of Carter’s favoured all-trichord hexachord, whose occurrences highlight certain passages. Differentiating successive passages are different patterns of meter or even durations, and different manners of interaction between the two instruments, ranging from conflict to cooperation.
Joseph Dubiel (Columbia U.)
Observations of Carter’s Clarinet Concerto
Occasion is found in Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Concerto (1996) to inquire into musical experiences that might be elicited by the composition, in themselves and in relation to Carter’s compositional techniques (as we have been led to imagine them). A particular focus is the work’s second movement, in which the soloist is accompanied almost exclusively by unpitched percussion, whose parts consist predominantly of pulses at different rates, surprisingly unadorned yet also surprisingly various in the details of their realization. Some attention will also be given to the progression of movements, all defined by instrumentation and formulaic character but not all alike in the manner of their internal articulation or their connection to one another.