Elliott Carter
Interview with Bruce Duffie
Everyone who approaches a 100th birthday is special in some way or another. News organizations, both print and broadcast, make special notice, and friends and family share a common wonder that a relative has hit the century mark. But when someone would be noteworthy anyway, that special longevity takes on even more meaning. This particular life, which is already significant, continues to produce music, and not just music but extraordinary scores which are dense and thorny and enjoyable and ennobling. They are studied before their premieres and will continue to be investigated long after their creator has moved on to whatever next life is in store.
In June of 1986, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Elliott Carter on the phone. He seemed pleased to talk with me and answered my questions with detail and humor. As is noted at the end of this webpage, I've been able to use his comments - in part or in full - on several occasions, and it's particularly pleasing to be able to present them again at this special milestone in his life.
Here is what we said that afternoon . . . . .
Bruce Duffie: Thank you so much for speaking with me. I appreciate your taking the time this afternoon. I was reading the jacket on the brand new Nonesuch recording, and something struck me immediately. It said your music is better understood in England than in America, and I was wondering if you can account for such a phenomenon.
Elliott Carter: Oh, perfectly. The BBC has played my music frequently in England ever since around 1955 or even maybe before that, and it’s been played there and in important concerts at the Albert Hall and all around. There’ve been a number of British groups that have played my works. The Arditti Quartet has just given my three quartets at Queen Elizabeth Hall and the works have been very well widely disseminated in England, both on recordings and by performances not only by chamber music groups, but by the BBC orchestra. The BBC orchestra has taken works of mine on tour of Europe. The BBC, in general, has been very sympathetic to contemporary music and it gradually developed quite a large public. Just recently LondonWeekend Televisiondid an hour-long television show on my music. So I would have say that showed some interest, more interest than one has here, for instance.
BD: Is dissemination, then, the key to acceptance of music?
EC: Well, music is well known and contemporary music is very much more accepted in England than it is here, in general for many different reasons, but one of them is that it’s just been played more and more frequently. And it’s been more intelligently reviewed. When I had my three string quartets played there about a month or two ago, I had six rave reviews. Well, if I’d had them played in New York I doubt if I would have had one good review. I don’t know how you explain that. Maybe they’re very old-fashioned in England, I don’t know.
BD: Maybe they’re very OLD fashioned???
EC: Yes. I mean part of the review of music is that serious music is taken seriously. I have a feeling that happens less and less in this country.
BD: Is there any way to reverse that trend, to get serious music taken more seriously?
EC: It’s difficult to reverse such a trend because the whole field is very commercialized. The entire reason why all this is happening in England is the government gives great support to musical organizations. The BBC, for instance, and the people who run it - certainly in the past, anyhow - have been very partial to contemporary music, and developed a whole school of English composers that didn’t exist before. Maxwell-Davies and Harrison Birtwhistle are largely the result of a great deal of sponsorship on the part of rather highly funded things by the government. We don’t have that kind of thing in this country.
BD: But in talking with other composers who are also teachers, it seems that we are turning out a tremendous number of people who are calling themselves composers.
EC: I know we are but the number of composers is one of the problems in this country because the amount of music that is produced is so great that it can’t be played very often in many places. It’s only played once, by and large. We’re producing a large world of composers that have one performance of each work, which is disastrous in terms of dissemination of music.
BD: Would you then encourage a lot of these people who are composing to go into other fields?
EC: I think they should. It’s very hard to make any money at it. You can’t make a living in this country composing serious music, no matter how skillful you are.
BD: So there is a great competition amongst composers?
EC: Yes, sure! That’s one of the reasons. There’s a greater competition among composers than there is a need for the work that they produce. In England they developed a large audience for contemporary music because it’s been highly sponsored and frequently performed, and played over the radio all the time. I get performances there all the time. All of my works have played many times on the BBC. I get more royalties for broadcast performances in that small country of England than I do in the entire United States.
BD: That’s a sad commentary for us, really.
EC: Well I don’t know about that. Maybe it’s a bad commentary for England.
BD: Well, let me ask specifically what do you expect of the public that comes to hear your music?
EC: What do I expect? I expect them to understand it and I expect them to want to listen to music for one thing, and to understand music, having heard some, and to be familiar with the field of cultivated and developed music, serious music if you want to put it that way. I don’t think, generally, that my music would appeal to many people who are not able to pay attention to what goes on in the music. I think a great deal of music that is written is more than insane. Music in the popular field is music that doesn’t require much attention and doesn’t require very much commitment. It’s what the Germans call entertainment music.
BD: Virgil Thomson mentioned to me that it creates a sort of "lack of attention."
EC: Well, I think in America everything destroys the ability to pay attention. The whole society is built on the idea that we must not pay attention to anything, so all kinds of things can be put over on us.
BD: Should an audience understand your music, even on its first hearing?
EC: Well, I think many people DO understand it on its first hearing, surely. One of the basic problems, though, with first hearing is that the first performance is seldom faithful to the music.
BD: Really?
EC: Well, certainly! I mean to tell you, it takes a long time for performers to learn, or to find out what’s in the music. They can’t understand. The first performance very seldom presents the music as it will be worked out. I’ve always felt, at least up until fairly recently, that it took about ten years for the performers to understand what the music was about. It was very obvious in the case of older music. Very few people understood what Beethoven was about in his time, and certainly the last quartets took almost a hundred years to be understood.
BD: So then you are expecting your music to last a long, long, long time?
EC: I have absolutely no idea about that, and I don’t really care. It seems to me the kind of society we are, and world we live in, we have absolutely no idea what the future can be.
BD: Then let me change the question a little bit. Do you feel that you are part of a long line of composers?
EC: Well, I think that composers... I’m very happy with the public that I have. I have quite a large number of people who like my music a good deal. I’m pleased about that and these people encourage me to write more music. Many composers don't have that. My three quartets played in London, the very next day there was a concert of my music in Geneva and the next day after that one in Milan - all in the month of April. I get lots of that and people are quite enthusiastic. They learn the music without any publicity or without my having made any effort. The concerts of my music show up here and there just by themselves because people like play them and there is a public that likes to hear it. I’ve got a letter that a violinist of the Sequoia Quartet that told me he’d played my Second Quartet a hundred times. I never knew, of course. We don’t get royalties for that, so I would, never knew anything about it.