BD: How so?
EC: Well if you get a Pulitzer Prize in literature, your book sells. It doesn’t mean a thing in making modern music, as far as I’m concerned.
BD: Is that a mistake on the part of the selecting committee?
EC: No, this story I told you about the Juilliard Quartet is the case. There were a lot of people that wanted it, or thought they wanted to hear it, but when they heard it, they were very cross about it. Finally, lots of people didn’t want to hear it when they saw or heard what it was going to be like on the road when they heard it on the record. It did not, in other words, increase appreciably the number of performances that the work got at the time. Now, it’s possible, having won two of them over the years, the reputation that this produced finally made some of my music more acceptable to some people. But the music prize is a very different thing, as I say. The Pulitzer Prize doesn’t have the same effect on the musical field that it does on others.
BD: Is that something that a composer should strive for, to try and win the Pulitzer Prize?
EC: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think that one knows that the thing about the Pulitzer Prize, as far as I understand it, is that they have a different jury every year, and who knows whether who’s going to get it? The jury is varied. If you look at the list of people that have received it, there’s every conceivable kind of person who’s receiving it. I don’t know whether it has very much, but I really, honestly, can’t answer what effect it had. It’s nice to have prizes of this sort, certainly, because they all add up somehow. Especially if you have enough money to do a lot of publicity, they add up to a lot. But if you don’t make a lot of noise about it, it’s as if you haven’t got it, just as when Mr. Regan gave me that medal last year.
BD: Was that not significant for you?
EC: Well, it was significant. I liked getting it. I was interested in being in the White House and sitting at a dinner table with Mr. Reagan. Yes, that interested me a great deal. There’s a silver medal and people play. I was very touched and moved that the government wanted to do this. I have a feeling that as far as increasing the number of performances of my music, it’s just nil. You have to understand that this is a field that’s very unlike painting or literature in the sense it doesn’t make any money. I would have to have thousands of performances of my Symphony for Three Orchestras, for instance. It was played in Chicago in order to pay for the cost of the score, and to pay for the amount of time that I spent on it. And that could never happen in this country, or it couldn’t happen anywhere. The Chicago Symphony plays it maybe three times and that’s it for a very long time, and maybe forever. It’s the same for the five or six other performances it has gotten around the United States, and there may be ten that it’s received in Europe, So I get two or three hundred dollars, maybe a thousand dollars for a performance. It’s not very much. And my chamber music doesn’t pay at all. It’s not something that has a commercial value. As you may know, the copyist gets more to copy my score than I get.
BD: Ha! I was unaware of that balance!
EC: I am making a clear copy of my Fourth Quartet. I can copy, regularly, sixty pages, and I copied about four to five pages a day. It’s very hard work. I work all day long as a dentist doing that. Now it will take the copyist much more time than that, because I don’t do it with a ruler and a pen and an engraving tool. I just do it with a pencil, but to get everything neat and clear is a chore. This is not composing the piece, it’s just copying. So it would take me - whatever, four goes into sixty is fifteen - so fifteen days, maybe more, to do this.
BD: Right, so there’s half a month gone.
EC: Yeah, that’s right, with no pay whatever, means there’s nothing. Doesn’t mean anything.
BD: Let me ask you perhaps an outrageous question. Is composing fun?
EC: Well of course it’s fun. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t. It's not like a funny toy, it’s infuriating like everything, like all fun. This particular aspect of copying drives me a little crazy because I would rather write the piece than copy it, but when it’s written this way, it’s in such a mess that nobody could make it out. It’s not clear enough, so it has to have copies made.
BD: Sure. But the actual act of composing and deciding what will be used...
EC: Oh, that’s fascinating; it interests me a great deal. Even all of this copying interests me too, but it still has its tedious side. I guess everything has that.
BD: Let me ask you a philosophical question. What do you feel is the ultimate purpose of music in society?
EC: It’s hard for the composer to answer that. I don’t know that it’s the ultimate meaning, but certainly one of the things is that it makes life worth living. It’s a very interesting thing to do and it’s a very interesting thing to hear, and it gives a kind of value and a kind of order in the sense that it communicates very interesting human feelings and human thoughts in a very intense and strong way when it’s done well. It seems to me that this is a valuable thing. These days, the opposite is happening, which I find is less and less desirable, the tendency to do everything as relaxed and lackadaisical as possible. It’s important to learn to pay attention, to pay attention very intensely and have the attention rewarded.
BD: Should music be art or entertainment?
EC: Well, I can’t say. I don’t know whether it could be used as entertainment. Under many conditions it would be not at all entertaining to many people, but I can say that some of the music I’ve written is certainly entertaining. Certainly there was that old First Symphony. It’s a very entertaining piece, even Duke Ellington told me that.
BD: When you’re writing a piece, where is the balance between inspiration and technique?
EC: Oh, I never write anything if it doesn’t seem to me to be inspired. The technique is like the grammatical technique that we are now using as we talk to each other. It’s not something we think about, but there it is. You wouldn’t understand me if I wasn’t using my verbs and my nouns in proper order and with the proper ending, and so it is with music. That’s the technique. On the other hand, there’s the whole thing we’re saying and talking about, and that’s what the technique helps to preserve.
BD: What is next on the calendar for Elliott Carter?
EC: Well I’m writing that oboe concerto for Heinz Holliger, the Swiss oboe player. He and Paul Sacher from Basle commissioned it, and that I will write with great pleasure because I once learned to play the oboe when I was a student.
BD: I wish you lots of success with that.
EC: Well, I hope so too. [chuckles] Thanks.
BD: And I want to thank you for being a composer.
EC: Ha, ha, ha, ha. Not many people would say that. Thank you.
© 1986 Bruce Duffie- Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.
- Used by permission.
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