Name: Password: or
strict warning: Only variables should be passed by reference in /home3/classij3/public_html/sites/all/modules/interview/interview.module on line 356.

Elliott Carter, page 3

BD: So unless Covent Garden commissioned you for an opera...

EC: Well, you know, it’s a very long process. I have no experience at writing an opera, and I have only seen one opera that was written since the war that I felt was worth seeing; no, maybe two, and both of them have been played very poorly in this country, and have been very poorly received: Die Soldatenby Zimmermann and Roger Sessions’ Montezuma. Why would I write another one of those crazy things that nobody wants to play? I don’t like to spend all that time with that result.

BD: With all the commissions that you have, do you ever write a piece just because it’s what you want to write?

EC: Well, they’re all that. I never write any of the commissions until I want to write. I only fulfill a commission that interests me at the time. I hope right now to write an oboe concerto for Heinz Holliger. That interests me a great deal. There are other commissions that I put on the back burner for a while until I get interested in them.

BD: But at some point, because you’ve accepted them, you’ve had the interest.

EC: Yeah, well I have the interest but I don’t have an idea. For one reason or another, when there’s a new commission, another commission interests me more. I’m just now finishing myFourth Quartet. The idea of writing another quartet suddenly took me and I decided I would write it. That’s what the deal is. I couldn’t accept things that didn't interest me a great deal to write, and probably some of these commissions that I have accepted I will never write. I don’t know that. I hope I can, hope I will.

BD: I hope so too. You’ve been involved in the teaching of composition most of your life, have you not?

EC: Yes, I have.

BD: How has the teaching of composition changed over thirty or forty years?

EC: Oh, it’s changed enormously in a very unpleasant way. When I first started to teach, contemporary music was something that the teacher had to teach the student because generally the students were not terribly interested in it, or, one felt, didn’t know much about it. And in truth, generally they were interested in older music but were trained comparatively little in harmony and counterpoint. There’s been lots of books that taught them how to write contemporary music without knowing anything about harmony and counterpoint, and at a certain point you have students that don’t know anything at all, who can’t recognize the opening of Tristan und Isolde or who write music like Stockhausen. I began to feel that they just had absolutely no knowledge of the fundamental things that would be taught in a simple manner by harmony and counterpoint, and it became harder and harder for me to deal with this. And then finally, the last straw was when the composers decided that modern music was all finished and they wanted to write old music, but they had no idea of harmony and counterpoint. So they began to write this mess that they thought sounded like Brahms because they couldn’t hear Brahms anymore in an intelligent way. I was trying to write like Brahms and Mendelssohn when I began, and now I find that students who want to write that way haven’t had the faintest idea of what they’re trying to do. They do it the most inept and stupid way. Finally I got sick of the whole thing, so I quit.

BD: You have stopped teaching completely?

EC: Yes, mainly because of this dilemma. It’s all very understandable in terms of the historical development of music, but it’s very hard as a teacher, especially when you’re brought up in my old-fashioned way, to find students who want to go back to this old fashioned way without knowing what it’s all about. To them it is very new and fresh because they were brought up on how to write serial, 12-tone music. This problem bothered me a great deal I gave it up, in any case. It was one of these things that began to worry me more and more as time went on.

BD: Were any of your students quite promising?

EC: Well, there are, yes. I’ve had some students who were very fine. Many of my students have become very avant-garde in an old-fashioned sense. One even wrote a piece for fog horn. [laughs] It sounds funny too.

BD: You encourage, then, this expansion of the possibilities in producing music?

EC: I encourage whatever the student feels he must do, which is the most important thing. I encourage each student to be what he wants and to do what he wants to do as well as he can.  I’m not very good on fluff or teaching people to use foghorns, I can tell you that.

BD: Where is music going today?

EC: I don’t know. I think that the music hasn’t really changed a great deal over the years. The only thing that’s happened is that the general public and the musical performers no longer have any direction so that they play things of any kind. There was a time in each period when there was one group of performers and public were interested in the new things. The music of Schumann, for instance, or of Chopin or Liszt were all the avant-garde of their day, and they were helped by one group of the public who were there. Meanwhile there’s another group of the public who was interested in Gretry and other composers we don’t know very much about now. But there were these two poles that persisted and persisted through the good part of the centuries up until around 1950 or so. Then this whole thing disintegrated and there is no direction. Everybody does what he can, and who knows which is good? Who knows what is good and what is bad anymore?

BD: Is there hope for the future of music?

EC: I have no idea. I don’t know. Of course there is hope for the future as long as people are lively and want to live and want to hear music, sure.  It’s a very much more perplexing time because of the fact that there is no longer an idea what it is to be competent in music, which there was, after all, in the early part of this century. The things that are interesting about Schönberg and Bartók and Stravinsky, although they were, they were highly competent composers. Now, competence, after the first World War began to deteriorate, and certainly after the second World War, the question of competence is not half as important as oddity or novelty of one kind or another. Stravinsky was very novel but he was also very competent, even at the age of 23, or 22 when he wrote The Firebird.

BD: Is Elliott Carter a competent composer?

EC: Well, I try to be. I don’t know. I feel that this is an important thing. What does it mean to be competent? It means all sorts of things that would be particularly impossible to describe right now, but one is being able to solve all sorts of problems that music has always been involved with. Many of these things are completely sidetracked by composers in these years; being afraid to write a good and melodic line, a warm, big melodic line, for instance. I had trouble, for instance, at the end of that Triple Duo which runs on for 40 or 50 measures. It’s a very big long line. This is something that I think takes a lot of training and competence to do. It’s not something you find most people can do anymore.

*     *     *     *     *

BD: Your career has been that of composer and teacher and writer, and yet not that of a performer.

EC: I once conducted a madrigal choir in college when I was a student, but I’ve never done much. I get too nervous in public.

BD: Really?

EC: Yes.

BD: Has this had an influence on your writing?

EC: I have no idea. One of the things I do feel is that my music is written for performers. If I were performing it, I would lose track of what it is that goes on in the performance that ought to have been put in the score. One of the things that I find is very important in the early stages of the rehearsals of the work is to hear how other people interpret what you’ve written. I try to make the score as foolproof and as clear to the performers as possible. When it doesn’t come out exactly the way I want it to, I change to make a little bit louder, a little bit softer, or change the articulation or something like that. Now I don’t think I would do that if I were conducting because then, no matter how I do it, you’re too much involved in too many other things and I would not be able to get the score in the shape that I would like to have it. I would lose track of all this.  Being apart from the performers, I can sit back and check these things, and I can go to the next rehearsal, or whatever, done by another group and find out whether what I put into that score will be read by those people that way. I understand every time Stravinsky conducted The Rite of Spring, he changed the score. It is really not possible to find out what the score is anymore and he did this in every place he went.  In Minneapolis, there are differences in the parts with the New York Philharmonic because he changed something or other and, and he did this over and over again. We know that this practice is very draining, and if he had been a bystander not involved in it, it might have been better. It’s the same with the Mahler symphonies, where Mahler continually changed everything.

BD: Do you ever make alterations in your score at the suggestion of the performers?

EC: If the thing is too difficult, I do. If they show me that it’s too difficult, I've done this. I’ve changed certain things in some of my scores and sometimes I’ve regretted it because the next performer came along and said, “I don’t know why you changed that note, it’s perfectly easy.” So it’s very hard to do. It’s very hard to get a clear-cut thing, but I usually change it and decide that that looks better. I don’t change it that much anyhow. I couldn’t bring a new taste. Playing a stringed instrument, which I don’t, it’s rather hard for me to judge sometimes what the difficulties of certain passages are. But sometimes they show me that it’s too difficult and I do rewrite, but not very much. I’m pretty expert at that.

BD: Should you be concerned with the technical problems? Shouldn’t you only be concerned with the final result, the way it sounds?

EC: I’m concerned deeply with the technical problems because they produce the final result, the way it sounds. Every moment of every piece has been thought of very, very much - how the violin can play, what the trumpet can do, or whatever. In fact the pieces were written for the instruments that play them with the concern for their technical abilities. To me, that’s partly being competent. I don’t go to the rehearsal and find I’ve written half a dozen things that nobody can play and have to rewrite the piece constantly at every rehearsal until there’s a different piece. My pieces are difficult, I know.  I wrote, wrote my Third String Quartet and the Juilliard Quartet took it and learned it. I went to some of the rehearsals and I don’t think I changed it very much in it. Certainly I never did any changing in the first or second quartet. And it said the same with orchestra pieces, but this comes from very long experience with the orchestra and with the instruments. It's the same with singers, or whatever.

*     *     *     *     *

BD: You have won the Pulitzer Prize twice. What influence has that had on you?

EC: On winning the Pulitzer Prize, I can’t tell you that exactly. You write something and it’s among the list of things that you’ve got and the actual effect of the Pulitzer is very odd. They just give it to you. The first one was won by my Second String Quartet which the Juilliard were playing at that time, and they got a lot of engagements to play it around the United States. After the first two or three performances, the audiences were so angry that I had ever received the prize because the piece was so peculiar as far as they were concerned. The Juilliard Quartet finally made a recording and sent it around to the people who had asked for it, and asked them whether they really wanted to hear this piece or not, and many of them canceled it. The Pulitzer Prize in music is a very different thing from that in literature or journalism.