Partially thanks to his prolific output and partially thanks to my own enthusiasm, Elliott Carter’s music shows up on my stand relatively frequently. Learning a piece by Carter really challenges that old cliché about celebrating the journey, not the destination. First comes a period of mind-numbing rhythm study. As a student learning Retracing, I was convinced that only a computer could accurately perform the ever-shifting beat subdivisions, so I entered the piece into music notation software to “teach” me to count it. Next comes the bizarre physical training phase in which the performer must practice lightning-quick shifts in technique, one instant honking out broad, forceful notes and the next pecking lightly (for a bassoonist, this is great core training with facial contortions to match!). Any remaining brain cells can be used to increase the tempo until it tests the limits of the possible.
I had to warm to Carter over time.
The music is perplexing. It’s certainly not tuneful, and it goes by in a flash, before you can really get a grip on the experience. The more time I spent with this music, though, the more I enjoyed that perplexed feeling, and the more I started to bring out the surprises in the composition. The more I emphasized the surprises, the funnier the music got. And the funnier the music got, the more I felt like I had understood it. This is why I’ve come to call Carter the Merry Modernist.
Perhaps the most famous fact about Carter’s career is that he continued to compose until his death in 2012, at 103 years old. Any person with the energy to compose—with increasing productivity, mind you—past his 100th birthday must by default have had an agreeable personality, and the music confirms this. The parts are riddled with wordplay and double meanings, and the articulations are notated so strictly and with such diversity that the music resembles speech--chattering, mumbling, and slurring along like the telling of a joke. I’m not the only person to zero in on this prevailing cheerfulness in Carter’s work. Daniel Barenboim has compared him to Haydn, saying, “Carter's music is always in good humor, you feel its high spirits, the tongue-in-cheek, the recklessness.”
This season I’ve learned two of Carters’ 21st-century compositions that feature the bassoon. Retracing for solo bassoon premiered in December of 2002, with a performance by Peter Kolkay at Carnegie Hall. The piece is an excerpt from Carter’s Asko Concerto for chamber orchestra, written for the Asko Ensemble and composer/conductor Oliver Knussen, with whom Carter had a longstanding friendship. Knowing that the material was originally composed with a larger group in mind, I ask myself what makes it characteristically “bassoonistic,” and I think the answer lies in the huge interval leaps, the clipped shortness of certain notes, and the expression marking for the piece: con umóre. Which translates to, of course, “with humor.”
Au Quai, pronounced “OK,” is a duet for viola and bassoon, named for an appearance of the French-English pun in the short story “To the Wharfs” by Arnold Schoenberg, who is better known as one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers. Carter’s notes relate a moment in the story in which some fishermen thought lost at sea return to their village, inspiring shouts of “to the wharfs, aux quais, O.K.!” Members of the London Sinfonietta premiered the work in June 2002.
Through the challenges of the past year, I’ve found myself gravitating toward Elliott Carter. Perhaps I am, in fact, looking for something lighthearted to cheer me up, but the modernist aspect appeals to me, too. There isn’t much room for interpretation in the markings; you play the piece as he wrote it, or you don’t. At a time when many things feel uncertain to me, this offers me comfort.
-Kara LaMoure
Photo by Robin Gould