Happy Birthday Mr. Carter!

[Guitarist]

Happy 100th!! And may you continue to compose astonishing works for many more years.

[some guy]

Indeed!

[diegobueno]

A big salute to Carter as he reaches the century mark. 80 years of compositions, and still going strong.

[Febnyc]

Just this afternoon, while creaking along on the bike in the gym, I watched a re-broadcast of last night's Charlie Rose interview of Mr. Carter. Also at the table were Daniel Barenboim and James Levine. It was a riveting half-hour, and enormously entertaining. Mr Carter's ebullience and spirit belied his years. What a thrill to see!!

It's here: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9774

I've not really cottoned to his music, however. I have a recording of Carter's First Symphony - which I like - it's tonal and within my sphere of comfort.

Does anyone have other Carter recommendations?

[Donaldopato]

Happy Birthday Mr Carter. I have yet to really appreciate your oeuvre, so maybe by your 101st it will happen. I keep trying!

[Guitarist]

Just this afternoon, while creaking along on the bike in the gym, I watched a re-broadcast of last night's Charlie Rose interview of Mr. Carter. Also at the table were Daniel Barenboim and James Levine. It was a riveting half-hour, and enormously entertaining. Mr Carter's ebullience and spirit belied his years. What a thrill to see!!

It's here: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9774

I've not really cottoned to his music, however. I have a recording of Carter's First Symphony - which I like - it's tonal and within my sphere of comfort.

Does anyone have other Carter recommendations?

His Piano Sonata (1945/46) is quasi-tonal. You may not walk around whistling tunes from it, but it is far easier to grasp than his newer music. It concludes with one devil of a fugue! I just saw Ursula Oppens perform his complete piano music--whew! They all make staggering demands on the player, not to mention the listener. For the uninitiated, they are probably "easier" to listen to than his quartets or much of his other music.

[Ralph]

From The New York Times:

December 12, 2008
Turning 100 at Carnegie Hall, With New Notes
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Classical music tends to lionize the great composer cut down in youth, but Elliott Carter made a mockery of that trope on Thursday. Mr. Carter, the dean of American composers, was celebrating his 100th birthday, on the precise day, with a concert at Carnegie Hall.

He had a piece on the program, of course, but not some chestnut written when he was a student in Paris in the 1930s or an avant-gardist in New York in the 1950s or a Pulitzer Prize winner in the 1960s or a setter of American poetry in the 1970s or a begetter of chamber music and concertos in the 1980s.

Mr. Carter wrote the 17-minute piece, for piano and orchestra, just last year, at 98. In fact, since he turned 90, Mr. Carter has poured out more than 40 published works, an extraordinary burst of creativity at a stage when most people would be making peace with mortality.

His first opera had its premiere in 1999. He produced 10 works in 2007 and six more this year. “I don’t know how I did it,” Mr. Carter said on Tuesday in the cluttered but homey Greenwich Village apartment where he has lived since 1945. “The earlier part of my life I felt I was more or less exploring what I would like to write. Now I’ve found it out, and I don’t have to think so much about it.”

The new piece, “Interventions,” was scheduled for its New York premiere Thursday evening by the pianist Daniel Barenboim and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with James Levine conducting. The program included Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Mr. Carter said that hearing a performance of that piece at Carnegie 85 years ago had helped inspire him to become a composer.

Mr. Carter is a phenomenon. To paraphrase the musical satirist Tom Lehrer, when Mozart was Mr. Carter’s age, he had been dead for 65 years. Mr. Carter has lived more than three times as long as Schubert did. Some composers, like Verdi and Richard Strauss, produced until the end of their long lives — but that was merely their 80s.

Lionized as one of the great American composers, Mr. Carter is respected as much, if not more, in Europe. The intellectual and performing giants of the field — people like Mr. Barenboim and Mr. Levine, the pianist and scholar Charles Rosen and the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez — champion him. Despite the thorny, complex nature of much of his music, his concerts these days are often packed.

“He’s still writing at the top of his form,” Mr. Levine said. “Like all great composers, every time he writes a piece he has new ideas he’s trying, as well as coming up with a subtler reworking of something he had done before.”

The Carnegie affair is one of dozens of concerts that have taken place over the last year to honor Mr. Carter. Others surrounding his birthday are happening in Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Vienna, Madrid and elsewhere. “God help me,” Mr. Carter said of the concert avalanche.

All the attention has left him feeling a little ambivalent. “There are all these pieces I want to write,” he said, “and I can’t get to them because there are all these things getting in the way. But on the other hand one does enjoy appearing, having especially wonderful performances, which is fascinating to me.”

That prompted a provocative thought.

“I’d rather hear them play good contemporary music than old music,” he said of the performers devoted to his work. He was bored, he said, with scores from the age of “gaslights and horses,” although he admits to exceptions: Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven symphonies. But 20th-century composers “have a spark” and convey “what it is like to be living now,” he said.

In the interview, Mr. Carter displayed a mind alive with ideas, a gentle but slightly tart wit and a streak of self-deprecation. A Steinway piano was wedged in a corner of his workroom. His desk was a battered wooden surface held up by metal file cabinets.

Mr. Carter, whose father was a lace importer, was born in New York. He attended Harvard with a recommendation from Charles Ives, majored in English, and went to France to study composition with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger. He has taught at numerous colleges and conservatories, and been showered with international honors.

He wakes every day at 7 a.m., composes for two and a half hours, goes out for a constitutional with an aide, rests after lunch, composes again or receives visitors in the afternoon, and watches French satellite television in the evening, if he does not have a concert to attend.

He said he has gone back to reading the classics, including “Hamlet.” After starting a third bout with Proust in the original French, “I got a little sick of it two months ago,” he said. “That’s why I turned to Shakespeare.”

A terra cotta self-portrait head of his wife, Helen, a sculptor who fiercely protected him until her death in 2003, sits in his living room. A small group of New York musicians, including Mr. Rosen, the cellist Fred Sherry and the clarinetist Charles Neidich, are close to him, playing his music and keeping an eye on him. Virgil Blackwell, a clarinetist, serves as Mr. Carter’s business manager and helper, handling everything from royalties to hearing-aid batteries.

Audiences do not always take well to Mr. Carter’s complicated works. But players are drawn to his music because of its challenges and his ability to write well for their instruments.

“I’m writing for performers,” Mr. Carter said. He has written more than 130 works, and for every permutation, from a solo instrument to double orchestra to chorus.

In his middle decades Mr. Carter could spend a year writing a piece. His recent compositions have generally grown shorter and less dense. “I finally have done all my adventures and great big noisy pieces. Now I write simple ones. That’s a new adventure.”

He said that life — his, at least — “is just a matter of luck.”

“I’ll be damned if I know why I write all that music that people like,” he said. “That some people like, anyhow,” he added.

With the interviewer out of the apartment, Mr. Carter was heard on the other side of the door saying to an aide, “I’ve got to rest a little after this nonsense.”

[Istvan]

I don't know a single work by him. Which would you suggest as essential?

[Chalkperson]

I don't know a single work by him. Which would you suggest as essential?

Nothing...

[karlhenning]

I don't know a single work by him. Which would you suggest as essential?

Check this out for suggestions.

Cheers,
~Karl

[HoustonDavid]

Happy Birthday Mr. Carter, indeed!! I too saw the Charlie Rose interview (late Wednesday night on PBS Houston). Charlie seems to always knock his interviews out of the park, but this was better than usual. It was fascinating to watch three highly distinguished gentlemen, Charlie Rose, Daniel Barenboim and James Levine, pay a well-deserved homage to a centurion composer who still has a self-deprecating wit and terrific stories to tell about a distinguished career.

[Guitarist]

Istvan wrote:
I don't know a single work by him. Which would you suggest as essential?

Nothing...


Check this out for suggestions.

Cheers,
~Karl

The purpose of this thread was to honor one of the great minds of the 20th/21st century. Please start your own thread if you feel compelled to make juvenile and degrading comments. Don't bother with some equally witless retort, either.

[Febnyc]

I'll stick with his Symphony No.1 - it sits best with me. Much of his music is too advanced for my taste - I've tried a lot of it.

[karlhenning]

I'll stick with his Symphony No.1 - it sits best with me. Much of his music is too advanced for my taste - I've tried a lot of it.

Have you ever gone back to any of the pieces which didn't quite 'sit' with you?

I don't necessarily mean right away; perhaps after five or ten years.

Carter's is not music which one can 'absorb' in one go, to be sure; and one's ears change.

Cheers,
~Karl

[Febnyc]

I certainly agree that "one's ears change." My listening envelope has expanded over the years- of that I am aware. In Mr. Carter's case I have, in a couple of instances, returned to listen again - kept the CDs and gave them another spin. And, after seeing the Charlie Rose interview I have admiration for the man himself - his modesty, intelligence and dedication to his craft - and I am envious of his clear mind and sharp faculties at such a biblical age. But I simply don't enjoy his music.

[karlhenning]

I certainly agree that "one's ears change." My listening envelope has expanded over the years- of that I am aware. In Mr. Carter's case I have, in a couple of instances, returned to listen again - kept the CDs and gave them another spin. And, after seeing the Charlie Rose interview I have admiration for the man himself - his modesty, intelligence and dedication to his craft - and I am envious of his clear mind and sharp faculties at such a biblical age. But I simply don't enjoy his music.

You've been fair, then; I appreciate that.

Cheers,
~Karl

[living_stradivarius]

Will be listening to the event tonight.

[stenka razin]

I was present with my wife for his 90th birthday celebrations at The University Of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and he was delightful. A beautiful exhibition of his manuscripts and other memorabilia was provided for the public and there were concerts in his honor. Long may this great American composer live!

[Werner]

Here is a note to all of you who have not yet seen the interview by Charlie Rose with Elliott Carter, James Levine, and Daniel Barenboim - the link provided by Frank earlier in this thread.

A searching, informative, and fascinating meeting of Rose with three of the most interesting minds in the art -no matter what you may think of their particular compositions or performances. It's half an hour well spent.

The same goes for Charlie Rose's interview with Gilbert Kaplan. The ultimate experience of the amateur musician - making a work his own in an authentic and valid way. It may answer some of the questions on some posters' minds. Money? It helped, certainly - but it would be useless without all the other essentials.

You'll find the link on the Kaplan/Mahler thread.

[James]

Boulez on Charlie Rose...
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/3988

[Joe Barron]

I liked the Rose interview, too, until I saw Stephen Stuckey's filmed interview with Carter Saturday at Lincoln Center. Stucky asked questions that seemed to trigger associations in Mr. Carter, then he just sat back and let him talk. (Carter's ideas on modern poetry were most absorbing.) Rose, in contrast, kept trying to hotfoot the interview by repeating Carter's own words back to him, and Carter could respond only by either saying yes or no, or chuckling. Mr. Carter was also interviewed live before Saturday's concert, and though the conversation was short, it was informative. He was asked if he is tempted to write another opera, and he said his is being tempted, specifically by Daniel Barenboim, but he would only do it, he said, if he were given a finished libretto. Looking for a subject and then shaping would take months in which he'd rather be writing music. Barenboim suggested setting Shakpespeare, like Much Ado About Nothing, but Berlioz has already done it, Carter said. There were four new songs on the program --- for soprano and clarinet, a lovely combination --- and Mr. Carter said he would like to write about ten in all. He worked on one that morning, he said, but he didn't finish it. With all the excitement of the past few days, he had slept late, he said.

As for recommendations to newcomers, I'd say listen to some of the more recent, short pieces for different combinations of instruments. Naxos has a nice 100th anniversary album out, which contains two extened (ie., 10-minute) pieces, and a string of short ones, including the Enchanted Preludes, a little work for cello and flute that always seems to make a favorable first impression.

Then there's always the earleir Cello Sonata and the Harpsichord Sonata and the Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for Wind Quartet --- all mature but user-friendly works.

In any event, Happy B-day Mr. C. I look forward to every new piece, and he's writing so quickly that it's hard to keep up.

[Joe Barron]

I'll stick with his Symphony No.1 - it sits best with me. Much of his music is too advanced for my taste - I've tried a lot of it.

Well, if you like the Symphony No. 1, you might also want to try the Holiday Overture, the Elegy, the Pastorale for Clarinet and Piano, the lovely Woodwind Quintet, and the early choral music (espcialy the Dickenson settings. All written within a decade of each other, and very much in that neoclassical style you seem to like.

[diegobueno]

The Charlie Rose interview was most interesting for what Levine and Barenboim had to say about Carter. Often they asked questions to Carter, which were much more interesting that what Rose was able to come up with. Maybe Rose should have just stepped out of the picture and let Levine, Barenboim and Carter converse among themselves.

[Joe Barron]

The Charlie Rose interview was most interesting for what Levine and Barenboim had to say about Carter. Often they asked questions to Carter, which were much more interesting that what Rose was able to come up with. Maybe Rose should have just stepped out of the picture and let Levine, Barenboim and Carter converse among themselves.

By the end, they seem to have forgotten all about Rose. That was my favorite part.

[Febnyc]

Thanks, Joe, for the Carter recommendations. The Holiday Overture is fine - and it's coupled with the Symphony No.1 on the disc I have. And I've located a CD called "Early Chamber Music of Elliot Carter" on Cedille label. It contains the Woodwind Quintet, Pastorale and a couple of other works. Sounds like it would appeal and I'll give it a shot.

I do, however, take issue with anyone who denigrates Charlie Rose. Of course musicians such as Barenboim and Levine would have more pertinent questions for a composer, that's a given. But Charlie Rose does so well with his guests from every walk of life - I've seen him do excellent interviews with authors, businessmen, politicians, you name it. He's not a sensationalist - thank goodness - like the talking heads on the cable news shows - and he exhibits a good grasp of the subject at hand. Let's cut him some slack in "competing" with the likes of the distinguished panel members he hosted. It was a riveting half hour - anyway you slice it.

Another excellent interview show is on BBC World News - it's called "Hard Talk." I never can remember the name of the host, but he asks very tough and pointed questions and really puts his guests on the spot. Quite well done.

[James]

But Charlie Rose does so well with his guests from every walk of life - I've seen him do excellent interviews with authors, businessmen, politicians, you name it.

Couldn't agree more, and hey; at least he had Carter on a major show! And for 30 minutes! Most people in the United States don't even know his music much! Barenboim & Levine were just kissing Carter's ass essentially, I would have rather had just Rose & Carter one on one...and what's a shame is that the media attention given to Carter now is mainly attributed to his advanced age, where was all this attention earlier to help get the word out about his stuff, say 10 years ago etc.? There wasn't much.

[karlhenning]

Ah, enter James of the Black-&-White, stage left!

Cheers,
~Karl

[James]

...just the truth really...