I remember going to the
80th birthday concert for Elliott Carter, at the Albert
Hall, and thinking how lucky I was because there might not be another
chance to see the man who through much of my lifetime I thought of as
the greatest living composer. That was in 1988. Carter has died, at
103, and it's immensely sad because I always think of him as
embodying the greatest impulses of the modern era—an artist who
managed to express the 20th century in its own musical language, but
in a way that would be, ultimately, comprehensible in terms of the
previous era. That he continued doing this into the 21st
century was almost as remarkable.
Almost twenty years
after grabbing that 'last chance', in 2006 I went to one of the Get
Carter events at the Barbican, and Carter, now 98, was there again.
Some of the music being played was old, but some was new, and just as
enthralling, challenging, and satisfying as anything he'd written. I
can't think of another artist who continued producing quality work
that late into his life; De Kooning's late paintings don't have the
same force as the early ones (and there are the inevitable questions
about their provenance). Eubie Blake was still playing in his 90s,
but not composing. Carter's final composition was finished just two
months ago, and now he has died, aged 103, not far shy of another
birtnhday.
I'm sure I came to
Carter's music through Charles Ives. Just as Carter nearly spanned
the Twentieth Century, he was also a living bridge to Ives, whom he
discovered as a youngster in New York. Ives wrote a recommendation
for Carter's application to Harvard. I once wrote about Ives, in the
Spectator, and said he had a 20th century mind trapped in
a 19th century soul—and what drew me to Carter, I think,
was the sense I had, before I had even tried to think these things
out, that Carter's mind and soul were deeply in tune with my times.
At college, I had a
couple of Carter records, with lovely simple psuedo-surreal jacket designs on Nonesuch. One
of them, the 1952 Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord (you can
link to it here) was one of the two I played most nights when I was
going to sleep (the other was Miles Davis' Bitches Brew--and it occurs to me as I write this that I felt much of the same awareness in Miles, Monk, or Coltrane that I did with Carter) which did not
necessarily endear me to my roommates, even after I closed the door.
I'm listening to it now, and I understand better now what it was then
that appealed to me, on a deep and instinctive level. In one sense
it's post-modern, about the instruments themselves, and their
relations. But underneath the conflicts between the sounds, the
timings, the essence of each individual, there is also a coming
together, a way of knitting the chaos together, that to me brings all
of modern life into focus, into perspective, into a sense of being
something we can cope with and celebrate.
Carter is always the
composer I suggest when people say they don't 'get' 'modern' music.
There was a fantastic South Bank Show back in the 80s, in the days
before contrived talent shows, house-selling, and cooking replaced
serious work on commercial TV. It was made by Alan Benson, and linked
carefully Carter's music to the tradition, provided signposts for
hearing it as such. Seeing it performed often might accomplish the
same thing: where the instruments might be arranged across the stage,
and even regroup to illustrate what they up to. That he was perhaps
better appreciated in this country than in America is interesting;
Carter had many champions, but none so effective, or with the status
in his own country, as Oliver Knussen here, and Knussen's conducting
of Carter's work shows the profundity of his understanding of it.
It's funny. I began
writing this feeling sad, wanting to mark the passing of not only a
great man, but an amazing creative span, a century of artistic
progress in an age not always committed to that. But as I listen to
those four instruments engaged in their interactions, I find it
impossible to be sad. Just as it did when I was young and looking to
clear my addled brain, Carter's music seems to be recognising, and
then unravelling mysteries. It is truly a thing of wonder, and though
he will be missed, this music will live on, and speak to future
generations about our times as profoundly as Mozart or Beethoven do
about theirs.
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