STEVE DITKO: MY BBC LAST WORD ESSAY

I've done an essay on Steve Ditko, creator of Spider Man, Dr Strange, The Question, and Mr A, for BBC Radio 4's Last Word. You can listen to it here; the introduction comes just before the 17 minute mark. But as is so often the case with Last Word, the programme itself is worth the listen, especially the lead item on Oliver Knussen, about whom I wrote right here last week. I knew of Sam Chisholm from my days working at Sky, and then there are two fascinating obits for people I didn't know, Barbara Harrell-Bond and Anna Sandor de Kenos. It's this mix that helps explain why I love being part of the show. Thanks to producer Neil George.

Ditko called out for more length. Some of what was cut out of my script as recorded was in my Guardian obit of Ditko, which like the Knussen you will find just before this post. I probably should have spent a little more time on his weirdest super-hero, The Creeper. But look at that (very early) Mr A panel, and think that decades later, Ditko was writing far more argument into far more static panels. It was outsider art indeed. And I am writing a deeper dive into Ditko and Ayn Rand, which I will let you know about....

OLIVER KNUSSEN AND ELLIOTT CARTER

Oliver Knussen has died, and I have been listening to and reading tributes to him.  I was also listening to some of his works: the Third Symphony (1979), which may have been the first of his I ever heard, in my early years in London, and the lovely Ophelia's Last Dance (2010), which, as it turns out, was originally started in 1974, a melody excluded from that Third Symphony. You can listen to that here as you read this.

I've always liked Knussen the composer more than loved him, but listening to Huw Watkins playing solo piano on Ophelia's put me in mind of Elliott Carter, whose work I do love. This should not be too surprising: Knussen's first composition teacher was John Lambert, who like Carter studied under Nadia Boulanger. What is more noteworthy, if not surprising, is how energetically Knussen promoted Carter's work. As a conductor he has recorded virtually all of Carter's orchestral works, and always with a keen feel for their heart as much as their composition.

I went to a couple of birthday celebration concerts  for Carter in London, his 80th and 90th, if I remember correctly, each time thinking this would be a remarkable last chance to see him in person. But I also went to the Barbican in January 2006, for one of the BBC's 'Get Carter' concerts, and heard Knussen conduct the Clarinet Concerto and the brilliant Double Concerto for harpsichord and piano and two chamber orchestras. I seem to recall Knussen introducing the show on stage, and Carter at 98 indicating his approval. I also recall how the movement of the players reflected the movement of the sounds--something which helped my companion appreciate what she first heard as cacophony.

But as I said, Knussen had a rare understanding of  Carter. Two years after that Barbican concert, Carter turned 100 (the photo above come from his 100th birthday concert in New York) and Knussen wrote an appreciation which began:

    Elliott Carter, 100 in December, was born the day after Messiaen, but he sounds younger - his music has yet to sink in. It bears comparison with Beckett’s plays: phrases, meaningful in themselves, relate to each other only in their simultaneity. Rhythms are spasmodic, while held chords of vibrant beauty colour kaleidoscopic scenes that are rich with turbulent activity.

As I wrote this I listened to Knussen conduct Carter's Concerto For Orchestra with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, you can find it here, the famous concert where a storm raged outside while the music which Carter said as inspired by Saint-John Perse poem 'Vents' (winds) played on. And Knussen, looking for all the world like a cross between Orson Welles and Chuck Blazer, never missed a beat. It reminded me that Knussen was a child prodigy, composing and conducting when he was just 15. Carter was more of a slow developer, but he lived to be 103, and was composing almost til the end. Knussen died much to soon; his own music and his wonderful appreciation for the music of others will be sorely missed.

ELLIOTT CARTER: AN APPRECIATION

I remember going to the 80^th 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 21^st 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 20^th century mind trapped in a 19^th 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.

That sense becomes more and more profound in Carter's later work—especially as he moved to larger ensembles. I sometimes feel his status worldwide was less than it might have been because he was seen as a 'chamber' composer, as if the absence of a series of symphonies somehow lessened the impact of his music. But his major period is generally thought to have begun with the Concert For Orchestra, in 1969, and among my favourites of his work are the awesome A Symphony Of Three Orchestras and the Double Concerto for Harp and Piano, whose scale of ambition ought to be enough for anyone.

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.