Abstract: Elliott Carter is one of our great readers of poetry, especially American poetry. He must have always loved poetry (he was, after all, an English major as an undergraduate). His early, rebellious love of modernism wasn't limited to music. Look at the poets he has chosen to set--to read: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, without whom twentieth-century American poetry is inconceivable; Robert Frost, perhaps the first truly modern American poet; and such diversely heroic modernist figures as Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell. And it's signicant that with most of these poets Carter set more than just one poem. (1) These choices don't merely reflect Carter's taste--they express crucial aspects of his own complex character. Frost's sly and crusty humor wells up from a tragic sense of isolation--the sublime indifference of nature mirroring our detachment from one another. Carter the innovator might well identify with Hart Crane's desire to create a new and complex lyric rhetoric (2) or with the seriousness underlying the glitter of Ashbery's slippery, surfacey aesthetic. Bishop, Ash-bery's favorite contemporary American poet and longtime friend of Robert Lowell (it was Lowell who evidently first suggested Bishop to Carter), is a writer whose reticence and elusiveness are mixed with a profound--and profoundly American--sensibleness and forthrightness. And Lowell, more than a decade after his death, remains more clearly than ever the spiritual and psychological of our time, an artist who has moved between probing self-analysis and large-scaled public utterance, between an intricate and gorgeous poetic density and the poignant directness of conversation. These poets all have their mercurial sides (one of Carter's favorite words). Experience for them is not simple and monochromatic but nuanced, kaleidoscopic, altering its moods and perceptions from moment to moment. Bishop loved poets who could recreate the mind thinking. Carter's remarkable settings share this quality. These are all social poets, poets who look and reach outward into the life of the world. But they are also poets of intense privacy, poets who retreat deeply into the most secret self, who speak the language of inward isolation that in music no one in this century has expressed more deeply than Carter. Yet who could be more different from one another than Carter's poets? Each speaks in a distinct and completely identifiable voice. And this too is part of Carter's ongoing work. He has become increasingly explicit about his interest in voice and character, the way individual instruments embody different personalities (or different aspects of his own personality): the rhapsodic cello and time-keeping piano of his Cello Sonata (1948), for instance, or the four colorfully incompatible club members of the Second String Quartet (1959), or the relentlessly arguing--and loving--violin and piano in the extraordinary Duo (1973-74). It's tempting to say that in his nonvocal compositions, Carter gives up melody for talk. His musical lines seem more like the inflections of speech than the contours of traditional melody. Refusing to write an opera, he has filled all his music with recitative and operatic ensemble. He attributes some of these simultaneously interacting heterogeneous character-continuities not only to the layerings in Ives but also to such passages as the Act I finale of Don Giovanni, with its three on-stage orchestras all going at once, or the split-level tomb scene at the end of Aida. Carter's style includes two of the fundamental elements of drama--monologue and dialogue. Then, like the obsessive talkers in a Howard Hawks movie, Carter's characters sometimes don't even stop to listen to one another. Carter's interest in dramatic composition is graphically illustrated by the change in his writing for the between his 1942 Three Poems of Robert Frost (his earliest surviving treatment of American poetry for solo voice) and his late outburst of vocal works thirty-three years later (Carter having written no new vocal music between 1947 and 1975). …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-06-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 9
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