It certainly isn't easy - he seems in that piece to have pushed in particular his metrical and rhythmic techniques almost as far as they could go within a certain set of boundaries, building upon his earlier achievements but in a more extreme fashion. I'd say a parallel situation applies with Lachenmann's Gran Torso (written almost exactly at the same time) in terms of his own earlier idiom, though of course that came at a much younger point in his career than the Third Quartet came within Carter's. I find the Carter piece coruscating, passionate, and indeed as Aaron said, somewhat frightening; the intensity of the feelings that come across exceed that in just about any other work of his. And as you say, maybe Carter didn't feel willing or able to pursue that path earlier, hence why it might reasonably be called a 'watershed'. But maybe (to mix metaphors), after that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater?

Absolutely they are, that's true of everyone. This question always comes up when people are attempting to analyse how others might be manipulated by external forces, including the mass media, the demands placed upon their working life, etc. - the person attempting to survey such things needs a fair degree of self-reflection in order at least to attempt to avoid the pitfall of seeing manipulation because one is oneself manipulated. Just as therapists themselves undergo therapy before starting out. There is not detached, objective viewpoint by which one somehow stands outside of the factors bearing upon others, but it might be possible to attempt to perceive some of the limits of the world and consciousness that both oneself and others inhabit, and thus look for what may lay beyond. In terms of a good starting-point, how about one's own perceptions of the work combined with those one observes in others (much easier to do after there is a more developed reception history, of course). It probably would not be erroneous to think that some of Max's attempts at portraying madness and derangedness in works like the Missa super l'homme armé or Eight Songs for a Mad King come across to many in a rather more comical fashion than he perhaps intended - but why not make what is widely felt to come across the starting point for an inquiry, rather than what he intended (which may be ambiguous, or retrospectively presented by him in a different fashion, or whatever, or even ultimately unknowable)? And more widely, how about considering the reception of a lot of new music to the wider public, which gives a very different picture of the music's value or otherwise than that deriving exclusively from that minority who favour it? Of course there are more than a few people doing just that.

Maybe the baby is the expressive potency of some of the earlier work, that came, at the time of the Third Quartet, to exceed the realms of what was considered acceptable in a certain context? Of course it's not entirely absent from the later works, just doesn't seem such a strong presence.

That's one of the means Carter uses; there is still a lot of value, I think, in the players continuing to interact in a 'chamber music' manner - the Juilliard Quartet eschew the use of a clicktrack, presumably for that reason. But I'm thinking more simply of the expressive effect of the work.

No, it's not about that (also Gran Torso absolutely seems like 'chamber music' in that sense), it's about looking for a degree of expression in new music that can stand its ground in comparison to that achieved by functional harmony and other means in the past.

One last quick thought for now:

Isn't there something rather lacking in a piece of music if one needs external information in order to truly appreciate it (or to be told how to hear it), rather than that being able to be obtained through the much-maligned 'repeated listenings'? To do the latter seems the most 'charitable' thing.

Ian

For what it's worth, I don't agree with CD on the usefulness of the composer's writings, and I really did only bring them up in order to refute what seemed to me to be your patronising claim that Carter hadn't been as exercised as the European modernists by various issues to do with society and history in the years directly after WWII.

I agree with your last message, too. But I think that your approach has not helped the current thread, and I'd like to see martle, richard, and others joining in again with the sort of interesting comments that we were getting in the first 2 or 3 pages of the thread. I'd particularly like to return to this question of Carter's 'self-reinvention' c. 1952 without reference to the subject of independent wealth, which I don't deny may be very relevant but which in the present case I think was so generalised and unverifiable an area for comment as to be not really productive.

Do any of the composers and other creative artists around here have any thoughts on what is involved in such a 'self-reinvention', e.g. on how much effort it involves, how guaranteed of success it might be, whether it's something one can really just decide to do and succeed by an effort of will, how it relates to issues of reception (if a composer went to the desert nowadays to write a big work that would change his style in one fell swoop, his agent would probably make him keep a diary to be touted around to the arts sections of the national newspapers, but I can think of other, less overt but equally far-reaching, ways in which contemporary composers have changed their styles)? ...

More an issue of their not having the same vivid immediacy as they would have had to someone actually living right in the centre of them. Same goes, as I say, for comparing Shostakovich with another composer interested in some of the same techniques but living under very different circumstances.

Well, in terms of the second, third, and fourth questions, certainly it has something to do with whether the resulting works come across in such a manner to others, I would have thought. Also, composers do develop both their own idiom and the idiom/musical language of others; it's very rare for any work to be truly 'created out of nothing', and also debatable whether a composer will really get much beyond square one by doing so. Carter's 'self-reinvention' seems more of a shift of emphasis rather than a total reinvention; I can hear plenty of continuities in terms of harmonic usage, idiomatic use of instruments, and more broad sensibility (haven't analysed them in sufficient depth to see how these might be manifest, but I'm sure it could be done) between the earlier works and those from around the First Quartet onwards. Style may not be the paramount thing - plenty of composers have changed their styles but still end up sounding recognisably like themselves.

By the way, in terms of your other comments, what is really patronising and superior is to pass lofty judgement on what is productive in a thread when one oneself has been posting back and forth all the time in those arguments that supposedly are not productive. The issue was simply about whether biographical factors are worthy of consideration, and if so, which types of things? Actually, on the whole I find it's often some of the German writings on new music that seem less concerned with such factors overall (except when, of course, writing biographies); writings in English on music make a lot of biography, but often certain things are pointedly ignored not least when (for example in the case of gender, class) they inevitably are considerations that might bear on the writer as well as the subject. I would be very interested, say, to read what an African-American (not in a tokenistic sense - one of whatever convictions or persuasions), involved in a different field of music, might write about Carter, and reckon their perspective could be just as valid as anyone else's. At the moment I know of no such thing, but as the social base of the universities continues to expand, we might see such a thing.

I would put it more in terms of "self-revelation" than "self-reinvention". When I look back now on what I was doing (or trying to do) in the mid-1980s I see clearly that I was trying to find a "point of origin", having rejected all my previously-held ideas as to why I was writing music, how I was doing it, what it consisted of, and so on, and from that point to reconceive those ideas from first principles. (For those who might be interested, the composition closest as it were to that "point of origin" was the solo cello piece Ne songe plus á fuir.) However I don't think I was so explicitly conscious of that at the time, or at least not as much so as Carter when he wrote his first string quartet.