As Stuart says, in one way or another it happens all the time, but, as he also says, the composer's own view of it is often at odds with that of others.

Apart from the remarkable comment on Stockhausen (qv in the eponymous thread), another thing that struck me on reading David Schiff's book is how seemingly stilted and schematic Carter's compositional procedures are (in both pitch- and rhythm-domains), while the music itself comes over, to me at least, at its best, as embodying exactly the kind of attitude towards "character" and "drama", albeit in abstracted form, whose realisation Carter admires in Mozart.

One of the strange things about Carter's music for me, though, is that many listeners and musicians who are otherwise of a much more "easy-listening" persuasion seem to be enthusiastic about it while they wouldn't give the time of day to other equally "complex" music. I don't find a string quartet by Carter any less "difficult" to hear and appreciate than one by Ferneyhough; but many people apparently do. Why might this be, I wonder.

Tetrachords are all Greek to me.

a pox on jimmy -- all for elliott

Carter's dynamics are also not systematic, except in very specific circumstances.

What you seem to describe in terms of CD in the RT-analysis lines up w/ what is known about Carter's working method. There is a "pre-disposition" of intervallic characters and these work themselves out through a scheme of interactions. The locus classicus would be the first string quartet, and experiencing the first three quartets in succession allows us to witness an evolution of the concept.

I might venture to say that Carter is himself partially responsible for establishing the "traditional associations of various intervals" -- what other composers made 'interval quality as carrier of drama' an extended focus of their work?

Odd that - I know Chris doesn't particularly get on with Carter's music. Maybe it's worth pointing out the contrast that Chris's music is very much based in the pitches themselves rather than the intervals.

My memory of Toop's article in Perspectives on Sulle Scalle della Fenice is a little fuzzy, but I think that one of the main differences between Dench and Carter in this context is that Carter, as Member Sudden pointed out and I hinted at as well, strives by way of dramatic signifiers (like intervals) to produce a conventionally rhetorical musical narrative.  Dench, who was born a whopping forty-five years after Carter, invites the listener to stand "outside" the piece and take into account, for instance, his wife's name, which provided the numerical material for SSdF–a completely non-musical feature that forces us, once we know its significance, to reevaluate the piece's musical substance.  It's at once a) a spiky, dissonant, hyperactive serial flute piece and b) a tribute to the flutist, with whom he was in love when he wrote it.  You might even say that the "piece," perceptually, is our reconciliation of these apparent incongruities.  Of course, it's still a convincing experience even if we don't know about the LAURACHISLETT thing, but I think that knowing the whole story is crucial to the piece's ontology.  The dialectic of sentiment and calculation certainly enriches it for me.

Frank Cox (HUGE Carter fan, by the way) is sort of in the same type of boat as Dench, in some ways, albeit on a much more turbulent sea; although he might not say it, I suspect he uses extensive and intricate serial procedures because they are representative, much like Dench's in SSdF were representative (for him) of the performer, of forces beyond our control.  He writes unceasingly pessimistic, obsessive pieces; the serial processes he uses seem, for me anyway, to create situations in which every cage is surrounded by another cage.

Sort of like the 1997 sci-fi thriller Cube.  Don't tell him I said that.

Man, this board is a blast.

...Frescobaldi, Berg, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Boulez, ....