No, but I assume that Carter isn't interested in deploying dynamics systematically. Very few composers are of course, one possible reason being that this is the parameter most likely to be ignored or "reinterpreted" by performers. I often find that most of my comments to performers in rehearsal are to do with dynamics and particularly with giving them their full range.

Chris's take on that if I understood him correctly was (and for all I know still is) that precisely because pretty much any structural procedures he might use would be acoustically imperceptible (or effectively so) he would prefer to use as 'seed' material something which was in some way meaningful to him.

An alternative would be to employ structural procedures which are perceptible, wouldn't it? Or am I missing something?

Of course it would be an alternative but I presume it's something he found less interesting and that he was in any case not uncomfortable with the idea of the structural level of the music being below the surface. Perhaps as well the things he had already found out he liked doing with notes weren't the kind of thing he wanted to discard.

Anyway, you all know where to find him.

Well, there's no point in arguing with you about this, of course, but it's interesting to me (and perhaps revealing about Dench's compositional methods, about which I know essentially nothing) that he's conflating imperceptible structural methods with interchangability of the material thus operated upon.  Ian mentioned Aldo Clementi, who for me is the prime example of the opposite attitude; Clementi's canonic structures may be audible only in a general sense (and at their beginnings), but surely the particular (diatonic) properties of the "seed material" thus becomes all-important? 

In fact, it strikes me as more intuitive that highly audible structural processes would be more compatible with arbitrary starting places. Hence Donatoni's etwas ruhiger in Ausdruck, for example, or the Cage Billings pieces?

And since I should probably say something about Carter, I'm really torn about him; I react viscerally against his brand of reductive, almost caricatured "musical characterizations," and his instrumental writing often strikes me as infuriatingly middle-of-the-road.  But damned if I don't like a lot of the pieces more than I think I should.

Have you read the Toop articles then? I think they're worth a look if you want to know a bit more about why Chris does these things the way he does. Obviously it's a point of view thing whether you want such things to be foreground-audible or not; I certainly can't imagine Chris wanting to do something like etwas ruhiger, and like Clementi even less so even though to an extent they all have something to do with the 'crisis of material' whatsit. Could be worth reading the Toop articles or, ahem, even the article by one Carl Rosman in Musik & Ästhetik 17 (January 2001), although for the last one you'd need either to read German or know someone who could send you a translation...

Me too - I agree with both of you, and in fact I've a feeling I mentioned this much earlier in the thread in terms of a comparison with the composer who for me does sounds like what I'd expect of Carter if I'd read the analyses and not heard the music, namely Lutoslawski.

Maybe those structures aren't so audible as canonic structures, but the impression I get from Clementi, at least in the performances I like most, is of a definite emphasis upon process rather than so much the material upon which such processes operate (though of course that dichotomy is always a bit simplistic).