Indeed - which may arguably tell you more about the commentators than it mght usefully inform you about Elliott Carter himself, n'est-ce pas?

Best,

Alistair

Yes, but also of some of his advocates amongst musicians. Not all or even most, but some certainly seem to find him 'acceptable' in this sense.

There is a broader issue of how certain new music is deemed 'acceptable' to the extent that it reminds people of that which they already know. Now, there's much more to Carter than that, but I've noticed how recent commentators never want to stop telling us about his roots in 'tradition', rather than about how that tradition is mediated.

I am still 'chafing' at this analysis and can't help but wonder whether Member Pace is applying an inappropriate standard to Mr. Carter. I am sure others have thought about it, and some like Alistair Hinton were more audibly incensed.

So what if Carter's work lacks a feeling of 'necessity' -- what exactly does this mean? That his music did not fill a particular void in the cultural landscape? I keep coming back to the writings of Helmut Lachenmann, who showed up prominently in the Stockhausen thread already. HL expresses, in the 1970s and on, skepticism about the post-war Aufbruchsstimmung, and the possibilities of creating a new language out of the wreckage of the old one simply by heightening the level of abstraction. Perhaps someone like Carter was already skeptical from the get-go, not only about the tabula rasa, but also more generally about the adequacy and appropriateness of music as a means of address 'urgent' questions of social import on any but a deeply subjective and personal level. Seen in this light, his pursuit of ever more technically sophisticated rhythmic and pitch-organizational methods was not just an act of navel-gazing, but an effort to come ever closer to the kind of music making that most corresponded to his own tastes and predilections. In EC's work, there was no drive toward universality in the (in Carter's eyes) rather unpromising sense espoused by the serialists.

It seems Carter would have taken "Your music feels very necessary" as a greater affront than "Your music is a glass bead game." The heroic connotations of the image "salvaging [whatnot] from the wreckage of [whosit]" probably seemed to Carter a bit fatuous, maybe even self-serving. Does this partly come from the fact that he lived in relative comfort in the United States, away from the fray? Perhaps. But even I as a Stockhausen enthusiast possess enough skepticism about the serial project to know where EC is coming from.

OK, this also isn't a very satisfying analysis, but it is one more fair to the composer, in keeping with my conviction that, if one is to engage critically with the work of a composer, one should try to do so on the composer's terms, rather than exclusively on one's own. The critique on one's own terms has its place, too, but remains incomplete (and a bit unfair) if made to the exclusion of the former.

Well, it's just a personal reaction, a vague attempt to identify why somehow a lot of Carter's music doesn't really reach the highest peaks to me (not just unlike some of the Europeans I mention, but unlike some Americans as well, most obviously Cage and Feldman).

That is part of it - but it's more about how it seems a little incidental, rather than music that 'burns to be'.

Sure, and I think he was very right in that respect. With some hesitation and trepidation in making this claim, I might suggest that what Lachenmann and some others discovered was something of the very dynamic nation of 'tradition', how entering into a critical engagement with existing musical language (and 'tradition' itself) was, paradoxically, quite 'traditional'. If that seems contrived, it's an attempt to distinguish this from the work of neo-classicists (and their latter-day equivalents) who, as it were, took tradition out of history. Coming after a period in German history which attempted, appallingly, to somehow freeze history, to artificially try and recreate some totally idealised rendition of a cultural 'tradition' (indeed something of this ethos can be found considerably further back in some romantic and early modernist aesthetics, though), to do that itself has to my mind a political meaning. Though this is quite different from a simple tendency towards abstraction.

To try and explicitly 'address' social questions in music is often to miss the point, I feel (but let's not open that can of worms). But to bring a powerful subjective and personal level into one's music-making is itself a social issue (when subjectivity is increasingly squeezed out by the pressures of the culture industry as it wraps its tentacles around contemporary music as well; and it was an issue in earlier decades as well). However, I don't really feel Carter's music does this, at least not to my ears. The tabula rasa of the immediate post-1945 period is vastly inflated in size and importance by many historians of that period, also - only a very few works come close to satisfying that category.

Those meglomaniac-like aspirations to universality may be best consigned to volumes of such composers' collected pronouncements; nonetheless I do feel their subjectivity seemed somehow more engaged with the wider world than was the case in Carter's more hermetically sealed music (to argue why and how this might be the case would take some time and space, though).

Well, being sceptical about aspects of the Stockhausen project does not in itself necessarily make one's own efforts any better (or worse). I think perhaps you are interpreting 'necessary' somewhat differently from how I intended it - rather than connotating 'social necessity', I'm more referring just to a sense of unstoppable conviction on the part of the composer. I hear that Xenakis, I hear it in the earlier Boulez, I hear it in Feldman, I hear it in Stockhausen, I hear it in Nono, I hear it in Lachenmann, I hear it in Ferneyhough, and countless others. But less so in Carter. That's what I mean by 'necessity' - has something to do with passion, conviction, and so on.

No, I don't accept that at all. Why should a critical engagement be on the composer's own terms? Would we do that with Tavener, say? Should we judge his music primarily in terms of how well it satisfies the cod-religious/spiritual claims he makes for it (and maybe he sincerely believes)? When a composer writes a work, and it goes out into the wider world, it may be fair that a performer should be somewhat beholden to respecting their conception, but listeners come at the works with a variety of different experiences, perspectives, and so on of their own. And the pieces may come across to them in a way significantly different to how the composer intended them - indeed the pieces may even be successful for reasons other than those intended by the composer. I do believe very strongly that any serious analysis and engagement with a piece should take how one hears it (as well as considering how others might hear it) as one's starting point, prior to investigating the composer's intention and so on. I do feel that it seems that you implicitly want to legislate on what the 'correct' mode of listening and engagement with a work of music is, entailing a certain deference towards the composer's own way of seeing things. And I think a lot of music criticism suffers significantly from being over-beholden to such assumptions (the book I co-edited and wrote a lot of on Finnissy was criticised in one review by Whittall on precisely such grounds, and he was absolutely right with respect to most of our writings - personally I attempt a very different and more critical approach now). I'm not sure if composers, or what they think, are necessarily of such primary importance; I'm interested in works and their possible meanings in a wider cultural context. And even when dealing with compositional intention (which is certainly a legitimate issue for study), that itself ought to be 'decentered' as well. For example, Stockhausen's ideas about Weltmusik, as laid out in that notorious essay in the fourth volume of his Texte zur Musik, very clearly belong to a certain era, that in an age of globalization and Starbucks (when the global village has become the global supermarket) have a different ring to them. One can look at works like Hymnen or Telemusik relative to these ideas, yes, but it's equally necessary to look critically at the ideas themselves. Or mightn't it be more fruitful to let the ideas take something of a backseat, even see what's worthwhile about the music in part despite them?

Yes and no; I don't argue that we should censor Carter's biography -- we can use it. I just balk at drawing facile conclusions from it.

Well, I don't deal with Tavener because I don't understand his religious position and don't feel particularly sympathetic to it; nor do I feel it needs to be urgently addressed. I have things far higher on my list.

Now if someone managed to coerce me into writing something intelligent about him, then yes, I would try to see his work in the context of cod-religion (what the hell is that?!). If I thought his work was totally disingenuous and exploitative, I would try to make that case by looking for places in the music where spirituality has been replaced with pseudo-spirituality, and use these to argue that the music is bunk. But even then it would be a tentative hypothesis. Aesthetic critique is extremely hard, and one should use all that is at one's disposal, including the composer's own perspective. I think this is the point ill-torn echo was trying to make with his cartoon, right, O chill tenor?

Whether he (Hen Jot Raven, now) 'sincerely' believes something or not is immaterial, I think, because unproveable. Just because he thinks he believes doesn't mean he truly believes -- see what I'm getting at? He may have deluded himself so utterly that no amount of psychobabble can unearth his true convictions... and the commentator ends up sounding like a pompous 8X*X*X*X*8 and weakens his/her case.

Grrr... 'I just balk at drawing facile conclusions from it.'

It depends on what I am setting out to do. If I think the whole perspective is problematic, then yes, I should get to the bottom of that. But if I am to convince anyone other than myself, I need to at least begin by taking it at face value, then show how that is impossible without making unacceptable moral/ethical concessions. It would run along lines such as "Look how facile and formulaic this is: if this is meant to tap our deepest spiritual reserves, then just how impoverished is my notion of spirit expected to be?"

This is also all hypothetical, of course, as I haven't seriously tried to be in JT's shoes. That it is bunk is something I feel very strongly, but what's the point of saying so when I can just get on with my life in hopes that the stuff never again crosses my radar?

Yes, you've caught me in something of a contradiction; all I can say is that caution and skepticism is called for, including skepticism toward one's conclusions; but not to the point where one's whole ability to draw conclusions is impaired. The point is to make a persuasive argument that changes minds, of course, not to establish an apodictic certainty.

Ha! I've skated into the banal again. I'll get me {insert garment here}

Of course, and I totally agree. I'm just asking aloud where we draw the line at what can be reasonably gleaned from a composer's biography with respect to their work, without such an endeavour being facile?

We often end up agreeing more than initially realised (not that the process of getting there hasn't hopefully clarified and developed various things for both parties)! I think perhaps what you call the 'spirit' (in the sense defined in the Stockhausen thread) is quite different to what the term means to Tavener, so that his definition of 'spiritual' amounts to quite a different thing. Personally, I reckon one could argue one's case either for or against the music (or somewhere in between) without needing to delve too much into the latter - your own concept of spirit would be an altogether more productive paradigm! But on top of that, can't we realistically place certain demands of our own upon music, which are not alleviated because the composer intends it differently? If we are judging something as a piece of music in some sense, aren't we always bringing some criteria of our own with respect to what (hopefully defining this very broadly) a piece of music should be? A lot of music up until the end of the 18th century was 'functional', intended for specific occasions and not particularly for posterity (there are exceptions), we now hear and judge it in quite different contexts - surely it is legitimate to do that rather than basing our opinion of it upon how well it fulfilled its original function? I'd sooner judge Haydn's quartets by some of their immanent aspects, and how they continue to be distinctive and meaningful today, rather than how well they served as aristocratic entertainment at the court of Esterházy.

I'm very interested in what you say about Carter and Ferneyhough, that articulates very well something I've sort of intuitively felt - actually I've heard of the latter making the opposite claims towards the former (in the sense of the late Carter being an extension of Ferneyhough, rather than the other way round), but that's perhaps by the by..... I suppose I hear Ferneyhough as occupying something of a midway position between, say, the rather innocent and unassuming optimism of Carter on one hand, and the radical, acutely historically aware, scepticism of Lachenmann, Huber, et. al on the other (Holliger also occupies something of a mid-way position, but in a different manner). There is of course a fair amount of that ferocious Angst-ridden late expressionist language in Ferneyhough, and a certain tendency towards fragmentation - but nothing like to the extent of the other composers (nor the various other directions they moved in or incorporated). And these seem rather intensively interrogated and developed in the work, though not so often placed in such contexts as to radically defamiliarise them (as can happen in the case of the aforementioned Germans). Maybe Carter deals more simply with the very small-scale sonic details of his materials as 'particles' (not to be equated with single notes, though) that are ultimately subsumed into his totalizing strategies (I know Ferneyhough's are totalizing as well, again more so than the Germans, but there seems a greater inner tension between low-level gesture and macroscopic process/structure - and I think I would feel that even if I didn't have knowledge of his compositional process), rather than really building much upon their expressive properties in a dynamic manner?

When I was 17 I bought a CD of Carter's music and took it home and listened to it, several times. Then I went and bought some more. Unusually for me at the time, I don't think I read any writings by or about Carter for quite a while after this, but when I did they confirmed the impression I already had from the music that it was seeking to address, in a way that I found both powerful and unusually comprehensible, some of the conditions of modernity.

I don't make any great claims for a composer's intentions but I really do think you might read some of Carter's fascinating writings, many of them addressing quite fundamental issues of history and phenomenology, before making sweeping claims about his hermetically-sealed interest in complexity only as a technical challenge.

I also don't know what you're trying to suggest by this:I don't believe that there are no important aspects of modernity to be addressed other than murder, fascism, and the apparent failure of Aufklärung in Central Europe.