Regarding "necessity": for me this is a question of a composer feeling a need to evolve new ways of looking at music, for whatever reason: the desire for a tabula rasa (Stockhausen), for a means to articulate a critical programme (Lachenmann), and whatever it may have been, no doubt something less tangible but whose results are just as clearly the outcome of "necessity", in the case of Carter. Against this sense of "necessity" one might cite the kind of epigonal attitude whose necessity is as it were second hand. What Carter seems to me to be after (and I haven't read any of his writings or very much about him, so pardon me if this is either obvious or just wrong) is a situation where the audience, instead of being told what to think, is presented with an experience through which to form their own thoughts, which I would contrast with my experience of Lachenmann's music, which I often find myself comparing to being lectured in great detail about something I already know. However I do find the sound material of Lachenmann's music more attractive than Carter's.

Thanks, t_i_n. Great stuff.

I initially disliked Carter's statement that one begins to look back at old music as stuffy, or even tiresome when I first read it. (I have never found that to be the case.) There must be a better reason for composing other than that one is bored with the current state of music? But then I thought, to each his own. What are other people's thoughts on this? Do you compose out of boredom?

Well, articulating a 'critical programme' is not how I hear Lachenmann, really, more of a case of simply adopting a thinking, critical, and aware approach to the materials and expressive tropes which he inherits - but that can equally be said of Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms or Schoenberg.

Must hear these things extremely differently - I find an awful lot more space for reflection, subjective engagement, and so on, in Lachenmann than in Carter, where I hear tired old modes of expression raked up again and again in a sometimes rather manneristic fashion. Lachenmann has a utopian element, but in a very different manner to Stockhausen, say - more about positing and pointing at a realm of experience 'beyond' rather than trying to actually create wholescale some 'other world'. That said, I can see how some would find that such a strategy, at least in the later works of Lachenmann, itself becomes manneristic - also, in works like Concertini or NUN in particular, he seems essentially to be resting upon his laurels, and mostly producing a flashy collection of sonic events. The former is not that unlike a Carter work in some ways...

I have to side with Richard and say that Carter's music leaves a lot more room for my own musings than does Lachenmann's, but Lachenmann's sound world is more attractive. Then again, I'm trying to imagine "mixing" the best of both worlds, and don't find that particularly appealing at all! Somehow Carter's rather "staid" notion of instrumental timbre fits his particular experimental trajectory.


The sticking point here is that Carter addresses this 'transformed nature' through technical, and perhaps seemingly dispassionate, means. Once we're past that, which is clearly an aesthetic problem for some, we can realize that this is pursued more successfully in some pieces than in others, and that there are performance practice issues which can work in Carter's favor. I just remind of Ian's impression of the Ardittis playing the first quartet, or Richard's differing impressions of Penthode from different performances.

A lot depends, I think, on the performers really hearing and bringing out the different tempi, but what is making that difficult is what I called, and tin acknowledged as, a somewhat impoverished idea of meter and tempo. Carter tends to "show" meters at cross purposes by marking accents in unexpected (but schematically determined) places. On the second quintuplet-sixteenth, and so on... but usually these accents are supposed to imply metric emphasis in Carter, yet people simply play them as accents, and they are then heard as some sophisticated kind of syncopation. So the performers need to rehearse the long-range poly-tempo, and this really does make a difference. I would even venture to posit that it makes the critical difference between London Penthode and Amsterdam Penthode, or between Arditti Quartet I and, I don't know, Pacifica Quartet I -- Haven't heard them play it yet, though knowing them I suspect they too understand the distinction very well. From my own experience of recordings, the phenomenological "static" has to do with this misunderstanding of accent, or the inability to really let the notated accents suggest a consistent new meter free from the confines of the actually notated meter. I uphold the Knussen recording of Clarinet Concerto as a particularly well-heard rendition -- that product really exudes the smell of hard work, doesn't it?

It's outrageously difficult, really -- yet (and this is a second problem) Carter places an ever shifting landscape of polytempos before the players, some of them being far more challenging than others, yet doesn't engage with this difficulty gradient in other ways (by for example simplifying the texture, or encouraging stronger stratification through dynamic or instrumentation). Some may see that as an inadequate criticism; it's a problem that it's up to the players to transcend... fair enough.

In addition, though, Carter's typical division into 4, 3, and 5, often 7, so strongly encourages a more conventional realization of meter (both to the performer and to the listener) -- simply because these tuplets are multiples of one and the same basic pulse; there must be a way to more actively discourage us from hearing the notated pulse, perhaps by considering tempos with consistent ratios, such as 4:9, 2:3, 1:1, 3:2, and 9:4 ... some people are already working in this direction, though the results are and remain near or beyond the confines of accurate playability.

Actually, that [CD, #81] reminds me of another issue about Carter that I wanted to bring up in this thread, which is this whole business of giving individual performers (or sections of the orchestra) 'characteristic' melodic intervals. I basically can't stand this way of writing harmony (or perhaps what I mean is that I think it fails to relate melody to harmony in the way it intends), it makes most Lutoslawski sound just about dead on arrival to me, and yet when Carter does it I tend to find the results highly successful and engaging. Is this simply because I manage to ignore the technique that's generated most of the local pitch events?

Funnily enough, I never really was all that taken with the Clarinet Concerto in Knussen's recording, but found a concert recording I heard recently by one Mr Oliver Sudden and the Libra Ensemble much more gripping. But I haven't had a chance to listen again to the Knussen CD since then, so maybe I'm just generally more receptive to the piece these days than when I last heard it (a couple of years ago at the Proms, with the same performers as on the DG disc).

No, but then I didn't say one did. The point I'm making is that I said the writings confirmed some feelings I already had from listening to the music. The other point I was making is that you voiced some 'suspicions' (I think that was the word you used) about Carter's own intentions and psychology, which you said were based on the way you heard the music. My response was designed to indicate that if you'd read his writings you would have found, in this case, some quite concrete evidence that your suspicions were wrong. That's not the same as stating that one always, or even usually, has to read a composer's writings in order to pass comment on his music.

If that's all you had been saying I don't know why you would have been saying it - no one had suggested otherwise!

I didn't rule anything out for consideration! How often do I have to say this in different ways? I just object to drawing facile conclusions from it.

For me, God is nothing more (or less!) than another metaphor for spirit. If I plug that word "God" in wherever I use the word spirit in my own sense, then I can certainly engage with music by God-fearing composers.

Well, we disagree. If you play a minuet with 5-bar phrases and you don't know that that simply is undanceable as a minuet, then you're just playing something quirky. Haydn's minuets comes across as merely quirky when the performers don't try and fail to dance a minuet.


tB refers, I think, to the practice of some composers pointing to the emptiness that lies beneath subjectivity, and musically saying "Behold! How empty thou art!" -- I think this really is how he reads Spahlinger. To be fair, Spahlinger's presentimientos is a lot like that actually, as an experience. But I won't claim that he meant Spahlinger. I'm just guessing, since MS's string trio was performed at UCSD once.
As for musica negativa, sure, it's a problematic term, but like 'queer', it has been adopted by the people it was meant to lampoon. Musica ex negativo -- music extracted from a negative dialectic method, a phrase which Adorno certainly did not mean as detraction. MS would say that Cage practiced abstract negation, whereas MS himself practices concrete negation. That is a topic for another thread, though, and one which I'm not ready to talk about yet until I've written my article.

Decoration?! Yick! No no, can't have any decoration! It will detract from my 'critical programme'! -- nonsense. Why not stop making music entirely, or just knock out his polymeters on a couple of woodblocks?

For the record, that's the comment in question. Even you yourself raised the possibility that the writings could provide relevant concrete evidence in this case: that was the context for my remark that 'I really do think you might read some of Carter's fascinating writings'.