Carter was born in 1908. What he said about his fascination with modernity has to do with the time when his aesthetic was still being shaped. He isn't saying this today, right? And he wasn't upholding aeroplanes as such, but the possibilities for new perspectives that they suggest.

There you go again, sitting back and posing your Socratic questions. Didn't he just ask you to help him think through the issue?
The description Al Moritz gives of Gruppen on his website is somewhat along the lines I'd like to see. The differently conceived tempo objects give the sense of people, vehicles, and other creatures moving in different directions and at different speeds. It by turns gently and violently subverts the Cartesian (not Carter-ian!) pre-modern picture of the world.

Yes, and I'm saying that I am interested in considering that (and other things)!

Precisely. All I said was that Carter had thought about those concerns - I was responding, as I thought I'd explained pretty well by now, to your comment that 'I find it hard to imagine ... that the various wider concerns that bore upon the mind of the post-war European avant-garde ... were really concerns for Carter.'

I'm not interested in talking to you about whether and/or how things are made manifest in the music, because you always approach the subject like a prosecution lawyer (with a bit of moral blackmail thrown in from time to time: 'if you believe this then you're ignoring the fact that Stockhausen's mother was murdered under the Nazi euthanasia programme' - you still haven't given a satisfactory explanation of that comment). Your attitude is ironic given the interpretive and analytical paucity of your own paper purporting to address performance issues in 90+, unless you've significantly improved it since the version you sent me.

Some thoughts on the quotes from Carter:

I've heard Carter making that link between that work and Schumann before - it's always somewhat dangerous for a composer to do, because it invites comparisons which may not be favourable. But to my ears at least, those works of Schumann are permeated by strong, directive (or rather, omnidirective) intentions or desires (it's not quite clear whether 'desires' is to be understood purely in terms of being 'directive', or whether C is talking about 'desires' in general). And that's the key difference between those earlier works and Night Fantasies, which I find one of his weakest works (at least in all the wide range of performances I've heard). I remember hearing of one British critic lauding Knussen's music for using the musical means of the past, but divesting them of all their expression - that actually seems relatively accurate, but I wouldn't necessarily see it as a compliment!

Fine, but what exactly were those feelings, and what would constitute something 'serious and meaningful' to Carter? The above doesn't really say much more than 'music needed to change, because of events in history, some people elsewhere were doing it reasonably well, and I wanted to do something 'more vivid and much more meaningful' as well'.

Well, there are plenty of major composers in Europe who have never taught on any regular basis (which raises questions about their own independent means in such a context). But in terms of what Carter says, that situation has changed with the rise of more populist composers (for example, some of the minimalists), who have made lots of money from composing (sometimes tied in with being part of ensembles who play their music, of course).

Yes, very true - in a non-American context, though, it is sometimes possible to do such a thing by adopting a sort of neo-Carterian approach, though.

I suppose I can hear the New Musicological critique of the above ringing in my ears instantly: what is construed as 'the music of the present'? To the majority of the population, that would be popular music, which could be argued to achieve what Carter describes vastly more successfully. But Carter's comments might have resounded with those in the 19th century and before, in terms of their relationship to their own past. Though I'm not convinced much music of the last 20 years is necessarily more vivid, striking, communicative than that of Monteverdi or Bach or Beethoven or Schumann.

To be honest, that's the construction of the past that I hear in Carter's work, purely as a range of historical artefacts, rather than works that exist in some dialectical relationship to their context. The skewered paintings of his patrons by Franz Hals may not have the same immediacy in an age where those types of patrons no longer exist in the same form, but possibly past art and music may maintain its relevance because the power relationships between creator and patron continue to have contemporary parallels, with the distributors of capital taking the place of the old aristocratic patrons?

I don't think Carter intends to foreground this feature in the way that Lutoslawski does, and if he does intend to do so then he fails with me as well as with you. I've never found it particularly helpful or interesting to concentrate on this, or the details of the polyrhythmic structures, as opposed (respectively) to a sense of textural and temporal differentiation which may be what Carter is aiming at creating with these ultimately musically-neutral techniques.

Can we please, as intelligent people, stop going round in circles, in one thread after another, with the question of the composer's own view of his/her music? We all know that this view isn't the only one and in many cases not even a particularly authoritative one. We also know that wilfully to ignore this view is a waste of time, in the sense that you can either spend time and effort working on hunches as to why you think the music is the way it is, or you can first consult the composer to see what he/she has to say, which more often than not is at least enlightening. To use some Stockhausenian terms, we can be fairly sure of ourselves when discussing the what of a piece of music, but we're on very shaky ground when it comes to the why, and the composer ought to be a pretty good starting point for this kind of investigation.

As for Carter's music being dated, apart from the obvious fact that he's 99 years old, everything is dated. The alternative is to posit some kind of aesthetic criteria which stand outside of time and history, for which (especially from a Marxist point of view) there's no evidence.

I would go along with that, if only because I'm exhausted by the back and forth.

Fair point - maybe some music, purely from our contemporary standpoint, is more dated than other work, though? Beethoven sounds fresher and more immediate still today than do, say, Stamitz or Wölffl? I suppose what I'm thinking with Carter is that some of his most recent music doesn't seem to have developed that much from that he was writing in the 1950s-1970s; if anything, it can sometimes seem a bit formulaic. Of course that criticism could be made of other numerous composers too; also, one can hardly expect a composer in their 70s, 80s or 90s to be continuously discovering new things. But it all seems to have become a little too 'easy' after a certain point, especially after the watershed of the Third Quartet.

The composer him/herself is, however, a product of a wider context and background, as is the musical language he/she employs, and all that is entailed therein. In the case of Schumann, arguably his deteriorating state of mental health affected his compositional decisions (which in no sense necessarily implies the mapping of the Florestan and Eusbeius aspects onto a manifestation of schizophrenia, in the manner beloved of certain lurid biographers), in ways of which he may not have been wholly cognisant? In that case, the 'why' goes beyond the composer's intentions. And Carter is a white male of a certain class, background and situation - those are not necessarily wholly limiting factors upon the 'why' of his music, but nor is the question independent of such things.