Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation With Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter, in these interviews from 1968-1970, offers his view of modern music. He talks about the methods of his teacher in Paris in the 1930s, Nadia Boulanger, and his early influences -- Ives, Varese, Scriabin, Stravinsky and the Second Vienna School. He critiques serialism and technique without communication at length. Central to Carter's music is its flow: "I must say that the one issue that I am, and have been, very concerned with, unlike most of my colleagues since the war, is making the flow of music be the most important thing; the 'now' of any given point to me is only as significant as how it came to be 'now' and what happens afterward ... Music is the only world in which you can really manipulate the flow of time in a rather free way ... [T]he only concern of most composers today...is with block-like, terribly simplified structures of time... We had so much of that with 'The Rite of Spring.'" (pp. 37-38) This is indeed key and central to Carter's music, and it stands in polar opposition to Harrison Birtwistle, another great composer of the second half of the 20th century, whose key inspiration was precisely that cubist, block-like collage structure of Stravinsky, particularly of "Symphonies of Wind Instruments.