(1) Composer to composer - conversations about contemporary music by Andrew Ford

Gentility and apocalypse - Elliott Carter

Quotes:

[A.F.] "For Carter, each musical work is a new departure. Just as he consciously tried something different with the first quartet, he immediately moved on to find new challenges.” p. 5

[E.C.] “I never wrote a work like [the first string quartet] again, because I felt that I had done that and then I wanted to go on to something else. I’ve tried to make each of my pieces individual and separate from each other; I didn’t want to repeat myself. I hope each of my pieces has a distinct character of its own — a distinct style of its own, almost. When I came to write a piece like my Violin Concerto [1990] and started dividing it up into movements, people said I was becoming very conservative. While that may be true, that wasn’t what I was thinking about: I was thinking that I never wrote a piece using the structure of three different movements before.” p. 5

[E.C.] “I am rather impatient with easy solutions, so that sometimes I can’t think how to begin a piece for days, although I have a very good idea of what happens in the middle. But I worry about it until finally something shows up. Very often I write little examples of what I would like to hear in the piece and then I assemble them in one way or another. Night Fantasies was written in that way. I wrote lots of little fragments and then gradually adapted them to the big rhythmic scheme.” p. 6

[A.F.] “It is a method which Stravinsky is often said to have used: writing small blocks of musical material, and then moving them around until they fit. One report speaks of Stravinsky’s use of a scrapbook for this purpose. Certainly the new flute piece on Elliott Carter’s desk appeared to be a scissor-and-paste job.” p. 6

[E.C.] “I never think of my pieces in the abstract. Very early in the piece the general typecasting of the various instruments or groups of instruments become something that is, a human idea: the idea of groups of people I society; individuals and their relationships to each other. My music has been very concerned with the presentation of individual characters and their interrelation.” p. 6