I do not stare at myself in incredulity over this.
I'd like to see you try, though!
I'm sure Carter, like most composers, is best heard live. Same is true of Messiaen, whom I've appreciated greatly in performance, but whom I rarely listen to on recording. Had I written more, I would have described Carter's aridity, but added that his music does not lack emotional punch, at least in a good performance.
The early Carter orchestral music I know - especially the Elegy - sounds more like Barber that's been left out in the sun too long than like Copland. The Minotaur suite is choppy enough, and the orchestration is more Copland-Hanson, but it doesn't have the kind of rhythmic intensity I associate with Copland. Not that I intend to drive a deep line between Copland and Barber.
There's a deep irony somewhere in Carter feeling freed from a hegemony at the same time and by the same process that others, to whom that style came naturally, were getting trapped into it. Whatever Zhdanov might have been babbling, the American populists never claimed theirs was the only way of composing, uttering the kind of "historic necessity" rot that Boulez was so fond of. What kept Carter from finding his own voice was merely an unusually long self-discovery process, and not the compulsion that kept others writing like Carter so long when it was against their grain.
no subject
I'd like to see you try, though!
I'm sure Carter, like most composers, is best heard live. Same is true of Messiaen, whom I've appreciated greatly in performance, but whom I rarely listen to on recording. Had I written more, I would have described Carter's aridity, but added that his music does not lack emotional punch, at least in a good performance.
The early Carter orchestral music I know - especially the Elegy - sounds more like Barber that's been left out in the sun too long than like Copland. The Minotaur suite is choppy enough, and the orchestration is more Copland-Hanson, but it doesn't have the kind of rhythmic intensity I associate with Copland. Not that I intend to drive a deep line between Copland and Barber.
There's a deep irony somewhere in Carter feeling freed from a hegemony at the same time and by the same process that others, to whom that style came naturally, were getting trapped into it. Whatever Zhdanov might have been babbling, the American populists never claimed theirs was the only way of composing, uttering the kind of "historic necessity" rot that Boulez was so fond of. What kept Carter from finding his own voice was merely an unusually long self-discovery process, and not the compulsion that kept others writing like Carter so long when it was against their grain.