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composers on parade
This week marks the birth centenaries of two significant composers. One of them is still alive.
Wednesday: Olivier Messiaen, born in Avignon, France, December 10, 1908. He died in 1992.
Thursday: Elliott Carter, born in New York, December 11, 1908. He's the one who's still living.
Neither has been an obscure name for a half-century or more, but for a long time they tended to be overlooked when lists of great contemporary composers were being drawn up. That's changed in recent decades, and now their centenaries are being marked with some fanfare.
They're very different composers, though, and fans of each tend to stare at the other with some incredulity. Neither is among my favorites, but if I had to choose, I'm definitely on the Messiaen side. He was a mystic Catholic who stands with the great spiritually-inspired composers of the century. He wrote a lot for the organ, which he played professionally, and was often inspired by birdsong as well as by his religion. His best music leaves an impression of stillness within a bleak, dissonant beauty (as I put it in a review). I will be spending some time Wednesday listening to his Turangalîla Symphony and the Quatuor pour la fin du temps.
Carter is a difficult nut to crack, even his admirers admit. He's the last survivor of the generation of the great American populists, and started out writing like Samuel Barber, just not as well. But in the post-war era, when the atonal regime was imported from Europe, and Barber was driven into a corner while other composers trying to keep up with the times merely lost their way, Carter found his way. Systemic complexity suited him, and he became the epitome of the intellectually spiky composer. His five string quartets (the latest written at the age of 86) are considered his masterpieces, and if you want to listen to them, be my guest. There are said to be riches in Carter if you delve deep enough, but there's nothing on the surface to tempt me to do so.
Wednesday: Olivier Messiaen, born in Avignon, France, December 10, 1908. He died in 1992.
Thursday: Elliott Carter, born in New York, December 11, 1908. He's the one who's still living.
Neither has been an obscure name for a half-century or more, but for a long time they tended to be overlooked when lists of great contemporary composers were being drawn up. That's changed in recent decades, and now their centenaries are being marked with some fanfare.
They're very different composers, though, and fans of each tend to stare at the other with some incredulity. Neither is among my favorites, but if I had to choose, I'm definitely on the Messiaen side. He was a mystic Catholic who stands with the great spiritually-inspired composers of the century. He wrote a lot for the organ, which he played professionally, and was often inspired by birdsong as well as by his religion. His best music leaves an impression of stillness within a bleak, dissonant beauty (as I put it in a review). I will be spending some time Wednesday listening to his Turangalîla Symphony and the Quatuor pour la fin du temps.
Carter is a difficult nut to crack, even his admirers admit. He's the last survivor of the generation of the great American populists, and started out writing like Samuel Barber, just not as well. But in the post-war era, when the atonal regime was imported from Europe, and Barber was driven into a corner while other composers trying to keep up with the times merely lost their way, Carter found his way. Systemic complexity suited him, and he became the epitome of the intellectually spiky composer. His five string quartets (the latest written at the age of 86) are considered his masterpieces, and if you want to listen to them, be my guest. There are said to be riches in Carter if you delve deep enough, but there's nothing on the surface to tempt me to do so.
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I'm sorry you didn't come to the Carter Centennial programs over the weekend, but if you can ever catch the quartets live, they're best heard that way. As far as writing like Barber goes, his early orchestral music sounds more like slightly spiky Copland. He says now that the First Quartet is where he decided he would write what he wanted to write rather than what the milieu said he should write, though the Piano Sonata - which you'd like - seems to mark the beginnings of his stylistic shift.
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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.
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Check out Carter's Symphony no. 1 and the Holiday overture. They're very Coplandish.
Robert Greenberg, who was the lecturer for the Carter weekend, said that during the late 30s and WWII, there was a feeling among many composers - and this seems to have included Carter - that music should be populist and accessible, as much as a political matter as anything else, and that this did affect how Carter composed. He linked this to the Depression, the New Deal, and the sense that it was necessary to create a truly American music.
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Of course the American populists made a conscious decision that they should write their music that way. You don't have to descend to citing Robert Greenberg (whom I don't take very seriously as an authority, not after his mendacity over Shostakovich) to prove it: Copland, for one, states that explicitly in several places as his motivation for changing styles in the 1930s. And of course they thought this was the best way, or they wouldn't have done it.
But this was just, as you put it, a milieu, and not an attempt at an enforced hegemony as the succeeding serialist era was. I just find it ironic that Carter should have been moving voluntarily out of an uncongenial environment and into a congenial one (for him) at the same time and in the same direction that others were moving under social and professional compulsion away from their congeniality.
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Yes, that's an irony, indeed, though you will also find plenty of people who will dispute the supposed social and professional compulsion, which seems to have existed primarily at a smallish number of northeastern schools. See my friend Steve Hicken (listen101.blogspot.com) for other views.
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Greenberg can be very entertaining in small doses, but his mannerisms and over-egged explanatoriness gets on the nerves after a while. When SFP calls me up and tries to get me to subscribe to another one of these series, I just tell them that I've already had a lifetime dose of Robert Greenberg.
As for the hegemony, it wasn't universal - Alan Hovhaness didn't starve to death, after all, though he sure looked as if he was about to - but contrary to the disputants it was very widespread, and more to the point, where it did exist it was preached and enforced as compulsory. Testimonies, now that it's fallen back (it's still not entirely over), are multiple. And it was stronger still in Europe.
But we don't even need to get into those enforcement waters. All we need do to see the attitude is to look at the documented statements of Pierre Boulez. Nobody before him declared that a particular style was historically necessary. Nobody before him ever had to.
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Oh, jeez, yeah, Testimonies is not defensible at all at this time. I will take a look at your article. His mannerisms got me after the first couple of hours. I believe they are there for the tape audience more than the live audience. He is rehearsing for the recordings. I am also annoyed that he never left room for or welcomed questions during or after the lectures, for crying out loud.
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(And if you really want to see scorn, see what was written in the 1950s and 60s about Rachmaninoff and Korngold, who hadn't seen a dead end at all. A dismissive article on Rachmaninoff in Grove 5 says that as a composer he wasn't "of his time" at all, a truly meaningless criticism, but exactly what the Boulez circle would claim.)
Another thing about Schoenberg: he proselytized for his system, and why shouldn't he? If he had not thought well of it, he would hardly have employed it. But he didn't belittle or try to erase the significance of other composers, and that's the difference.
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