Elliott Carter, John Cage and The Emperor’s New Clothes

I freely admit that the title of this post is a bit edgy, if not downright inflammatory. Hopefully, though, it will prove a harmless attention-grabber and sufficiently relevant to what follows.

A Cruel Trick

Perhaps I shouldn’t be comfortable admitting that I was fooled recently by what I thought was an absolutely fascinating interview with the great American composer Elliott Carter. Several friends forwarded the following Associated Press article to me by e-mail. I read it and immediately forwarded it to someone I thought would also find it interesting. I’ll paste the article here below before commenting on it.

——————–

Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:53 pm From the Associated Press

NEW YORK - American composer Elliott Carter, an exemplar of the atonalist style of modernism and according to admirers the greatest living practitioner of his craft, apologized to music lovers around the world today for what he called “a half century of wasted time.”

“What was I thinking?” the venerable Mr. Carter, 99, said at his home in Manhattan. “Nobody likes this stuff. Why have I wasted my life?” Carter said he “went wrong” back in the 1940s and spent the next 60 years pursuing the musical dead-end of atonality. In the past seven decades, he has produced five string quartets, a half dozen song cycles, works for orchestra, solo concertos and innumerable chamber works for various combinations of instruments—all in an advanced, complex style he now dismisses as “noise.”

Despite consistent encouragement of many mainstream musicians such as Boston Symphony Music Director James Levine, for Chicago Symphony conductor Daniel Barenboim, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Carter said his many admirers were “delusional.”

“The critics who said they were just congratulating themselves for being smarter than everybody else were right all along,” he said. “We should all go back and get our heads on straight.” Carter said he blamed his late wife, Helen, for turning him into an unrepentant modernist. “She liked this stuff, and I could never say no to her,” he said. Mrs. Carter died in 2003 at age 95.

Since then, Carter said, he has been reevaluating his aesthetic. “I’d like to write something pretty for a change—maybe something based on an Irish folk tune,” he said. He was uncertain whether he would withdraw his substantial catalogue from the repertoire, though one alternative would be to revise his works, ending each with a tonic triad, he said.

“I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders,” Carter said. “From now on, I promise to be good.”

——————–

Call Me Gullible

I actually thought a major musical figure was renouncing his aesthetic agenda and that of an entire school of thought that permeated the last century of musical development. Of course, had I been more astute I would have dismissed the article right away—the April Fools date of the release should have been my first clue if nothing else. It wasn’t until after I had passed it along to someone else that I continued checking my e-mail and found a subsequent message from the one who sent it to me, saying that they too thought it was legitimate and only after forwarding it to me discovered that it was a joke. But is it shameless for me to ask: what if the article were true?

I have nothing but respect for Elliott Carter. First, the gentleman is more than thrice my age, is a musical giant and, I’m quite sure, many times over my superior in other ways as well. And the brilliance and sheer importance of his musical output who could deny? So, my curiosity in asking “what if?” is not, I trust, a matter of impropriety but rather honest curiosity. If not Mr. Carter, are there other figures at work in the field of classical music who, if they actually did make such a statement, could prompt performers, audiences and critics alike to re-evaluate their perception of music?

Anyone who would deny that musical development in the twentieth century did not at least flirt with scenarios akin to “The Emperor’s New Clothes” has, I think, a little too much confidence in the evolutionary process. Now, mind you this is coming from a life-long student of classical music, a composer and one with a keen interest in and appreciation for new music. And I am definitely not knocking atonal music, at least not as a whole, or saying that it was or is a mistake. (I recall enjoying Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra not too long ago and being impressed by the work’s lyricism and undeniably human expressiveness. I would say the same for the Berg Violin Concerto, by the way.) But, I do believe it is possible for our fascination with novelty and “progress” in music to throw the art form a little too far from its roots—and by that I mean most especially its visceral connectedness to some facet of the human experience or, as one composer recently explained to me as the basic impulse of his work, “what it means to be alive”.

An Interesting Conversation Piece

I recently came across the following video that features a piece of music written and performed by John Cage. Typical of the controversial composer’s work, the piece, Water Walk, raises some fascinating philosophical questions about how we understand and define music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U

John Cage Sure, it’s easy to cite a performance like this as an extreme example of musical trajectory gone awry. But believe it or not, I actually find it quite fascinating. How can one argue that what Cage calls music is not actually music? Because there is no discernible melody, harmony or rhythm? Or, more subjectively, it isn’t “moving” or “inspiring”? On an academic and purely cerebral level, what the composer is doing on the stage is easily argued to be just as musical as any work of Beethoven or Bach. And I actually do think there is some value in rehearsing the argument - to rethink how we assign meaning and to consider whether “music” is anything more than a set of value judgments that we attach to particular arrangements of sounds. And Cage’s piece, Water Walk, is not without aesthetic appeal. In keeping with the tenor of other Cage works, it gives listeners an opportunity to consider and enjoy the intrinsic musicality of that which we might otherwise perceive as ambient noise.

But as interesting as such considerations can be (and I mean that sincerely), they are decidedly not born of the same stuff that has inspired the known history and development of music. And no matter how our world may change in the 21st century, I doubt that this will change, at least not in any lasting or significant way.

Back to Carter

Making broad, sweeping statements about the direction of music history is at least a little uncomfortable for me, if not downright embarrassing—knowing that whatever part my own music may play will doubtless be inconsequential and deservedly forgotten. Nevertheless, it seems to me that classical music will thrive as a freshly-created art form only to the extent that it connects with its listeners primarily on an emotional, non-philosophical level, and the more immediately so the better.

So, what does all this have to do with the Elliott Carter article? Very little, I guess. Only, I wonder if the music of the next 100 years is due to undo much of the “progress” that took place in the last century. And would such a supposed turnaround from Mr. Carter or another living legend tip the scales toward what currently appears to be a modest retro-aesthetic in new music?

June 11, 2007 | Filed Under Videos, New Music

Comments

3 Responses to “Elliott Carter, John Cage and The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Joe B. on July 16th, 2007 1:58 pm

Hi, Chandler. Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I e-mailed them to some friends of mine, since they were interested in how this April Fool’s joke is playing out. — I am a great fan of Mr. Carter’s music, and, by the way, the author of this prank.

You seem unaware that some formerly atonal and serial composers, such as George Rochberg and Robert Starrer, did pretty much what you describe here — recant — and nothing much seems to have changed. Perhaps if Mr. Carter recanted, it would really mean something, since he seems genuinely impervious to fashion, or at least, he went through his fashionable phase back in the 1930s.(A composer whose name I forget was described on radio recently as having started out as an atonalist before moving on to minimalism and finally settling on post-modern neo-romaticism, and I thought, “Yeah, that’s the career track these days.”)
Chandler Branch on July 16th, 2007 10:47 pm

Thank you for stopping by, Joe, and thank you for your comments. I feel honored to have hosted the author of the Elliot Carter prank! From my encounter and experience with your article, I would guess that the ripples have traveled quite some distance. Congratulations, and thanks.

Indeed I was unaware of Rochberg’s and Starrer’s aesthetic direction changes. Truthfully, though, my familiarity with both artists extends no further than name recognition. I need to give some attention to exploring their music. In any case, the apparent lack of effect that their recanting had on the general direction of musical development in America leads me to wonder who/what is really behind the steering wheel, so to speak. Perhaps it’s a simplistic way of thinking about musical development, but I do wonder - is it consumers (audiences), critics, academics, performers? All of the above, I’m sure. Perhaps it’s not very practical after all to expect to find any dominant pervasive trends today in the wide industry of classical music, especially in the wake of 20th century experimentation and boundary-pushing that left a less linear trajectory than did earlier periods of musical development.
Joe B. on July 17th, 2007 12:12 pm

Chandler — Perhaps I misspoke earlier. I did not mean to imply that Rochberg and Starrer were slavishly obeying fashion in changing their aesthetic, since, in their own version of things, they were feeling pressure from their colleagues to compose in an atonal style and defied that pressure by moving over to what they described as a more audience-frendly approach. In their own way, they, along with the original minimalists, were showing the same kind of integrity that Mr. Carter has shown for the past 60 years. Of course, the pendulum swings both ways. Neo-romantic postmodernism seems to be the fashion these days, but a large part of the critical narrative of the movement is that it still takes courage to buck the atonal trend, even though Rochberg did it 40 years ago.

My gag caught on, it seems, because it appealed to much the same attitude. It allowed those who do not like Mr. Carter’s music — and who cannot concede that anyone does — to say, “See, I was right all along.”

I never expected it to go as far as it did, but it has been fun to watch.