Magna Carter. Every musical note has life in it. For six decades the composer Elliott Carter imagined that life precisely. From 1945 to the last day of his life this past November, the composer Elliott Carter lived in an apartment building on West Twelfth Street that likely went up around the time of his birth in 1908. Curious about music at an early age despite his family’s indifference, the young Carter attended the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue in 1924; a half-century later, he would compose, with his Symphony of Three Orchestras, a portrait of Manhattan as compelling as George Gershwin’s. Carter was immersed in the musical life of his native city for a century, yet he was never a member or a rival of any so-called New York School, nor was he drawn, except fleetingly, into entangling musical alliances. He found his musical voice only after he turned 40 and had moved to West Twelfth Street, when he finally figured out how to reconcile the influences of his two mentors.
About the Author David Schiff. Elliott Carter, Composer of the Avant-Garde, Dies at 103. His death was announced by Virgil Blackwell, his personal assistant. Mr. Carter died in his Greenwich Village apartment, which he and his wife bought in 1945 and where he had lived ever since. Mr. Carter’s music, which brought him dozens of awards, including two , could seem harmonically brash and melodically sharp-edged on the first hearing, but it often yielded drama and lyricism on better acquaintance. And though complexity and structural logic were hallmarks of his works, the music he composed in the decade leading up to his widely celebrated centenary, in 2008, was often more lyrical, if not necessarily softer at the edges. Mr. “As a young man, I harbored the populist idea of writing for the public,” he once explained to an interviewer who asked him why he had chosen to write such difficult music.
Mr. Long before he began enforcing that rule, however, many of Mr. Mr. As Mr. Despite his years, he remained vital almost until the end. “The applause for Mr. At Harvard, Mr. Mr. Mr. Mr. Elliott Carter, Giant Of American Music, Dies At 103 : Deceptive Cadence. Hide captionComposer Elliott Carter at the piano in 1989. Jacques M. Chenet/Corbis Composer Elliott Carter at the piano in 1989. Tom Cole's appreciation of Elliott Carter's life, which includes interviews with Carter and musicians Charles Rosen and Ursula Oppens, airs Tuesday on All Things Considered. To hear the segment, click the audio link. The dean of American modernist composers, Elliott Carter, died in New York City Monday. Carter's music, while often thorny and complex, was championed by many of the world's great orchestras and conductors. Carter's Cello Sonata, from 1948, was a bold breakthrough, written for cellist Bernard Greenhouse, who later co-founded the Beaux Arts Trio.
"The Cello Sonata was extremely modern at that time," Carter told NPR's Tom Cole in a 2008 interview, the year he celebrated his 100th birthday. The composer's longevity was remarkable, but what amazes more is Carter's continued productivity. Carter found inspiration in surprising places. A guide to Arvo Pärt's music. Arvo Pärt receiving the Leonie Sonning music prize during a concert with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in Copenhagen in 2008. Photograph: Kristian Juul Pedersen/AFP/Getty Images Arvo Pärt is one of those composers you might think you know: a reclusive, extravagantly bearded Estonian who's ensconced in a world of so-called "holy minimalism" – a reverie of simplicity that luxuriates in the pure sounds of "tintinnabulatory" tonality, which sounds a corrective (for some) and sentimental (for others) note of archaism in a world of chaotic modernity.
(Don't worry; I'll come back to the whole "tintinnabulation" thing.) Reading this on mobile? Click here to view The problem with Pärt is that his music has become, in a sense, a victim of its own success. Growing up in communist Estonia, Pärt found himself at odds with the regime on pretty well every aesthetic and spiritual level. But what happened next was something that the censors, and Pärt himself, could hardly have predicted.
Fratres. A guide to Helmut Lachenmann's music. Ok team, hold on to your hats: how's this for a start to the day, a concept to get your head and your ears around? "Musique concrète instrumentale". Boom. That's just one of the ideas that you need to hold on to when you're listening to the music of 76-year-old German composer Helmut Lachenmann. He's a senior figure of musical modernism, and a guru-like presence for generations of younger composers who want to follow in his essential, extreme, focused, critical, and explosive footsteps. Way to curdle a metaphor. But you must throw your preconceptions about musical conventions out the window, and be prepared to find and hear beauty where you may have thought none was possible – in the scrapes, scratches, and sighs that instruments and instrumentalists can produce as well as the actual notes they make.
If you've clicked through any of those links, you may need some help with the astonishment you may well be feeling just now. A guide to Oliver Knussen's music. Oliver Knussen's huge influence as conductor, teacher, programmer, artistic director, and catalyst for so much of the energy of the contemporary British musical scene can sometimes make you underestimate his real legacy: the music of crystalline concision, complexity, and richness. He has been composing since his teenage years, pieces whose distilled, essential quality is the hard-won prize of a ceaseless creative perfectionism and search for the fundamental rightness of the way one note follows another, one harmony flows into the next, how each detail of his scores relates to every other. Listen to the the first of the Two Organa, to the opening of the Horn Concerto, the unbounded effervescence of Flourish with Fireworks, and hear what I mean.
This is never music cast on a grand scale. Knussen is a physically big man, and a big personality too. Yet there has been a price that Knussen has had to pay to produce this brilliant, bejewelled music. A guide to Judith Weir's music. Judith Weir once composed an epic historical opera in three acts, dramatising a cast of thousands, including the Norwegian army, a piece that told the story of King Harald Hadradi's failed invasion of England in 1066.
It's a work that you'd have thought requires the armoury of a full-scale opera house to put on, with full-on Cecil B DeMille extravagance. But in fact, King Harald's Saga is written for solo soprano, who sings all the parts – obviously! – and the whole things lasts around 10 minutes. As Weir says, in writing the piece, "a certain amount of compression has been necessary". That's typical of Weir's personal and artistic understatement. Her career is framed by King Harald and Miss Fortune, the large-scale opera (ironically, based on a simple Sardinian folk tale rather than a major historical epic) she recently wrote for the Bregenz festival and which Covent Garden staged earlier this year. And her operas are the centrepieces of her musical life. . • Next week: Oliver Knussen. A guide to John Zorn's music. John Zorn. Finding any one label to define the man and his work is pretty well impossible, but that impossibility reveals just how important his music is.
You'll see what I mean. Perennially youthful – even though he's 60 next year – Zorn, who was born and lives in New York, is a Pulitzer-prize nominated composer of pieces for classical musicians, a saxophonist (he's one of the most thrillingly inventive improvising players out there), an impresario – founder of the Tzadik record label, he also runs a club – The Stone, for experimental and avant-garde music, and he has done more to support and sustain an entire generation of musicians in the downtown New York scene than anybody else.
Pause for breath, but there's much, much more. What looks on the surface like a bewildering array of forms and styles in his music is connected, Zorn says, by the way he deals with his material. Naked CityUnclassifiable band-based magic. Has the avant garde ever been more entertaining? A guide to Harrison Birtwistle's music. Harrison Birtwistle in his studio at home in Dorset. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe There's one simple way to approach Harrison Birtwistle's music, one crucial maxim I want to give you above all others: Don't Panic! I refer, naturally, to the notorious premiere of Birtwistle's Panic, for solo saxophone, drum kit and ensemble, which wowed, shocked, and flabbergasted the Last Night of the Proms audience in 1995; but what I mean is not that you shouldn't listen to Panic (it's one of the most dazzling and dynamic pieces written in the last 20 years) but that you should never, ever, approach Birtwistle with the cliched idea that he's some kind of scary, noise-making curmudgeon.
No: his music is a vital, essential, life force which you need to hear. Not convinced? Listen to the opening of his 1982 ensemble piece Secret Theatre, and be pinned to your seat with the music's unstoppable energy. Recovered? So where was the crucible of Birtwistle's creative imagination? But there was theatre, too. A guide to Pauline Oliveros's music. Nearly sixty years ago, Pauline Oliveros found her mantra.
"Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening". This simple but transformative thought has filled her life in music. Oliveros (born in 1932), then in her early 20s and living in San Francisco, turned a tape recorder on, and, listening back to the sounds she had preserved, heard things that she had not realised were happening in real time – and a philosophy of listening and sonic exploration was born. It's an approach to music that would lead to her Sonic Meditations and to Deep Listening, an album recorded in a disused cistern 14 feet beneath the earth in Washington State that changed composer Simon Holt's life when he heard it (a disc that's become an "underground hit", Oliveros told me – it's also spawned a plethora of puns).
Let's rewind a bit. But Oliveros's relationship with technology is philosophically ambivalent. . • Oliveros talks about the Deep Listening concept. A guide to Elliott Carter's music. If there are any composers writing more profoundly joyful, or youthful, music than the American Elliott Carter, I've yet to discover them. He's the closest any of us will probably ever experience to new music's Haydn. He's also, incidentally, 103: old enough to have become his own style, his own musical world. Carter's recent music – and there's a truly astonishing amount that he's written since his 80th, and even his 90th, birthdays – is witty and acerbic, energising and lyrical, but he owes this explosion of creativity to hard decades of compositional labour in the 1950s and 60s, when he refined a language of teeming, vitalising, mind-bending complexity.
Carter still lives in the downtown New York apartment where he has watched the city where he was born grow, develop, and teem beneath him since the second world war. It was in the desert of Arizona in 1950-51 that Carter made his breakthrough discoveries in musical time and space. Next week: Pauline Oliveros. A guide to Brian Ferneyhough's music. Here's a question. What is complexity in music? Is there any music more complex than, say, the six-part Ricercar, with its six independent but symbiotically related strata of ever-changing musical information, from Bach's Musical Offering? Has anyone in the 20th or 21st century come close to demanding as much from his or her listeners and performers than JS Bach did in that piece, or any of his innumerable fugues?
Or what about Beethoven's late quartets? Aren't they the acme of musical complexity, in the sense of a rich stream of musical meanings and unpredictabilities, for the players just as much as the audience? The reason I ask is 69-year-old Coventry-born composer Brian Ferneyhough. Firstly, the pianist has to play a group of 11 hemi-demi-semiquavers in the time of seven in the basic tempo of quaver = around 50, followed by a single hemi-demi-semiquaver rest and then a semiquaver rest. So what does this kind of notational complexity mean? Reading this on mobile? Terrain.
Debussy. Cage. Satie. Stockhausen.