Composer for Professional!

"It's not an easy quartet to listen to,"

said the festival director. "But the Ojai audience has suffered a great deal in the past. They're used to it."

Difficult though it may be, the quartet that the long-suffering Ojai (Calif.) Festival audience heard last week has proved to be one of the most successful of modernist chamber works. At last week's UNESCO-sponsored International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, it was voted the outstanding musical work of the season. Winner of Pulitzer Prize and of the 1961 New York Music Critics Circle award, it has been recorded (by RCA Victor) and in the single year since its premiere, it has been played at most of the major European festivals. In various program notes around the world, it is known as Quatuor `a Cordes No. 2, or Streichquartess Nr. 2, or simply String Quartet No. 2, by New York's Elliott Cook Carter.

To Ojai's festival director, Composer Lukas Foss,the Second String Quartet is not only "not easy" but also "rather astonishing--an opinion shared by most people who have heard it. The astonishment derives in part from the fact that Modernist Composer Carter treats his four instruments as individuals with "individual behavior patterns." The first violin is fantastic, ornate and mercurial," while he second violin is "laconic and orderly " the viola merely "expressive." and the cello "somewhat impetuous "

Only Fourness. Instead of developing in traditional patterns, the work grows out of the "interactions, combinations, cooperations and oppositions" of Carter's four egocentric instruments, any one of which may clamor for attention over the voices of the others. Although the four begin to "cooperate and exchange ideas" as the work progresses, Carter was so intent on emphasizing their individual identity that he instructed the performers to sit in four separate corners of the stage. (The Lenox String Quartet, which played he work at Ojai last week, refused, said the arrangement would upset their coordination, but the Juilliard String Quartet has obliged to the extent of opining up an 8-ft. gap between players.)

Chances are, as an Italian observer pointed out, results would be the same whether the players were "together or far apart, sitting, standing or on horseback." Whatever the spacing, the quartet is a fascinating work. After the section narked Andante esspressivo, the first violin sours and dips in solo flight until, at last, inspiration fails and it falls silent for six dramatic seconds. By quartet's end, the instruments are communicating sufficiently so that phrases begun on one can be finished on another. Is there a? Explained one Carter admirer: "Only the 'fourness' of a string quartet." Only Difficult. At 52, Carter is firmly convinced that "the responsibility of a composer is not to the general public; he has to interest the professionals, and the professionals have to interest the world." Carter himself has interested the professionals by the strength and originality of his music, and by the fact that he has never been content to stay still. Early and middle Carter works--The Minotaur, The Defense of Corinth, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy--are as different from the Second String Quartet (except in their characteristic dissonance and complex rhythms) as they are from what went before them. And Carter will not be rushed. "I have written a very small amount of music," says he, "all of it difficult to play."

Son of a well-to-do Manhattan lace importer, Carter majored in English at Harvard, turned to the serious study of music in his senior year against his family's wishes. He worked with Walter Piston at Harvard, later with Nadia Boulanger in Pans, has been able to compose ever since thanks to a small inherited income and occasional teaching jobs (he has seldom made more than $750 a year from royalties on his compositions). He is now on the faculty at Yale but spends most of his time at his Westchester home on a lake near the former home of P T Barnum. (One neighborhood pastime: skin-diving for the dead elephants Barnum is said to have dumped in the lake.)

Never a "school" musician, Composer Carter believes that his own music makes he twelve-toners "look old-fashioned," that electronic music may be on the way out. Nor is he tempted, as are many of his contemporaries, by the possibilities of

improvisation: "It does the opposite of what it's supposed to do--it destroys spontaneity. It is a way of inventing a routine, and it is done by a performer who is not a composer. In jazz, there is the further problem that the basic material is extremely routine." But for all that, he would be living in no other musical age. "Contemporary music," says Elliott Carter flatly, "is the most interesting music ever written."

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