The Carter Vogue

"You don't throw a string-quartet program like this at an average audience," said Violinist Matthew Raimondi last week. That remark out of the way, Raimondi and the other members of the Composers String Quartet went out onto a stage at Columbia University and performed the three best and most difficult string quartets written since the time of Bela Bartok. They are by Composer Elliott Carter, and the trio of works have a collective age of 44 years. Yet no group had ever played all or even two of them at one sitting; scheduling even one is a calculated risk. The recital was a sellout. So was the second, held two days later to meet the demand for tickets. It appears that the string-quartet audience in the U.S. is not only larger than ever before but a great deal more mature.

For an average string quartet, the biggest problem in playing Carter can be just staying together. In String Quartet No. 2, the instruments are given music of a dramatically contrasting character: the first violin spins fantastic note flourishes, for example, while the viola sobs a lot. In Quartet No. 3, the first violin and cello are allowed expressive rubato; the second violin and viola are not. Says Michael Rudiakov, cellist of the marvelously together Composers String Quartet: "When you play this music, you jump and hope the parachute opens."

Last week, while the Composers Quartet was performing in New York City, Conductor Seiji Ozawa and the San Francisco Symphony were playing Carter's granitic Concerto for Orchestra (1969) in the War Memorial Opera House. In March, Pierre Boulez will preside over the world premiere of a new Duo for Violin and Piano at a New York Philharmonic Prospective Encounters concert. At 66, Carter would seem to be in danger of becoming that rare thing in contemporary music, a composer in vogue.

His Own Man. Not that anyone would ever guess that from watching Carter in action. He is a shy man with a quizzical manner. He looks uncomfortable even in a jacket. When he does take the stage--say, to deliver a few explanatory words about his music, as he did last week at the Composers Quartet recital--he tends to flap his hands and remain winningly untheatrical.

That is a reflection, perhaps, of a most conventional but lucky childhood. His father was a successful Manhattan lace importer who took the boy along on business trips to Europe. Carter foraged music shops in Vienna and Paris for Schoenberg and Stravinsky scores. Then came Harvard, where, save for Walter Piston and the visiting Gustav Hoist, "the teachers didn't like and didn't really understand one single thing about contemporary music."

In the years since, Carter has composed at an unpressured pace made possible partly by a small inheritance from his father. He lives with his wife Helen in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and does some teaching at Juilliard and Cornell. He has a studio with a piano, but of late has been more comfortable composing elsewhere--"away from the telephone, away from the requests I get 50 times a year from worthy institutions asking my advice on whether to give $20,000 to somebody else."

After the death of Stravinsky in 1971, Carter emerged as the most important composer in the U.S. To the uninitiated, his recent orchestral and chamber works can sometimes sound like the serial music of Arnold Schoenberg spun out to infinity by a modern-day sorcerer's apprentice. To those who listen hard and well, they constitute some of the most profoundly evolutionary, if not downright revolutionary, music of our time. It is somber, dark music that is not primarily intended to provide instant pleasure. Composing thus, Carter is a true child of the age of anxiety, but in matters of compositional style he is essentially fatherless. No one teacher, composer or school of thought can be said to have created him. The higher mathematics of his music represents his own laboriously worked out solutions to the challenges of modern theory. In effect, he creates a new language each time, then writes the piece. Of Carter's independence Violinist Raimondi says: "He has not spent his time getting on and off buses because they were going in the right direction."

Metric Modulation. Carter is most famous, perhaps, for developing what has come to be known as metric modulation. This is a means of precise note writing that, for example, enables some players in an ensemble to speed up, others to slow down, and still allows all to end up together.

Metric modulation can bring about astonishing departures in sonic texture and rhythm.

That is not the only kind of organizing device to be found in Carter's music. His Piano Concerto is built out of all the different three-note chords (triads) that exist within the octave. String Quartet No. 3 is based on four-note chords, the Concerto for Orchestra on five-and seven-note chords. This music no more has a conventional beginning and ending or progression in time toward a Brahmsian climax than a de Kooning has an east or west.

Carter is stringent in his music. But on the inequities of the musical life he is capable of arias and cadenzas. "Do you know how much I received in royalties the first year from the LP of Concerto for Orchestra? I'll tell you how much--$50. I get paid $3,000 to write a piece of music. My publisher has to spend $10,000 to get the thing ready for publication. When it comes out, I find that it has hundreds of errors in it. I send him an errata.

What happens? He loses it.

"Georg Solti is playing my Variations for Orchestra with the Chicago Symphony. He decides to invite me, all expenses paid, to attend the concert. When does the telegram arrive? On the day of the concert. He is in Chicago; I am in New York, with classes to teach. What can you do?"

Pondering all this, Carter can be forgiven for crying out, "Look, all I want to do is write my pieces, and to hell with the rest of it." With pop palliating the present and Muzak prophesying the future, Carter is understandably concerned about the dangerous gulf between serious music and the general audience. It helps, of course, that he has more fame than most, but essentially he has no choice. "It's a very simple thing. I was trained to be a composer. It gives my life some sense."

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