Articles
Elliott Carter String Quartets
The ]uilliard Quartet and Elliott Carter
CARTER: String Quartets Nos.1-4; Duo.' Juilliard String Quartet; 'Robert Mann (vln), Christopher
Oldfather (pno). Sony S2K 47229 (2-CD Set).
The Juilliard Quartet chose to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of their founding with a concert, which I attended, on 11 October in the Theater of the Juilliard School, featuring the four
string quartets of Elliott Carter. Their extraordinary performance was coordinated with the release of their new recording of the quartets on Sony. The choice of program was no accident. The Juilliard have dedicated much of their time and energy to championing the music of our time, from the Quartets of Bartok, Schoenberg, and Webern (very new music years ago) to, more recently , the music of such composers as Carter, Babbitt, Martino, Dutilleux and Harbison. Just as the Quartet's continual occupation with the standard literature has enabled them to trace the continuity between present composers and past masters, so has their immersion in new music given them special insights into the classics of their repertory, enabling them to find the radical and daring in Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart. The range of their repertory is dazzling and their mastery of the entire string quartet literature complete. The Juilliard has simply set the standards for string quartet playing, and continues to do so. At the same time--following the example of their mentor Eugene Lehner, the
violist of the Kolisch Quartet - they have guided the development of practically every young American string quartet over the course of their existence, including the Tokyo, the Emerson, the
Concord, the LaSalle, and the Shanghai.
The Juilliard Quartet has maintained, throughout its existence, an especially close association with the works of Elliott Carter. They gave the first performances of the Second and Third quartets, and have played all four of the works on numerous occasions. Their new recording is the crowning result of this relationship.
Carter's string quartets are among the most important works of 20th century music, but they are especially important to American composers. If Ives, along with Ruggles, Crawford, and Cowell, declared our musical independence, and Copland, Thomson, and Sessions gave us our constitution, then Carter, along with Babbitt, Berger, and Cage, gave us a new world order (although that term, trivialized by politicians at the moment, might seem to lessen the importance of the accomplishment of these masters). This 'new world order' consisted in the assurance that Americans no longer had to worry either to embrace or to eschew the colloquial: the American vernacular musical 'language' was as capable of elevated abstract musical discourse as any other. Perhaps the most ringing - and, for us, thrilling--proclamation of this fact is Elliott Carter's First Quartet. To any American composer
born since it was written, the First Quartet has loomed large, a work to be studied, learned, contemplated, discussed, loved, or hated, but inescapable. It revealed in its ample, visionary, thoroughly argued discourse new realms of possibilities. One listens to the piece with a dizzy, wild surmise, as though watching the whole universe opening up before one's eyes. Each of the succeeding quartets, the Second with its terse and intense drama, the Third with its passionate complexity and curious static quality, the Fourth with its braiding together of many elements of the preceding three, is a further adventurous exploration of the universe originally charted by the First. Each is complete in itself, yet each is clearly a development of some idea initially stated in the First.
The composition of the First Quartet was a turning point in Carter's career. In order to consider fully processes and ideas of musical continuity which had occurred to him during the composition of prior works (most especially the Piano and 'Cello Sonatas), but which he feared to be too difficult for players and audiences, Carter left his life in New York and spent a year in Arizona working on his quartet. His commitment to pursuing his thoughts included a determination to write a work which would seem to him completely musically satisfying, regardless of its difficulty. The quartet is perhaps primarily concerned with time - 'clock' time versus 'psychological' time. The work opens with a cello solo whose material is not heard again until the end of the work, a frame suggesting that the whole experience of the work has occurred in a split second of 'real' time. Although laid out in a more or less traditional four movement format, the 'between-the-movements' breaks happen in
the middle of movements, toward the end of the second movement and shortly after the beginning
of the fourth. Even the breaks have been composed into the structure, both affecting the psychology of the work's continuity and outlining, on the largest level, its consistent preoccupation with 4:3 polyrhythms. The texture of the piece consists of a super-polyphony of tempi as well as of melodic lines, creating a stream of ideas, each moving in its own time, combining and overlapping in ways that suggest dramatic structure.
The concern with the dramatic 'scenario' of a work is the element to which Carter returned eight years later when he composed the Second Quartet. Each instrument is conceived of as a character in a drama, articulated musically by means of assigning to each not only a consistent expressive style which might be considered a 'personality trait', but its own repertory of
intervals and rhythmic gestures as well. The four characters interact during the course of the work
in three manners, described by Carter as 'discipleship', 'companionship', or 'confrontation'. The interaction of the musical personalities of the four instruments is the subject of the quartet, and the form of the work is the articulation of its subject.
The slow movement of the First Quartet, which divided the string quartet into duos whose character differences 'form the extreme point of divergence between simultaneous ideas', predicted the Third Quartet, which throughout its entire duration divides the quartet into two simultaneous duos. One of the duos plays six movements characterized by a stricter, tempo giusto style, while the other duo plays four movements in a freer, tempo rubato manner, each movement being characterized by a unique 'behavior pattern ' of interval, speed, phrasing, and rhythmic procedure. During the course of the quartet, each of the six movements of the first duo is combined with each of the four movements of the second.
The Fourth Quartet returns to a continuous four-movement scheme, and in many respects most resembles the First. However, while each of the first three quartets presents a scenario concerned with individualization and opposition, the Fourth is concerned with cooperation, 'mirroring the democratic attitude in which each member of society maintains his or her own identity while cooperating in a common effort'. In the Fourth, processes which in the earlier quartets might be the province of one instrument, are shared by all. The height of the sharing, in the last movement, is also the occasion of an increased harmonic motion, breaking the harmonic stasis with which the second and third movements have struggled.
The recording of the Quartets also includes a vivid and noble performance of the Duo for violin and piano by Robert Mann, the Juilliard's first violinist and founder, and Christopher Oldfather. Written three years after the Third Quartet, the duo dramatizes the differences in the methods of producing sounds on the two instruments, and melds the two very different personalities of the instruments into a happy marriage. For the recordings, made under Carter's supervision, the placement of the microphones was different for each work. The quartets are very difficult pieces, and one is not unaware of struggle and effort in the recordings. Page turning and foot-tapping are not always silent, but the performances are masterful and magisterial. The opportunity to hear them repeatedly is a blessing for which one can be grateful, and it will in some ways make up for the loss to anyone unable to hear the Juilliard's breathtaking traversal of all four quartets in concert.
--Rodney Lister
Used by permission of Tempo