Elliot Carter

3 Pages 825 Words

Elliot Carter
Composer Elliott Carter was born on December 11 1908, but his age might mislead people about his placement in the history of music. This can be seen in a quote by another famous composer Pierre Boulez, twenty years younger than Carter, "He does not belong in the generation into which he was born; he really belongs to my generation." He has come into musical prominence along with men a generation younger than he is, he is most easily considered critically along with the group of composers all European, like Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio.
Born in New York in 1908, Carter spent his childhood in comfortable circumstances. He finished his education at Harvard, majoring in literature, and then went to Paris like so many other American composers to study with Nadia Boulanger. Perhaps equally important for his future development was a trip to Vienna at the age of seventeen, when he acquired the scores of the new Viennese school, including the earliest serial works of Schoenberg. Even more significant was meeting Charles Ives a year before, whom he admired and continued to see often, and who encouraged his ambitions at composition.
Carter never succumbed totally to the influence of Ives, and he was never even briefly to try serial composition. Eventually he also cast aside the influence of Stravinsky and the neoclassical school transmitted in Paris by Boulanger. With it, he cast aside the exploitation of folk material that one finds in Aaron Copland and other American followers of the Paris school. Folk material had only appeared halfheartedly in Carter's early works, which are interesting above all for their characteristic and complex rhythmic energy.
The years from 1935 to 1950 were difficult ones for Carter. Wide recognition came only in 1951, when he was forty-three, with the first String Quartet. Before this, however, his individuality had been revealed in the Piano Sonata of 1946 and the Sonata for Cello and Piano o...