100 and kicking

In addition to Messiaen's, there's a second centenary this year: that of the birth of the American composer Elliott Carter (1908).

And what I wrote isn't a mistake: the death date is missing because Carter is still alive and plans to celebrate his centenary in style on December 11th.
I say in style because not only is he alive, but he's perfectly himself and still composing: in 2007, for example, he wrote eight pieces, including one for piano and orchestra. (Interventions), a quintet with clarinet, one piece for choir, and the others for solo instrument.

Carter's style, in his youth, was defined as neoclassical or "melodic lyricism" as it was influenced by Stravinsky and Hindemith, but it then veered decisively toward atonal music starting in the 1950s, arriving at a style of writing that was at times very complex, so much so that the term "metric modulation" was coined for him. to describe the frequent tempo changes in his works.

Nevertheless, he always maintained a certain amount of expressiveness and drama:

I regard my scores as scenarios, auditory scenarios, for performers to act out with their instruments, dramatizing the players as individuals and participants in the ensemble.

His personal compositional system (often aimed at deriving all the pitches of a piece from a single chord, or a series of chords) does not prevent Carter from moving in decidedly lyrical fields, nor from guaranteeing perfect intelligibility of the sung text, sometimes even in a decidedly "simple" manner. Moreover, despite his usual compositional rigor, Carter occasionally chooses to "deviate," to create exceptions to his own system.

Elliott Carter – Night Fantasies (1980) for solo piano
Ursula Oppens, piano

Night Fantasies is a piano piece of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night. The quiet, nocturnal evocation with which it begins and returns occasionally, is suddenly broken by a flight series of short phrases that emerge and disappear. This episode is followed by many others of contrasting characters and lengths that sometimes break in abruptly and, at other times, develop smoothly out of what has gone before. The work culminates in a loud, obsessive, periodic repetition of an emphatic chord that, as it dies away, brings the work to its conclusion.

In this score, I wanted to capture the fanciful, changeable quality of our inner life at a time when it is not dominated by strong directive intentions or desires — to capture the poetic moodiness that, in an earlier romantic context, I enjoy in works of Robert Schumann like Kreisleriana, Carnaval, and Davids-bündlertänze.

I have to say that I like this piano piece, but I'm not particularly fond of pieces in which the neoclassical vein predominates.
Interested readers can also find a long interview printed here, as well as a radio program and other excerpts of his music, including the second quartet at the Internet Archive.

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