RIP Elliott Carter

When a composer leaves us at the age of 103, continuing to work until a few months before his death (his last composition dates back to 2012), after having composed for more than 80 years (the first commonly remembered piece, a lieder, is from 1928 and is certainly not the first), there is no reason to be sad. I'm sure almost all of us would sign off on it.

Elliott Carter (1908–2012) was the last of the great Cs of 20th-century American music, the others being Aaron Copland (1900–1990), Henry Cowell (1897–1965), and John Cage (1912–1992), contemporaries and all very important in the panorama of 20th-century music.

Carter, throughout his long career, was capable of renewing himself. After an initial neoclassical phase, influenced by Stravinsky, Harris, Copland, and Hindemith, he turned to atonality in the 1950s, though without ever embracing serialism. Instead, he independently developed a compositional technique based on cataloging all possible groups of pitches—that is, 3-note, 4-note, 5-note, 6-note chords, etc.—and then based his compositions on these sets. For example, the 1964-65 Piano Concerto derives its pitches from the set of 3-note chords, the 1971 Quartet is built on 4-note chords, the Symphony of Three Orchestras, which we hear here, is based on 6-note chords, and so on. Typically, each instrumental section is assigned a set of pitches in a layering of the material.

In Carter, the concept of layering also informs the management of rhythm: each instrumental part has its own set of tempos, thus creating a structural polyrhythm.

The title of this 1976 piece, Symphony of Three Orchestras and not for Three Orchestras, derives precisely from the fact that, although the piece is divided into four movements of different character, as is traditional, each movement is made up of three partially overlapping movements, one for each orchestra.

Furthermore, the instrumental composition of the three orchestras is highly differentiated: in practice, it is a single orchestra divided into three groups. The first is made up of brass, strings, and timpani; the second of clarinets, piano, vibraphone, chimes, marimba, first violins, double basses, and cellos; the third for flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, second violins, violas, double basses, and unpitched percussion.

Boulez conducts the New York Philharmonic.

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