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Elliott Carter and The Modern Meaning of Time
Elliott Carter and The Modern Meaning of Time
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to The Musical Quarterly
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The Twentieth Century
Elliott Carter
Jonathan W. Bernard
Ask a musician well versed in the music of the later twentieth century
what Elliott Carter is best known for-besides writing long, compli-
cated pieces that demand a lot from performer and listener-and one
might elicit the response: for his way with musical time. From the
level of intricate rhythmic detail to large-scale formal proportions;
from drastic changes in speed, density, and register that occur in the
blink of an eye to shifts so gradual and subtle that one sometimes
becomes aware that they are happening only when they are almost
over; from the monophony of his shorter solo works to complex
polyphonies of simultaneity with three, four, or more radically differ-
entiated things going on at once, all clearly perceivable-Carter has
demonstrated an ability to control the ebb and flow of time in his
music that is often breathtaking, even uncanny. Even more than his
harmonic practice, it is his temporal practice that seems to be the true
seat of his originality.
It wasn't always so. Well into his thirties, Carter favored a
patently conservative style of composition-pleasant enough, but
somewhat derivative and limited in the range of invention it permit-
ted in either the harmonic or the temporal domain. He seemed to be
treading the increasingly well-worn path, in the company of such
contemporaries as Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and
David Diamond, of the American neoclassical "school"--so many
members of which, including Carter, had studied with Nadia Bou-
langer. Perhaps not even Carter himself knew at the time that he was
following this path without sharing his peers' conviction that it was
leading in the right direction. But about 1944, as he has recollected,
something changed: "I suddenly realized that, at least in my own edu-
cation, people had always been consciously concerned only with this
or that peculiar local rhythmic combination or sound-texture or novel
harmony and had forgotten that the really interesting thing about
music is the time of it-the way it all goes along."r In retrospect, it is
644
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 645
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646 The Musical Quarterly
into the true role of time in music had a long gestation, and that its
origins actually owed more to his general humanist education than to
his specifically musical training.
This is not so strange a circumstance as it may at first seem, for
Carter grew up in the age of modernism, at a time when many in the
arts, yearning for escape from what had begun to seem arbitrary limits,
were appropriating ideas that had originated somewhere other than in
the art that they practiced: poetry borrowed from painting, painting
from music, film from literature, and vice versa, and so on. What is
customarily called modernism in music criticism has never had any-
thing necessarily to do with such practices, but the question of
whether Carter's conception of time in the modern sense in particular
can be considered an indicator of his allegiance to modernist ideals in
general is very much bound up with them. Toward this end, it is
worth charting a course through some of the ideas about time that
Carter encountered as a young man through his exposure to the arts
other than music--ideas to which he has often alluded in articles,
lectures, and interviews without fleshing them out in detail, as if to
leave them to others to discover and explain. For the sake of keeping
the presentation as clear as possible--even while lending a certain
artificial quality to the exercise--these ideas are separated into three
categories, corresponding to the arts of literature (including philoso-
phy), dance, and film, and are treated in that order, which at least
does bear some correspondence to the chronology of Carter's own
development.
At about the same point as his signal "realization," Carter also came
across certain writings about time in music, which he has briefly sum-
marized in his essay "Music and the Time Screen" and in his unpub-
lished "Time Lecture" (1965).3 For him, they served as examples of
abstract thinking on the subject that might conceivably have some
relevance to practical matters of composition. For us they serve as a
useful point d'appui that will lead us back to earlier influences on Car-
ter's notions of the meaning of time in general.
The first of these writings is an essay by Charles Koechlin, "Le
temps et la musique" (1926), in which the author identifies four kinds
of time:
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648 The Musical Quarterly
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650 The Musical Quarterly
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 651
quarter. The final volumes, the last of which was published in 1927,
were still coming out when Carter discovered it. As for Ulysses, it was
of course banned in the United States until 1933 and was first pub-
lished in Paris in 1922; Carter first read it sometime during the follow-
ing few years. 16 Both of these massive works treat the whole matter of
time in ways that most readers of that era were probably unprepared
for but which eventually helped change literature completely.
The standard English translation of Proust's title actually con-
ceals its real significance; a more literal rendering would be "In Search
of Lost Time." Such a search is largely the work of memory, and the
time of memory is undeniably private, in the Bergsonian sense-which
means, of course, that it is also multiple. As Stephen Kern has
explained, the novel
takes place in a clearly identifiable public time from the Dreyfus affair
to World War I. But the private time of its narrator, Marcel, moves at
an irregular pace that is repeatedly out of phase with that of the other
characters and defies reckoning by any standard system. Marcel reflected
that his body kept its own time while he slept, "not on a dial superfi-
cially marked but by the steadily growing weight of all my replenished
forces which, like a powerful clockwork, it had allowed, notch by
notch, to descend from my brain into the rest of my body." In the
search for lost time, mechanical timepieces will be utterly useless as
Proust learns to listen for the faint stirrings of memories implanted in
his body long ago. 17
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652 The Musical Quarterly
insists "that music does not follow or obey established patterns but
creates a direction and a scale of happenings that is all its own. That
new time embodied in sound may then assert its hold over a portion
of our experience."19 It is in fact at this juncture where Proust parts
company with Bergson. Unlike Bergson, who viewed time as "indivisi-
ble flux" in which "we experience a continuous gnawing of the past
into the present," Proust "valued the shock and pleasure of being
suddenly immersed in time which has been experienced
discontinuously"--like steep cataracts, in other words, instead of a
steady stream. 20
In Ulysses, such discontinuities are made even more apparent by
their explicit relation to public time. As is well known, the events of
the novel all take place within a twenty-four-hour span beginning at 8
A.M. on 16 June 1904 and ending at some indefinite hour after mid-
night (but before dawn of the following day). The characters, and
therefore the readers too, are continually being reminded of what time
it is by the ringing of church bells, by tasks to be carried out at partic-
ular hours, by the fixed routine of daily life as it unfolds in the streets
of Dublin. By contrast, each character's internal, private time is differ-
ent: the device of the direct interior monologue, famously exploited
in this novel, provides access to each "complex and special" world
of the mind, which Edmund Wilson has compared to that of a sym-
bolist poet: "we are confronted with the same sort of confusion
between emotions, perceptions and reasonings, and we are likely to
be disconcerted by the same sort of hiatuses of thought, when certain
links in the association of ideas are dropped down into the uncon-
scious mind, so that we are obliged to divine them for ourselves."21 In
these monologues, past is linked with future in a "temporally thick-
ened" present.22 For instance, Molly Bloom's thoughts, as she fades to
sleep in the remarkable "soliloquy" that closes Ulysses, range all over
the temporal spectrum; "her memory," as Stephen Kern explains, "is
not a faculty for bringing fixed ideas out of the past" but "one that
enables her to transform them repeatedly in the endless creativity of
her present consciousness, where all is fluid without separate thoughts
or isolated moments of time."23
The heterogeneity of time is promoted in other ways as well.
First, the rhythm of each character's thoughts is different: Stephen
Dedalus's, for example, "a weaving of bright poetic images and frag-
mentary abstractions, of things remembered from books, on a rhythm
sober, melancholy and proud"; that of Leopold Bloom "a rapid stac-
cato notation, prosaic but vivid and alert, jetting out in all directions
in little ideas growing out of ideas."24 Second, the rhythm of each
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 653
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Table 1. Episodes of Ulysses. From Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's "Ulysses," 41.
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 655
same function as does the viceregal cavalcade that ends the "Wander-
ing Rocks" episode, seen by nearly all the characters mentioned in the
first eighteen scenes or fragments as it progresses through the streets of
Dublin and thus in a sense coordinating them along one "vertical."30
In an interview, Carter responded to a request to characterize his
contrapuntal thinking in terms of his "feelings about time-continuity
and musical form" in the following way:
while it's obvious that the constant and over-all phenomenon of music
is one in which every "moment" is in the process of coming from some
previous moment and leading to some future moment-only thus con-
tributing to what is happening in the present--it seems to me that this
process can have a number of simultaneous dimensions such that, for
example, the moment, as it occurs, may consist of a number of simulta-
neously evolving event patterns or sub-continuities of more or less radi-
cally different musical character, which interreact with each other to
produce a "total" continuity and character-effect (which, as the dialec-
tical synthesis of the contributing sub-continuities and characters, is
irreducible to any one of these or to any "sum" of their qualities). It
seems to me that this is very much the way we think all the time and
that the feeling of experience is always the synthesis of our awareness of
half-a-dozen simultaneous different feelings and perceptions all interre-
acting together, with now one and now another coming into the main
focus while the others continue, more or less in the background, to
influence it and give it the intellectual and affective meaning it has.31
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656 The Musical Quarterly
Whatever Carter had seen of the world of ballet up until the 1930s
could only have been sporadic, confined to performances by touring
companies from abroad, since America at that time had no school and
company of its own. The Ballets 1933 and other productions of
George Balanchine which Carter attended while in Paris during his
three years of study (1932-35) with Boulanger thus represented his
first substantial encounter with the art of dance, and they made a
huge impression on him. This in itself, of course, is not particularly
surprising; many musicians are strongly affected by and drawn to
dance. Like music, it is a performing art in a nonverbal medium; fur-
thermore, it is inseparably allied with music in its realization. What is
striking is that Carter found some of the same things in Balanchine's
work that had seized his interest in philosophy and literature.
Balanchine was generally recognized almost from the first-even
before he struck out on his own after Diaghilev's death in 1929--as a
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658 The Musical Quarterly
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660 The Musical Quarterly
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 661
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662 The Musical Quarterly
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Description
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664 The Musical Quarterly
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 665
Variation 7
1Andante A = 72
in F
Hn
TI. I - ' -
1 1P
Vn 1C
Vcc~
arco (aors
Vn. l
tut, ns(co fma.- "
tullf(aoro
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Thr 1i tranqutlo~
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Tuba
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Example 1. Elliott Carter, Variations for Orchestra (1955): excerpt from variation 7. V
for Orchestra by Elliott Carter. Copyright @ 1958 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publi
(BMI) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
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666 The Musical Quarterly
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 667
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668 The Musical Quarterly
each movement deals with one segment of the whole musical repertory
of the work, associating various expressive characters with each seg-
ment. One type of progression, then, consists of statements gradually
coming into focus, being picked out of the background, characterized,
and fading away as the "camera-eye" turns to another portion of the
material. In a way, all the material is being sounded in vestigial form
almost all the time in the background. The idea that there is always a
large world going on from which items are picked out, brought into
focus, and allowed to drop back, is one of the fundamental conceptions
of the piece.84
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 669
the outset; the harpsichord and its complement make occasional brief
inroads (such as at mm. 166-68; see Ex. 2) that lead to some more
substantial incursions (mm. 186-91) but, with their slower music,
have little overall effect on the dominating rapidity. As the move-
ment goes on, the two groups show a tendency to move out of their
more or less mutually exclusive "montage pieces" into overlap and
even briefly sustained simultaneity, although no true merging ever
takes place.
The second excerpt from Potemkin follows directly upon the first;
it is the famous "Odessa Steps" sequence, which Eisenstein has identi-
fied and discussed in detail as an example of rhythmic montage:
the rhythmic drum of the soldiers' feet as they descend the steps vio-
lates all metrical demands. Unsynchronized with the beat of the cutting,
this drumming comes in off-beat each time, and the shot itself is
entirely different in its solution with each of these appearances. The
final pull of tension is supplied by the transfer from the rhythm of
the descending feet to another rhythm--a new kind of downward
movement--the next intensity level of the same activity--the baby-
carriage rolling down the steps. The carriage functions as a directly
progressing accelerator of the advancing feet. The stepping descent
passes into a rolling descent.85
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670 The Musical Quarterly
F'.
Tpt.
Tbn,
Prc. I 1
Parc. 2
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PP
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 671
BUs~ J.
pp
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(can sord)
Tp?
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cb.
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Example 2. cont
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672 The Musical Quarterly
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 673
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674 The Musical Quarterly
455
Oh I1 9espr.
InBk
e1~ -J---
In C
Ibn
~ ben marc.
(B T
ST
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qfmarc. esiw
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 675
ob 3 - 7
Ob~ "'mare IImare. jj c-
'VI L~j
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Example 3. continued
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676 The Musical Quarterly
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 677
Notes
This essay was written during a period of sabbatical leave (1994-95) from the Univer-
sity of Washington, whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
1. Allen Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott
Carter (New York: Norton, 1971), 90.
2. Edwards, 90-91.
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678 The Musical Quarterly
3. Elliott Carter, "Music and the Time Screen" (1976), in The Writings of Elliott
Carter, ed. Else Stone and Kurt Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977),
343-65. The "Time Lecture" and other unpublished texts by Carter referred to in this
article are housed in the Elliott Carter Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation in
Basel and will be included in Jonathan W. Bernard, ed., Elliott Carter: Collected
Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995 (Rochester, N.Y.: Rochester University Press, forth-
coming 1996).
4. Charles Koechlin, "Le temps et la musique," Revue Musicale 7, no. 3 (Jan. 1926):
45-62; quoted in Carter, "Music and the Time Screen," 344-45. The quotation
above appears in Carter's translation, adapted slightly by me.
6. Gishle Brelet, Le temps musical: essai d'une esthitique nouvelle de la musique, 2 vols.
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949).
7. In "Music and the Time Screen" (349), Carter, after summarizing Suvchinsky's
arguments, adds: "Such thinking (which I am not sure I agree with) led me to the
idea of the opening of the Cello Sonata of 1948, in which the piano, so to speak,
presents 'chronometric' time, while the cello simultaneously plays in 'chrono-ametric'
time." Elsewhere Carter has mentioned that the first movement of the piece "presents
the cello in its warm expressive character, playing a long melody in a rather free style,
while the piano percussively marks a regular clock-like ticking" ("Sonata for Cello
and Piano [1948]; Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord [1952]," in The
Writings of Elliott Carter, 271.)
12. Isaac Newton, Scholium; quoted by Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
(New York: Macmillan, 1929), 109.
14. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; reprint, New York: Free Press,
1967), 119.
15. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 120.
17. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 16.
18. Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), 158.
19. Roger Shattuck, "Making Time: A Study of Stravinsky, Proust, and Sartre,"
Kenyon Review 25 (1963):248-63; citation from 254.
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 679
20. Kern, 26, 58. In part, of course, this divergence from Bergson corresponds to
Koechlin's distinction of musical from other varieties of time (see above, 646-47).
25. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's "Ulysses": A Study, rev. ed. (London: Faber &
Faber, 1952), 41.
30. For a technical discussion of this passage, see Bernard, "Carter's Rhythmic Prac-
tice," 188-96.
32. For example, see Wilson on Proust, 132; Auguste Bailly on Joyce, quoted by
Gilbert, 28. As will become clear later in this article, Eisenstein understood the "con-
trapuntal" analogy, both to his own work in film and to literature, much more clearly
from a musical point of view.
35. This shift in attitude is borne out by Carter's unpublished reminiscence of Bou-
langer, "La musique en personne" (ca. 1985).
36. Lincoln Kirstein, "Balanchine Musagate," Theatre Arts 31, no. 11 (Nov. 1947):
37-41; citation from 39.
37. Kirstein, "Blast at Ballet" (1937), in Three Pamphlets Collected (Brooklyn, N.Y.:
Dance Horizons, 1967), 22.
38. Martha Graham, quoted in Bernard Taper, Balanchine (New York: Harper &
Row, 1963), 18.
39. Kirstein, "Balanchineand the Classic Revival," Theatre Arts 31, no. 12 (Dec.
1947): 37-40; citation from 39.
40. Kirstein, "What Ballet Is All About" (1959), in Three Pamphlets Collected,
48-49.
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680 The Musical Quarterly
44. Quoted in Kirstein, "A Ballet Master's Belief," in By With To and From: A Lin-
coln Kirstein Reader, ed. Nicholas Jenkins (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991),
217.
45. Balanchine's brief article "The Dance Element in Stravinsky's Music," for exam-
ple, is mainly concerned with the various kinds of movement that Stravinsky's ballets
evoke and suggest to the choreographer (Dance Index 6, nos. 10-12 [1947]: 250-56;
reprinted in Ballet Review 10, no. 2 [1982]: 14-18).
53. Kirstein, quoted in Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and
the Modernization of Ballet (London: Routledge, 1994), 103.
54. Edwin Denby, "A Note on Balanchine's Present Style," Dance Index 4, nos. 2-3
(Feb.-Mar. 1945): 36-38; citation from 37.
55. Laura Jacobs, "Cotillon Revived," Ballet Review 17, no. 4 (winter 1990): 80-84;
citation from 80.
58. Carter has recounted his experiences during this period in his unpublished lec-
ture "Soviet Music" (1967).
59. Sergei Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," in Film
Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1949), 38.
60. Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," 36; "A Dia-
lectic Approach to Film Form," in Film Form, 53.
62. Eisenstein, quoting Guillerd, in The Film Sense, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942), 95.
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Carter and the Meaning of Time 681
69. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 74-75. Carter shows particular interest in this quota-
tion in his "Gesamtkunstwerk" essay.
74. Eisenstein, "The Dynamic Square," in Film Essays and a Lecture, 85.
75. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Modern Novel (1927), quoted in The Film Sense, 68.
76. Eisenstein, "Achievement," 183.
83. Among the recent secondary literature on Eisenstein, see the discussion of spa-
tial relations in the fraternization scene in James Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema, and
History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 67.
84. Benjamin Boretz, "Conversation with Elliott Carter," Perspectives of New Music
8, no. 2 (spring-summer 1970): 7-8.
85. Eisenstein, "Methods of Montage," 74.
86. Eisenstein, "The Structure of the Film," in Film Form, 171-72.
87. See Goodwin, 67-69, for further analysis of this temporal dilation.
88. Edwards, 61.
89. Jonathan W. Bernard, "An Interview with Elliott Carter," Perspectives of New
Music 28, no. 2 (summer 1990): 180-214; citation from 192; Carter, "String Quartets
Nos. 1 and 2," in The Writings of Elliott Carter, 275.
90. Irving Howe, "The Idea of the Modern," in Selected Writings, 1950-1990 (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 145.
91. Howe, 141.
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682 The Musical Quarterly
92. Herbert Read, "The Situation of Art in Europe at the End of the Second World
War," in The Philosophy of Modern Art: Collected Essays (London: Faber & Faber,
1952), 46. Carter's own period of exploration, characterized by pieces that each
required the labor of several years to write, gradually gave way to consolidation-what
David Schiff has called the "new classicism" of the 1980s and, now, the 1990s. (See
"Carter's New Classicism," College Music Symposium 29 [1989]: 115-22.) This, too,
seems in keeping with the fate of the modernist as envisioned by Howe, who sug-
gested that the modernist stance was inherently an unstable one, perhaps eventually
impossible to maintain because it required perpetual commitment to the problematic.
It was too hard "to resist completely the invading powers of ideology and system"
(Howe, 155).
93. Howe, 152-53.
94. Stephen Spender, "The Modemrn Necessity," in The Struggle of the Modern
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 106.
95. Spender, "Dialogue with a Recognizer," in The Struggle of the Modern, 185.
96. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1910); Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919; reprinted with a
new introd. by Claes G. Ryn, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991).
97. Carter, "Expressionism in American Music" (1965; rev. 1972), in The Writings
of Elliott Carter, 230-43.
98. Arnold Whittall, "Elliott Carter," in First American Music Conference: Keele
University, England, April 18-21, 1975 (Keele: University of Keele, 1975), 82-98.
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