Christian Carey, Ph.D.

www.christianbcarey.com, christianbcarey@gmail.com

Dialogues: Conflict and Colloquy in Carter's Late Concerti

Elliott Carter's music has long been recognized as having a strongly narrative
component. David Schiff, Andrew Porter, and Jonathan W. Bernard have
discussed the poetic inspiration for large orchestral works such as Concerto for
Orchestra (based on Saint-John Perse’s “Winds”),1 Symphony for Three
Orchestras (inspired by Hart Crane’s “The Bridge”)2 and the Symphonia
(whose touchstone is Richard Crashaw’s “Bulla”).3 The more intimate genre of
chamber music has engendered narrative connotations gleaned from the
stage. These are most notably found in the contending "characters" of the
composer’s string quartets. Indeed, literary and theatrical allusions have
influenced the creation, analysis, and reception of much of his oeuvre.
Carter’s erudite background, steeped in the Classics and poetry, has played a
significant role in the cultivation of extra-musical associations in his work.

While the relationship between text and music can often be more clearly
ascertained in pieces involving sung text, poems often serve as inspiration for
the composer’s instrumental compositions as well. By making these
associations “public” as part of published scores and program notes, Carter
allows for pieces to take on a more explicitly narrative component. A recent
example is the Boston Concerto (2002), inspired by the opening lines of a poem,
entitled “Rain,” by William Carlos Williams:

As the rain falls

So does
your love

bathe every
open
Object of the World4

1 Jonathan W. Bernard, “Poem as Non-Verbal Text: Elliott Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra and Saint-John
Perse’s Winds,” in Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation, ed. Craig Ayrey and Mark Everist
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169-204.
2 Andrew Porter, “Great Bridge, Our Myth,” in Music of Three Seasons: 1974-1977 (New York: Farrar
Straus Giroux, 1978), 527-32.
3 David Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, rev. 2d ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 30-
31.
4 William Carlos Williams, “Rain,”in Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. Walton, Litz, et
al. (New York: New Directions, 1991), 40-41.

Carey, Dialogues 1
 The genesis of Boston Concerto marks two of the longest-standing
relationships in Carter’s life. (Slide)

The first celebrated his long marriage to Helen Carter, who was quite ill
during its period of composition and passed shortly after its premiere. (Slide)

It also commemorates a musical relationship that has lasted over eight

decades between Carter and the Boston Symphony. Thus, William Carlos
Williams’ “Rain” serves as the inscription to a musical love letter that
expresses its affection doubly. (Slide)

Finally, it reflects a late-career interest in Carlos Williams’ poetry. In 2002,

Carter set his poems in Of Rewaking, for mezzo-soprano and orchestra.

Despite the work’s extensive, wide-ranging biographical background, one

hesitates to ascribe an overly explicit musical or programmatic aim to the
inclusion of lines from the Carlos Williams poem at the beginning of the
score. After all, Carter’s reputation is that of a modernist; not a neo-Romantic.
But listeners hear the piece’s rampant use of staccato and pizzicato differently
with the poem in mind than they might without its inclusion: the implication
of “rainfall” becomes nearly inescapable. (Audio 1)

In a 2006 interview with Robert Aitken, Carter admitted that poetry might
play a role when he is “shaping a piece,” but said that the initial musical
inspiration and ideas for a work were already present.5 In a 2005 interview
with this writer, Carter emphasized the musical intentions he had when
composing Boston Concerto – exploring the various types of staccato and
pizzicato and the form of a concerto grosso with a large orchestra – as well as
the poetic, narrative component.6

Carter’s inspirational reach is not confined to literary fields. A polyglot and

polymath, he frequently used references from other disciplines to spur his
musical creativity. Most recently, Carter based his BSO commission Sound
Fields on Helen Frankenthaler’s Color Field pictures.

Although Carter’s music is often described as “theatrical” in nature, he

composed relatively few pieces with the potential for textual narrative that
involved interaction between vocalists. Most of this was early – choral music
– and late – his sole opera What’s Next? and his other centennial commission
5 Elliott Carter, interview by Robert Aitken, Elliott Carter in Toronto in 2006 (Naxos, 2008), DVD.
6 Christian Carey, “Elliott Carter: Fountain of Youth,” Signal to Noise 41 (Spring 2006), 16-19.

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 from the BSO, Mad Regales, a brief vocal ensemble piece.

Instead, Carter has most often dealt with instrumental “actors” or characters.
Different instruments are given distinct roles that are delineated in a number
of ways: gesture, tempo, interval collections, dynamic, and articulation.

Carter didn’t shy away from discussions of his music in these terms. While he
avoided assigning strictly definitive programmatic elements to his music, he
is willing to go along, to a certain point, with the ascription of a general
narrative or “character types” to instrumental interactions in his music.

For instance, in the program notes for the Fifth String Quartet (1995), Carter
makes the connection between chamber music rehearsals and, as he describes
it, “human cooperation.” (Slide Arditti)

Composer's Notes

One of the fascinations of attending rehearsals of chamber music,

when excellent players try out fragments of what they later will
play in the ensemble, then play it, and then stop abruptly to discuss
how to improve, is that this pattern is so similar to our inner
experience of forming, ordering, focusing, and bringing to fruition
— and then dismissing — our feelings and ideas. These patterns of
human behavior form the basis of the 5th String Quartet.

(Slide: Puzzle)
Its introduction presents the players, one by one, trying out
fragments of later passages from one of the six short, contrasting
ensemble movements, at the same time maintaining a dialogue
with each other. Between each of the movements the players
discuss in different ways what has been played and what will be
played.

In this score the matter of human cooperation with its many aspects
of feeling and thought was a very important consideration.7
(Audio 2)

Carter’s statements about the quartet indicate his interest in exploring

musical ‘dialogues’ in chamber music. (Slide) The concerto form is also
particularly effective for dramatic treatment, with the relationship between
soloist and ensemble often serving as a metaphor for the interaction between
7 Elliott Carter, “Composer’s Note” in Fifth String Quartet (New York: Boosey and Hawkes, 1995).

Carey, Dialogues 3
the individual and the group. Carter's concerti employ still more diverse
networks of relationships; soloist and tutti are joined by various fractals of the
ensemble as dramatis personae. Several of Carter's late concerti can be evaluated
from a narrative perspective. Indeed, he has explored this idea in a plethora
of instrumental deployments. (Slide)

In the 80s, 90s and 00s, a number of new pieces have appeared. Carter has
continued to compose concerti for solo wind and string instruments –
creating pieces for oboe (1987), violin (1990), clarinet (1996) (next slide), cello
(2000), horn (2006), and flute (2007); but in a retracing one finds unusual in
the composer’s output, he has also returned to two genres he explored in the
60s: the concerto for orchestra and the piano concerto.

Certain differences are seen when setting the three concerti written in the
1960s – the Double Concerto, Piano Concerto, and Concerto for Orchestra
alongside three pieces written around and just after the turn of the
millennium: Asko Concerto, Boston Concerto, and Dialogues. It’s no accident that
the pieces from the 1960s are more spread out in terms of their dates of
composition. In each, Carter spent a great deal of effort exploring the
boundaries of his musical language. Large in scale and scope, they contain
some of his most elaborate compositional architectures for the orchestra and
are very much ‘watershed’ works.

On the other hand, the latter triptych is comparatively transparent in texture

and more formally straightforward. Two of the three are for chamber
orchestras – Asko and Dialogues.

Asko Concerto, composed for the Amsterdam-based Asko Ensemble, serves to

unite Carter’s interest in chamber music characters and his late-career
preoccupation with the concerto grosso form. The group’s sixteen players are
presented in a variety of fractal groupings – two trios, two duos, a quintet,
and a solo – and the concertino also evolves in its accompanying complement.
The solo from the Asko was subsequently excerpted as a standalone work:
Retracing (2002) for bassoon. While the chamber orchestra scorings of Asko
and Dialogues might seem to more closely relate these two works, there are
also formal affinities between the Asko and Boston Concertos. In actuality a
grand-sized concerto grosso, Boston Concerto alternates individual sections of
the orchestra with tutti passages.

Carter’s interest in works for piano and orchestra continued. He wrote four
more pieces in the genre for Daniel Barenboim: Soundings, Interventions,
Dialogues II, and Conversations. Soundings has a different sort of setup; it

Carey, Dialogues 4
 primarily places the soloist’s material at the beginning and end of the piece –
thereby allowing the pianist to also serve double-duty as conductor.
Interventions, Conversations, and Dialogues II are all essentially a companion
pieces to Dialogues, dealing with much the same idea of conversations and
interruptions.

However, there are a number of differences among them. For instance,

Interventions is for large orchestra, and is robust in its orchestration. In
addition to piano soloist, Carter deploys two trios of instruments in concertino
groups. The piece also hinges on a bit of a musical joke. It opens with octave
A’s in the orchestra, imitating a symphony’s “tuning pitch.” The first
statement in the piano contends against this swath of A’s with its own
reiterated Bbs. This terse juxtaposition of minor seconds (and, later, Major
sevenths) informs many of the piece’s subsequent interactions, and it returns
in the work’s climax. Unlike Dialogues, and indeed much of late Carter,
Interventions ends loudly, with a tutti bang rather than a mercurial coda
whisper.

Although these initial observations about Interventions suggest that it is also

ripe for further analysis from a narrative point of view, for today we will
instead turn our focus to Dialogues (2003), an aptly named concerto for piano
and chamber orchestra. This is an exemplary composition in which to
examine the theatrical aspects of Carter's late concerto style.

Composed for Nicolas Hodges and the London Sinfonietta (conducted by

Oliver Knussen), it features a brilliantly virtuosic solo part which sometimes
threatens to overwhelm the orchestra. In an interview conducted with the
composer in 2005, Carter suggested that a significant inspiration for Dialogues
was Hodges’s technical skill and performing presence. 8

In his composer’s note, Carter writes, “Dialogues for piano and chamber

orchestra is a conversation between the soloist and the orchestra:  responding
to each other, sometimes interrupting the other, or arguing.  The single varied
movement is entirely derived from a small group of harmonies and rhythms. 
Commissioned by the BBC for the brilliant young pianist, Nicolas Hodges, it
was composed in New York during 2003.”9 (Audio 3)

There are two recordings of the piece: Hodges, Knussen, and the Sinfonietta
have made a CD for Bridge; pianist David Swan has recorded the piece for
Naxos with the New Concerts Ensemble, conducted by Robert Aitken. The
8 Elliott Carter, interview by author, November 2005, New York.
9 Elliott Carter, “Composer’s Note” in Dialogues (New York: Boosey and Hawkes, 2003).

Carey, Dialogues 5
 latter release also includes a video performance on DVD of Dialogues. While
this rendering by Swan and his colleagues has much to recommend it
musically, it’s interesting to note that the pianist’s more subdued stage
demeanor creates something of a ‘casting problem’ in the piece.

The issue of stage presence may not have been quite as relevant in earlier
Carter concerti. While a soloist with a compelling presence is always
desirable, the aforementioned pieces from the Sixties were principally
concerned with a wealth of musical details, often innovative both in terms of
pitch and rhythmic activity. Conversely, Carter’s recent predilection is to
reduce the harmonic materials employed in his music principally to a
vocabulary of all-interval tetrachords and hexachords and the 12-note Link
chords.10

Dialogues is no exception; Carter relies on this already familiar harmonic field.

The all-interval tetrachords (0137) and (0146) are especially favored. As
analysts such as Andrew Mead11 and Jonathan W. Bernard12 have found that
when studying Carter’s scores, the musical surface is much more complicated
than the materials Carter publicly suggests are central to the piece. The
composer’s observation in his program note that the piece is “entirely derived
from a small group of harmonies,” is a bit of an overstatement, as one can
find a number of collections in operation on the local level. Still, a pervasion
and primacy of all-interval tetrachords is confirmed by the score. A few
examples of the all-interval tetrachords’ significant presence in the work
follow.

1) In Music Example One, (0146) tetrachords are presented as verticals in the

strings’ first statements in the piece.

In Music Example Two, we see a later vertical statement in the brass containing
both (0137) and (0146). Unlike the other slides in this presentation, this example
is in C-score rather than transposed.

In addition to (0137) and (0146), you will notice that there’s also an interloper (or
rather, intervener) present, the tetrachord (0136). It’s not an all-interval
collection, though with an interval vector of (112011), it’s very close.

10 Elliott Carter, Harmony Book ed. Nicolas Hopkins and John F. Link, (New York: Carl Fischer, 2002),
31-35.
11 Andrew Mead, “Pitch Structure in Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 3,” Perspectives of New Music
22/1 (1983), 55-67.
12 Jonathan W. Bernard, “Problems of Pitch Structure in Elliott Carter’s First and Second String Quartets,”
Journal of Music Theory 37/2 (Fall 1993), 231-66.

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Of course, as Jonathan Bernard has amply discussed in his article “Problems of
Pitch Structure in Elliott Carter’s First and Second String Quartets,” 13 Carter
never uses his “small group of harmonies” in an inflexible manner that excludes
other collections. Rather, while emphasizing the all-interval tetrachords,
harmonic variety is expanded through use of “interlopers,” but also related PC
subsets, supersets, and multiple all-interval chords in various combinations.

A clear example of this practice is found in a linear presentation of the (0146)

tetrachord at the outset of the piece. In Music Example Three, an English horn
solo gradually reveals (0146) amidst several (016) trichords: a subset of the
collection. (Audio 3)

Correspondingly, in several of his latest pieces, there has was a trend towards
restrained employment of tempo modulation. The tempo modulations used in
Dialogues are relatively circumspect.

The overall tempo scheme is based on a straightforward ratio, juxtaposing

relationships based on multiples of 2 and 3:

(bpm 64 72 80 96 120 144)

Ratio: 8: 9: 10: 12: 15: 18

These tempi are deployed variously in sections throughout the piece. For
instance, the first 64 measures deal with a juxtaposition of 144 and 96.

So, harmony and large-scale rhythmic concerns, while well-crafted, seem to be

more a confirmation of oft-used Carterian techniques rather than innovative in
design. Instead, the “narrative” component seems to take on increasing interest
for the composer.

We can see Carter’s delineation of instruments as “characters” through his use of

rhythmic gesture. Local rhythmic details vary considerably in complexity. The
piano solo has the most ornate designs, ranging from stentorian chordal passages
to nonuplet filigrees. Its “antagonist,” the English horn, enacts a different
rhythmic profile, alternating held notes and terse dotted eighths. The orchestra
alternately incorporates from, responds to, and accompanies both of the above.

Another important aspect of Carter’s “setting the stage” is the interaction

between instrumentalists. The relationship between overbearing soloist and
chamber orchestra in Dialogues is quite different from the one found in Carter’s
13 Ibid.

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Piano Concerto (1965), where the orchestra has a more monolithic presence. In
the Piano Concerto, the pianist was fighting for survival against seemingly
overwhelming forces arrayed against it; this theme has been linked by Carter to
its Cold-War era genesis in West Berlin.14

In Dialogues, the reversal of roles has a decidedly postmodern flavor. The

individual is free to be assertive; on equal footing with the orchestra, the soloist
attempts to dominate, frequently interjecting or “talking over” the other players.

Not all of the members of the ensemble are willing to submit to a subservient
relationship; the English horn, in particular, proves to be, as Carter said, “a
persistent antagonist" to the soloist.15 Its part is deliberately non-virtuosic,
bringing to bear long sustained notes and terse rebuttals: a decidedly different
“character type” from the piano.

The ensemble serves as witness to the struggle between protagonist and

antagonist; at different times taking up material that reflects or responds to each.
Its role can be seen as analogous to that of the chorus in a Greek drama.

The resulting interplay between soloist (protagonist), English horn (antagonist),

and ensemble (chorus), creates a series of conflicts and conversations which
resembles a richly intricate dramatic structure.

An interesting wrinkle to this tripartite dramatic design occurs towards the

piece’s climax and concerns the fate of the antagonist: the cor anglais. After three
extended solo turns during the piece, in its fourth appearance in mm. 249 the cor
anglais is particularly spotlighted. Carter haloes the instrument with upper
register strings and removes all other winds from the texture. (Audio 4)

The piano soloist has had enough. His next entrance, a virtuosic passage of
nonuplets marked scorrevole 16serves to finally subdue the cor anglais, banishing
its performer to the wind section to play oboe for the rest of the work. (Audio 5)

Although the oboe never takes on a solo role, performing as part of the overall
wind complement for the rest of the work, the woodwinds are not yet done in
their challenge of the piano’s primacy. Beginning in mm. 299, the section as a
whole interrupts the piano’s cadenza.

14 David Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 2d ed., (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1998),
254.
15 Carey, ibid., 18.
16 Translation: gliding – flowing.

Carey, Dialogues 8
Their emphatic outbursts are met with seeming defiance by the piano soloist,
despite several massed onslaughts. But in the coda, we see the piano’s resolve
soften. Concurrently, another solo woodwind adopts a similar demeanor to that
of the cor anglais. Although in a higher register, we can see an analogous
statement in the clarinet’s quiet, terse ‘cameo appearance’ in the piece’s coda.
(Audio 6)

Ultimately, this clarinet gesture seems to subdue the piano’s loquacity, creating a
marked denouement in which the piano ends the work seemingly vanquished. In
a book chapter discussing beginnings and endings in Carter, 17 composer Richard
Wilson ascribes a cooperative, imitative duet to this interaction: a different
reading of the relationship. Given the variances in articulation and registral
deployment between the two instruments, and in light of the roles of winds and
soloist throughout the piece, I would instead suggest an interpretation that bears
out Dialogues’ fundamental dramatic shape.

While the roles of the piano and cor anglais as protagonist and antagonist seem
relatively clear, the clarinet’s role in the coda is intriguing. Having the clarinet
take center stage shortly before the work’s conclusion raises some interesting
parallels to delivery of an epilogue or valediction in many famous stage works.
In Greek drama, a figure such as Tiresias in Euripedes’ The Bacchae might prove
an apt comparison. In Shakespearian terms, one might think of Fortinbras in
Hamlet or the Prince of Verona in Romeo and Juliet: characters that come to restore
order and balance; who comment on the action that has preceded their taking
center stage, albeit briefly.

I hasten to add that such ascriptions are not meant to be explicitly programmatic,
but rather are suggested as a possible means of interpreting the formal design of
Dialogues in more theatrical terms; an approach that reflects Carter’s interest in
the interaction of instrumental characters. While Professor Wilson’s description
of the coda recognizes the centrality of the clarinet-piano interaction,
fundamentally he ‘miscasts’ them.

In Dialogues one can see a rhetorical setup that simultaneously mirrors both
relationships from postmodern life – the soloist as striving individual attempting
relentlessly to assert himself – as well as aspects from Antiquity (the conventions
of Greek drama).

The coincidence of the boldly new with the classically erudite can be seen

17 Richard Wilson, “Beginnings and Endings – Plus a Conversation,” in Elliott Carter: A Centennial
Celebration, Festschrift Series no. 23, ed. Mark Ponthus and Susan Tang (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press,
2008), 78.

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throughout Carter’s output; but each time he seemed to find a new wrinkle in
their manner of juxtaposition. Also ubiquitous is the combination of practical
concerns – such as the circumstances of a commission to compose for the
abundantly virtuosic Hodges – with creative aims – an interest in changing the
roles of soloist and ensemble when returning to a particular genre: the piano
concerto. All of these components make Dialogues a quintessentially Carterian
late work of considerable interest to performers, scholars, and audiences alike.

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