Elliot Carter comes out of the closet

[living_stradivarius]

Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:53 pm From the Associated Press NEW YORK

American composer Elliott Carter, an exemplar of the atonalist style of modernism and according to admirers the greatest living practitioner of his craft, apologized to music lovers around the world today for what he called "a half century of wasted time."

"What was I thinking?" the venerable Mr. Carter, 99, said at his home in Manhattan. "Nobody likes this stuff. Why have I wasted my life?" Carter said he "went wrong" back in the 1940s and spent the next 60 years pursuing the musical dead-end of atonality. In the past seven decades, he has produced five string quartets, a half dozen song cycles, works for orchestra, solo concertos and innumerable chamber works for various combinations of instruments --- all in an advanced, complex style he now dismisses as "noise."

Despite consistent encouragement of many mainstream musicians such as Boston Symphony Music Director James Levine, for Chicago Symphony conductor Daniel Barenboim, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Carter said his many admirers were "delusional."

"The critics who said they were just congratulating themselves for being smarter than everybody else were right all along," he said. "We should all go back and get our heads on straight." Carter said he blamed his late wife, Helen, for turning him into an unrepentant modernist. "She liked this stuff, and I could never say no to her," he said. Mrs. Carter died in 2003 at age 95.

Since then, Carter said, he has been reevaluating his aesthetic. "I'd like to write something pretty for a change --- maybe something based on an Irish folk tune," he said. He was uncertain whether he would withdraw his substantial catalogue from the repertoire, though one alternative would be to revise his works, ending each with a tonic triad, he said.

"I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders," Carter said. "From now on, I promise to be good."

[soliloquy]

Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:53 pm From the Associated Press NEW YORK

[retrouvailles]

This is just a case of extreme modesty. I actually quite like some of the "crap" that has been written in this period.

[jakev2.0]

What an absolutely astonishing thing for someone to say about 60 years of their life.

[soliloquy]

Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:53 pm From the Associated Press NEW YORK

[retrouvailles]

I hope this is an April Fools joke.

[steinwaymodeld]

what i like his cello sonata.

but that's his early work.

I feel that this is like a huge satire he just put on.

[retrouvailles]

Of course the work my username is named after falls under this "crap" category, but, eh, whatever. I still find that it has its own charm.

[ahinton]

Of course it was an April Fool's joke! What else could it have been? - especially since Carter is still well and truly "at his exercise" (or at least was until very recently and I've no evidence that he's suddenly come to a halt - the Horn Concerto he composed last year gets its première in a Boston SO concerto next November, by the way).

The joke has been so widely circulated that any amusement it may once have contained has surely depleted commensurate to the "yesterday's mashed potato*" status that the joke itself has long since acquired (1 April now being several weeks distant); that said, it is quite surprising how many people were taken in by it! Even the likes of William Bolcom helped to circulate it! I don't know if Elliott himself read it, but I daresay someone's told him about it - much to his wry amusement, I don't doubt!

Best,

Alistair

* from the lyric to the song A Fine Romance by Elliott Carter - no, sorry, I mean Jerome Kern...