L.A. Joins the Celebration of Elliott Carter’s Music

Elliott Carter will turn 80 Sunday, but the birthday celebrations have already begun.

Often described as one of the most distinguished and honored of American composers, Carter so far this year has been celebrated with more than 80 major birthday concerts around the world. More are planned, including a festival in Italy next fall in which his entire repertory will be performed.

Locally, the California E.A.R. Unit plans a Carter celebration on Monday with performances of three of his works, noted for their abundance of dissonant melodies, in Bing Theater at the County Museum of Art. Among the offerings will be the L.A. premiere of Carter’s “Enchanted Preludes” for flute and cello.

In a phone conversation from his home in New York, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner in music (with several other major awards) said that he wrote “Enchanted Preludes” with cellist Erika Duke and flutist Dorothy Stone of the E.A.R. Unit in mind. He will be in London for the U.K. premiere of his Oboe Concerto on Monday and regrets that he cannot attend the performance.

“The piece is dedicated to the 50th birthday of philanthropist Ann Santen, whose husband commissioned the work. But Erika originally suggested the instrumentation,” recalled Carter. “When I received the commission, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone.”

Stone and Duke have already given the work its premiere in San Francisco, with Carter in attendance. They describe the music as difficult both to play and to listen to.

“His music is deceptively lyrical,” observed Duke. “Melodic lines may have very large intervals and it takes time to get used to. But it’s actually very Romantic music.”

Another work on the program, the Triple Duo (1983), required an unusual amount of rehearsal time.

“It must have taken us eight rehearsals to work up the Triple Duo,” Stone said. “But once you get used to the singing lines of the music, the difficulties prove worthwhile.”

“Carter’s music is filled with incredible complexities, especially the metric modulations,” added Duke. “When an ensemble has played the music enough times to really understand it, it sounds almost like improvisation.”

But Carter’s music wasn’t always complex and difficult. There was a time when he composed simple, tonal music.

“Before World War II, I wrote in a Neo-classical, populist style,” he admitted. “Then I began to make a departure, step by step.

“But I wasn’t really changing my style, more like rediscovering it. It was when I was really young, before my college days or my studies with Nadia Boulanger, that I discovered the music of Varese, Ives, Stravinsky and Bartok.”

Yet Carter agrees that starting out with a style that was easy to understand, may have helped establish his career. Finding his own, esoteric style relatively late in life gave him the opportunity to explore new musical worlds without having to worry too much about shocking his audience.

Even so, he regrets that more of today’s young composers aren’t exploring new musical worlds.

“When I was starting out, young composers were always searching for a new language, their own style,” he said. “Today, it seems that most young composers are trying to imitate the styles of others.

“It’s a serious problem caused perhaps by the fact that today’s composers face a flooded market. There are about 20,000 active composers in America and not enough jobs or universities to accommodate them all--just the opposite of what it was like when I was young.”