Carter Is Minding the Score : His Works--to Be Played Tonight in Orange--Are Anything but Ordinary

Elliott Carter’s music is notoriously dense and daunting. His works have polarized the music community: some would nominate him as the greatest living composer, while others consider his scores deliberately impenetrable.

Not exactly the stuff most likely to garner Grammy awards, which traditionally represent more of a lowbrow popularity poll than a merit list. Yet when the nominations came out two weeks ago, there was the Juilliard String Quartet’s recording of Carter’s four Quartets and the Duo for Violin and Piano, up for best album and best chamber music performance in the classical categories.

“I’d be very surprised if they won,” Carter said in a recent phone interview from Santa Monica, where he’s staying while serving as visiting scholar at the Getty Center in Malibu. The 83-year-old composer has few illusions about the difference between the deep respect he is generally accorded from musicians and broad-based popularity.

“I’m not trying to be popular,” he said stoutly, “but to make something that seems significant to me. I’ve been fortunate always to have some sort of a public. Not a large one, in this country,” he said, sighing, while noting that programs of his music have filled halls throughout Europe.

Nor is he sanguine about the immediate future. The Grammy nominations this year are strikingly dominated by American artists and repertory--all of the best-album nominees are American performers doing American music, for example--but Carter doesn’t see this as indicating any great sea change in American attitudes towards its artists.

“It may be a good sign, but it depends on the nominators,” he said. “There’s no motive for change in this country. We’ve never been very sympathetic to our artists, unless they are painters who sell pieces for millions of dollars.

“Just consider the enormous success of advertising, keeping people from thinking and making their own choices. I find that a very dangerous and very terrifying thing.”

A staunch individualist himself, Carter makes music that is democratic in sound, each voice independent in time and identity.

“I’ve tried to individualize the performers, so that each one has his own character and yet somehow contributes to the whole,” he says.

This is true of his 1974 Duo for Violin and Piano, which the Southwest Chamber Music Society offers at Chapman University in Orange tonight and Friday at the Pasadena Public Library, in performances prepared under the composer’s direction. Violinist Peter Marsh and pianist Gloria Cheng will play the Carter Duo on a program that also lists his “Scrivo in Vento” plus works by Mozart--Carter’s favorite composer--Elgar and Oliver Knussen.

“I think it is one of my most interesting pieces--I dedicated it to my wife for that reason,” Carter said of the Duo. “The piano is really very separate from the violin--I try to make them almost opposite. There are so many things the violin can do that the piano can’t. I try to capitalize on that for dramatic effect.

“My music involves transforming the basic character of an instrument into something quite different. This piece carries this quite far.”

Carter’s characteristic obsessions with time and meter are also very elaborately developed here, making a piece that is “very virtuosic and difficult to play. My music is very unnerving to performers who are accustomed to coming together on a downbeat,” Carter noted wryly.

“But there were times when Brahms was unplayable,” he added. “I don’t think (my music) will always be difficult. . . . There are people who write music that is more difficult than mine now--Brian Ferneyhough, for example.

“When I wrote that old Cello Sonata in ‘48, it was considered unplayable. Now they teach it in conservatories and students play it all over the world.”

The Southwest Chamber Music Society has a long track record in presenting challenging new music with gusto and relish. “You don’t want to go down the same road all the time,” artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt said in a separate interview. “The excitement from working directly with a composer is an amazing feeling, for both performers and audiences.

“We want to present the best of contemporary music in a non-specialized context. It’s not like learning a foreign language--it’s like increasing your vocabulary in a language you already know.”

During his Southland visit, Carter has seen his Duo played by Marsh and Cheng at the Getty Center and four of his dedicatory miniatures presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group.

“Basically, this is a great opportunity to write some new music,” Carter said of his stay at the Getty. He is composing a harp piece for Ursula Holliger, an oboe piece for Heinz Holliger, and an oboe and harp duo, each piece for a different European festival. “In the end, it will be one long piece.”

Next week, Carter returns home to New York, the better to cope with the demands of orchestral writing. “It’s easier to do it at home, where I have all the right materials.

“The hell of it is, I write these pieces, and then I have to fuss around until I find a title.”

This from the author of such appellations as Duo for Violin and Piano?

“I like that kind of title,” Carter said with a laugh. “I go to concerts, and the composers have such striking titles, but then the music is so conventional and boring. I’d rather have the opposite!”

* The Southwest Chamber Music Society will play Elliot Carter’s Duo for Violin and Piano and “Scrivo in Vento”; Oliver Knussen’s Cantata for Oboe and String Trio, and Mozart’s Oboe Quartet in F, K. 370 and Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478, tonight at 8 in the Bertea Hall/Salmon Recital Hall at Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Tickets: $7 to $14. Information: (800) 726-7147.