A Life of Music Esoterica : Elliott Carter, 85, Hailed for His Works

Longevity can have its downside for a celebrated composer like Elliott Carter. In town through January as part of an 85th birthday celebration, Carter has been engaged in a whirlwind schedule of concerts of his music by various ensembles around the Southland, culminating in a concert at the Japan America Theater tonight as part of the L.A. Philharmonic’s “Green Umbrella” series.

Last week, he ushered the visitor into the living room of the Santa Monica apartment where he has been set up by his main sponsor, the Getty Foundation, inching past the Steinway baby grand filling up half the living room.

There is no rest for the restlessly creative--not to mention amply commissioned--composer, of whatever age. “I thought I was going to get some work done while I was out here,” the New York-based Carter said, gesturing to a desk strewn with manuscript paper work-in-progress, “but they’ve kept me pretty busy with concerts and appearances. This peace and quiet I thought was going to be here wasn’t.”

You get the sense that it is, for a composer too often neglected in his own country, a happily hectic visit. What began as a Getty-sponsored monthlong visit expanded into a more multi-organizational effort. Between the several concerts by the Southwest Chamber Society and the EAR Unit and tonight’s Philharmonic concert, Southern California is getting a full dose of Carter this month.

The sum effect is a retrospective overview of the composer’s music. Tonight’s concert, for instance, ranges from his 1948 Cello Sonata to the multilayered Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano and Two Chamber Orchestras of 1960, to “In Sleep, In Thunder,” settings of poems by Robert Lloyd written in 1981.

Like the work of Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbit and other composers working in a post-serial vocabulary, Carter’s music--of the last 40 years, anyway--has carried the torch of the 12-tone revolution laid down by Arnold Schoenberg, but taken to another evolutionary level.

For Carter, what could be dryly intellectual becomes a puzzle and a drama. He likes to have instrumentalists assume varying roles, as if in heated dialogue in an implicitly theatrical exchange.

In conversation, too, the composer alternates between seriousness and ingenuousness, with a disarming smile that occasionally consumes his face.

Carter, who has taught at several prominent East Coast schools, is widely considered to be among the most important living composers, whose complex-but-conversational writing has won him international acclaim, if not household-name popularity. Winner of two Pulitzers, the United States National medal of the Arts, and a constant stream of commissions--mostly from Europe--Carter makes music that is still relatively obscure, although a recording of his Violin Concerto recently earned him a Grammy nomination.

“All my recent works have been commissioned abroad,” he stated matter-of-factly, with a shrug of resignation “except for a piece I finished recently for the Chicago Symphony. It’s because I think my music got the reputation of being very difficult, and nobody in America wants to work.”

The musical organizations rallying to put on the L.A.-based Carter celebration represent part of the global network of groups who have made Carter’s music part of their regular repertoire. “I don’t like to boast,” Carter said, “but the people who spend a lot of effort on my music find it very rewarding. I’ve always thought, to tell the truth, that I was really not writing for an audience, but writing for performers playing the music. When they get over the horror of playing the pieces, which are sometimes very hard for them, then they like to play it.”

As seemingly dissonant and arcane as Carter’s music sounds to many ears, his earlier pieces tap into a more neo-classical language, partly as a result of his studies with the renowned, now-deceased Nadia Boulanger, who taught numerous 20th-Century composers of note. He also acknowledges a debt to jazz.

“I always felt that my music derived from jazz,” Carter asserted. “It came out of the idea of having a regular rhythm accompanied by improvisation. My music is continually playing between regular beats and improvisatory things--sometimes simultaneously, sometimes one after the other.”

Based as it often is on shifting relationships of rhythm and emotional character, Carter’s music tends to avoid traditional forms, in the search for “an internal diversity that involves you immediately in a new kind of structure that doesn’t fit in the ordinary kind of musical structure,” as the composer puts it.

“I find it hard sometimes to find that in a piece of any length. In the old music, you went back to the beginning or did something similar. But when you’re constantly going on and on and changing, the problem of how you get on with the last 10 minutes of a longer piece is a very interesting problem.

“You can always make a big bang somewhere,” he laughed, “but you can’t make a big bang if it’s a flute piece.”

Yet, even working on a small canvas--and the composer is known for his intimate chamber works--Carter likes to inject marked contrasts of character. Stagnant or meditative passages are not encouraged.

He pointed out that even “Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi,” a solo violin piece dedicated to the Italian composer Petrassi, which was played in a recent EAR Unit concert, is charged with a nervous eventfulness. It’s as if the violinist is engaged in an interior monologue involving multiple personalities.

“There is the idea that there are interruptions,” Carter explained, “but life goes on and on. Petrassi is a man who somehow is jolly and tells jokes, and then other times is sad and melancholy. I thought it would be interesting to write a piece that was interrupted but still had one long continuity.”

Despite the esoteric circles of his appeal, Carter has a kind of pragmatic philosophy about his music. He feels that he is writing about life as we know it, not making mazes in an ivory tower of his own devising.

He leaned forward on the couch and surmised, “It seems to me that what it’s all about really is the way we lead our human lives. It seems to me that too much music has been too conventional in all of this. It isn’t a picture of living somehow. I’ve tried to do that, to picture thinking and feeling.”