Carter, Elliott (Cook Jr.) (1908–2012)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda Ravenscroft
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Gustav Holst ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Walter Piston

Born in 1908 into a wealthy New York City family, Elliott Carter enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, spending time in Europe and learning French at an early age. The composer Charles Ives mentored the young Carter, taking him to concerts in New York and encouraging his developing interest in music. Carter’s childhood, characterized by immersion in a culturally enriched environment and exposure to the modern world, provided the elements from which his artistic aesthetic and musical language would later be forged. When Carter entered Harvard College, he focused his studies on English literature, Greek, and philosophy, although musical activities continued in the form of lessons with Walter Piston and Gustav Holst, as well as singing with the Harvard Glee Club. Carter completed a master’s degree in music at Harvard in 1932, after which he moved to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger for three years. He received a doctorate in music from the École Normale de Musique in Paris in 1935.

Walter Piston 1894–1976

Tempo ◽  
1977 ◽  
pp. 23-24
Author(s):  
Paul Rapoport
Keyword(s):  
Harvard University ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Main Text ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
American Composer ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Walter Piston ◽  
Academic Study

Walter Piston, the American composer and teacher, died aged 82 on 12 November 1976. As a young amateur he learned to play nearly all the instruments, but he did not begin academic study of music until he was 25 He graduated from Harvard University with highest honours in 1924, studied for two years in France with Nadia Boulanger, and returned to teach at Harvard for over three decades, retiring in 1960. Among his pupils were Leonard Bernstein and Elliott Carter. His three main text books (Harmony, Counterpoint and Orchestration) have been, widely used for many years.

A Brief Life of a Very Long Life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schiff
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Musical Education ◽  
Post Modernism ◽  
Piano Lessons ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Late Works

This chapter outlines the known facts about Carter’s life and tracks the reception history of his music. Carter grew up in a comfortable upper middle class New York household and was groomed to take over the successful importing business founded by his grandfather. His family gave him piano lessons but otherwise discouraged his pursuit of music which only began in earnest when he was in high school and first met Charles Ives. Even after that meeting, Carter studied literature, not music, as a Harvard undergraduate, and only received a full musical education when he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. This delayed development cast Carter into relative obscurity until the age of forty and critical recognition only came a decade later when he was awarded the first of two Pulitzer Prizes. With the arrival of post-modernism, there was a critical reaction against Carter’s music in the USA, tempered, toward the very end of his life, with some appreciation of the clarity of his very late works.

Carter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schiff
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Marc Blitzstein ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Depression Era

This book surveys the life and work of the great American composer Elliott Carter (1908–2012). It examines his formative, and often ambivalent, engagements with Charles Ives and other “ultra-modernists”, with the classicist ideas he encountered at Harvard and in his three years of study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; and with the populism developed by his friends Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein in Depression-era New York, and the unique synthesis of modernist idioms that he began to develop in the late 1940s. The book re-groups the central phase of Carter’s career, from the Cello Sonata to Syringa in terms of Carter’s synthesis of European and American modernist idioms, or “neo-modernism,” and his complex relation to the European avant-garde. It devotes particular attention to the large number of instrumental and vocal works of Carter’s last two decades, including his only opera, What Next?, and a final legacy project: seven works for voice and large ensemble to poems by the founding generation of American modern poetry: e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.

A Modernistic Education (1924–1935)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schiff
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
New York ◽  
Hart Crane ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas ◽  
Walter Piston ◽  
Glee Club ◽  
Formative Years

Carter’s formative years in New York, Harvard, and Paris brought him into contact with a broad range of contending and often contradictory aesthetic ideas and musical movements, including primitivism, expressionism, ultra-modernism, and neo-classicism. While in high school he encountered the ideas and music of American ultra-modernists and European modernists, often of an experimental or mystical nature, but at Harvard he was taught the classicist ideas of T.S. Eliot and sang with the Harvard Glee Club in the American premiere of Stravinsky’s neo-classical opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. While Carter’s neo-classical leanings were encouraged by Walter Piston and Nadia Boulanger, the visionary romantic poetry of Hart Crane presented a different model for an artist’s life and work.

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