Elliott Carter’s Cello Sonata: Mediating Schoenberg

and Stravinsky in Post-War America

Daniel Guberman

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

AMS San Francisco

Hope for American Music Abroad in Modern Music (1946)

• “The activities of American composers during the past ten years are… almost completely unknown here; not even the names are familiar. There is however great curiosity. Once the music becomes available there will be a ready public and willing performers.”

-Henry Pleasants, “Internationalism Again in Vienna,” Modern Music 23 No. 1 (Winter 1946).

Hope for American Music Abroad in Modern Music (1946)

“One of the first generations of American composers, the New England Group (Foote, Chadwick and others), was still dominated by the German academic outlook… A more recent group of American musicians studied with Mlle. Boulanger… The youngest generation will probably get its entire musical instruction in this country, and the time may not be distant when young Europeans will come here for their final musical education. This trend will not be forced by a self-conscious nationalism, but rather by the superior artistic and economic opportunities in a country not devastated by war.”

-Manfred Bukofzer, “The New Nationalism,” Modern Music 23 No. 3 (Fall 1946).

Carter on Postwar Composition

• “On the basis of music printed in 1945, it is hard to predict what the dominant post-war trend in contemporary composition will be. As in every other field, people expect a change, and yet nobody seems to be able to guess what is going to happen… What is interesting about the whole picture of recent music is that among a welter of different styles of different esthetic approaches and nationalities, there has been such a close similarity of feeling. Naturally, many composers, especially young ones, have felt this as a limitation and have been on the lookout for a new repertory of feelings.”

-Elliott Carter, “New Publications of Music” The Saturday Review 29 No. 4 (Jan. 26, 1946)

Carter on Postwar Composition

• “Some cynics have claimed that this cannot be written in our time, that we have lost the knack. But just the same we all seem hopeful, for our clamor about American music and about new music in general really betrays the desire to find and to nurture such durable music.”

- Elliott Carter, “The Composer's Viewpoint.” National Music Council Bulletin 7 No. 1 (September 1946).

Champions of Twelve-Tone Composition in Partisan Review (1948)

“[Stravinsky’s] works continue, one after the other, the destructive process he began in 1912, and which has become more and more open. These works are brilliantly made as far as craftsmanship goes and every note seems to be the result of absolute lucidity. But behind these frozen and sometimes readymade patterns there is nothing except perhaps the illusion of music.”

- Rene Leibowitz, “Music Chronicle: Schoenberg and Stravinsky,” Partisan Review (March 1948).

Nicholas Nabokov Defends Stravinsky • “The whole question of time + space + linear and chordal

harmony which creates the fourth dimension of music-rhythm is the real preoccupation of Stravinsky‘s art. In this, Stravinsky is a real innovator, akin to Monteverdi, who also stood at the beginning of a new cycle in musical history.”

• “Atonality or Dodecatonalism as a system of musical composition is, as everyone knows, a product of Central Europe. As such, it had from the outset the earmarks of a Messianic cult and a determinist religion.” – Nicholas Nabokov, “The Atonal Trial: A Communication,” Partisan Review (May

1948)

Nabokov’s Relationship with Carter

• Colleagues at St. John’s • Best Man at Carter’s Wedding • Included Carter’s works in numerous Congress for Cultural Freedom

Concerts

Measures 6-10 with vertical tetrachords

Opening with Pitch Classes

9 e 7 8 3

5 0 4 6 1 T

2

Comparison of two cello phrases

Section 1: Measures 6-10

Beginning of second section, measures 12-16

Beginning of third section, measures 17-21

Measures 25-26: Changes in the Left Hand

Beginning of section 4, measures 28-32

Metric Modulation, measures 33-36

Carter on the influence of Jazz, 1989

• “At that time I was attracted by the idea of combining certain elements of Schoenberg’s music with elements of Stravinsky: the irregularity of expression used by the former and the rhythmic base of the latter. That was what I tried to do in those pieces, developing an idea that had its source in jazz. But I think it was most successful in my Cello Sonata.”

-Enzo Restagno, Elliott Carter: In Conversation with Enzo Restagno for Settembre Musica 1989, trans. Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal (Brooklyn, NY: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1991): 38.

Carter on the Influence of Jazz, 1955

• “It would be convenient if one could say – as so many have done – that the distinguishing mark of serious American music is its employment (or reworking) of the rhythms of our native folk or popular music, particularly jazz. In earlier years when American music was just beginning to take shape, such an attempt may have been useful; but now that a substantial number of works has accumulated, neither critics nor composers feel it any longer necessary to emphasize national characteristics.”

-Elliott Carter, “The Rhythmic Basis of American Music,” The Score and I.M.A. Magazine 12 (June 1955).

Epistrophy

• Recorded by Thelonius Monk and Milt Jackson 1947

Elliott Carter’s Cello Sonata: Mediating Schoenberg

and Stravinsky in Post-War America

Daniel Guberman University of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill AMS San Francisco