makes in Scheffer’s film:
I’m very much concerned throughout all of my life to avoid the idea of mechanical repetition because it seemed to me that we were being deluged by advertising and by propaganda. This is something that I have tried specifically to fight - what we want is a kind of growth, a kind of development, a kind of liveliness and not just a kind of prison in which everything is made mechanical and inhuman. And so my music has always tried to reflect the human side of things, human in the sense that we are, like Montaigne says, constantly changing - “l’homme ondoyant et divers” is what Montaigne said, and this is what I try to capture.225
In this interpretation of the experience of time, “mechanical repetition” or stasis is the negation of flow, of (lived) temporal experience, of progress, of becoming, indeed of humanity, all of which are for Carter the primary expressive priorities of his music (note his use of the word “fight,” reflecting the strength of conviction this concept held for him). Furthermore, for Carter mechanical repetition brings into music something all too expected and predictable, promoting a passivity of listening antithetical to true
expressive communication. Its social manifestation can be found in advertising and in propaganda that promotes a kind of programmed mass responses which halts individual thinking and critical reflection, and hold both the individual and the collective in a state
of stasis.226 Both Carter’s and Adorno’s critique of listening is relevant here because, as
noted above, the listener is the idealized receptor of musical communication and needs to keep an active, critical listening capacity despite the “deluge” of false communication that surrounds them. Conversely, it is the composer’s responsibility to communicate something worthy of deep listening, which for Carter involves this sense of the human in a state of constant change. The social interactive dynamic is played out between composer and listener mediated by the music.
Carter’s criticism of mechanical repetition has definite parallels with Adorno’s diagnosis of the features of repetitive music that facilitate capitalist production and
225 Scheffer, “Elliott Carter: A Labyrinth of Time,” 6’03”.
226 Both Martin Brody and Daniel Guberman explore the ideas that were circulating in the 1930s and
1940s around the arts and mass communication in the United States. See Brody, “‘Music for the Masses’: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory.”; and Guberman, “Composing Freedom: Elliott Carter’s ‘Self- Reinvention’ and the Early Cold War.”
marketability but also repressive social organisation.227 While Carter’s claim that mechanical repetition in music is the sonic equivalent of advertising and propaganda
certainly expresses a critique of these consumerist and brainwashing activities, during
the 1980s in particular Carter also levelled stronger public criticism at the morality of
repetition in minimalist styles of music and in neo-romanticism. In one interview Carter cites Adorno’s “regression of listening” and, like Adorno, targets the effects of
repetitive music that mimic negative influences on the development of a “human” society—not only advertising, consumerism, passive engagement, conformism, and
state propaganda but, at its extreme, fascism.228 In interviews over the last decade of his
life, Carter maintained this position toward repetition, particularly as it is manifest in
Minimalism in the arts.229 Eisenlohr points out that Carter’s views originally stemmed
not from a reaction to the rise of a post-modern aesthetic per se but rather from Carter’s long-developed stance towards the relationship between composer and listener. Already in 1938, when Carter himself was still composing in an American neo-classic style, he had articulated his criticism of the passive listener. His article “Orchestras and
Audiences; Winter, 1938” in Modern Music opens boldly with:
There are two ways of listening to music. The most popular is for the listener to give himself up to an evening of reminiscence or revery after having checked his
conscious, critical self at the door with his hat.230
The second “more objective … kind of listener … is eager for new ideas and new feelings.” It is the composer’s responsibility to communicate to this “intelligent listener,” who in turn is responsible for actively listening to grasp this message:
227 See Theodor W. Adorno, “On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening,” in The
Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arati and Eike Gebhard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978).
228 Carter, “Elliott Carter in conversation with Robert Johnston, Michael Century, Robert Rosen, and Don
Stein (1984),” 253. For a discussion of parallels between Carter’s comments and the thinking of the Frankfurt School, see Schmidt, “‘I try to write music that will appeal to an intelligent listener’s ear.’ On Elliott Carter’s string quartets,” 54-57. Carter makes similar comments in Andrew Porter, “Riches in a Little Room,” The New Yorker 14 May 1979; and Leighton Kerner, “Creators on Creating: Elliott Carter,” Saturday Review December 1980; both cited in Dyck-Hemming, “Diskurze zur ‘Musik Elliott Carters’.” Further references are found in Restagno, Elliott Carter: In Converstaion with Enzo Restagno for Settembre Musica 1989, 58; and Scheffer, “Elliott Carter: A Labyrinth of Time.”
229 For example “Elliott Carter, interviewed by John Tusa,” in The John Tusa Interviews (BBC Radio 3:
Broadcast July 2, 2000); Geoffrey Norris, “Minimalism is death,” The Telegraph 26 July 2003; and Frank Otari, “In the First Person: Elliott Carter,” New Music Box (March 1, 2000). Accessed October 1, 2016, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/the-career-of-a-century-elliott-carter/7/.
230 Carter, “Orchestras and Audiences: Winter, 1938,” 28. For further references to Carter’s writing on the
active listener see Eisenlohr, Komponieren als Entscheidungsprozess, 208-12; and Schmidt, “‘I try to write music that will appeal to an intelligent listener’s ear.’ On Elliott Carter’s string quartets,” 169-72.
He follows it attentively for he know that it is a living message to him from another living man, a serious thought or experience worth considering, one that will help him to understand the people about him. To him, dead, worn-out formulas or non-
communicative styles are anathema. Serious composers and musicians have always aimed at this listener and he in turn has shown that he could take his listener’s share of
the responsibility by keeping his mind actively fixed on the music he was hearing.231
Composer and listener engage in a “true” social exchange through their postures towards their tasks of composing and listening respectively. In his reviews of new music in the 1930s and 1940s Carter always commented unfavourably on excessive repetition of musical ideas and musical forms that relied on classical or romantic
models.232 As already noted, Carter’s “two ways of listening” recall Adorno’s
“structural listening” and “regressive listening” but Carter’s early views seem also to echo the writings of Schoenberg, whose ideal listener must have “an alert and well-
trained mind” and who is offended by the musical equivalent of “baby talk.”233
Carter’s formulation of his ideal listener as the target of his musical communication has received attention in the scholarly and popular literature partially because Carter himself continuously raised this topic in interviews. Dörte Schmidt and Henning Eisenlohr delve into this aspect of Carter’s aesthetic in detail. I wish to extend the discussion a little further, and suggest that it is not simply that the ideal listener was important to Carter because of his desire for communication but because of a broader social vision that Carter himself felt almost morally obliged to engage with musically. Arnold
Whittall sees this as an ethical stance to which Carter holds.234 And in my reading it
connects to what Tia DeNora says of Adorno’s insistence on “the handling of musical
materials [being] nothing short of moral praxis.”235 The expression of this moral praxis
for both Carter and Adorno hinged on the understanding of how music temporality embodies the social.
231 Carter, “Orchestras and Audiences: Winter, 1938,” 28.
232 See many of Carter’s reviews for Modern Music in the 1930s: for example his 1937 critique of
Chavez’s Sinfonia India and his 1939 critique of Harris’s Second Symphony and Sibelius’s music in Else and Kurt Stone Stone, ed. The Writings of Elliott Carter (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), 7, 61 and 64-5, repsectivly. See also Elliott Carter, “Music of the 20th Century,”
Encyclopedia Britanica Vol. XVI (1953): 18; cited in Eisenlohr, Komponieren als Entscheidungsprozess, 225.
233 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber, 1984), 102-4.
See also DeNora, After Adorno, 19-20 on Adorno’s and Schoenberg’s ideal listeners. For a discussion on Schoenberg and repetition see Luis-Mauel Garcia, “On and On: Repeition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music,” Music Theory Online 11, no. 4 (October, 2005),
http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.4/mto.05.11.4.garcia.html#Beginning.
234 Whittall, “The search for order: Carter’s Symphonia and late-modern thematicism,” 62. 235 DeNora, After Adorno, 13. See also discussion in Witkin, Adorno on Music, 3.
Witkin remarks that for Adorno “[temporality] is inseparable from his notion of what is ‘social’ and what is ‘creative’” and thus “[a] music that is truly social (and, therefore, socially true), in Adorno’s analysis, is one in which the elements manifest sociality and
temporality in their relations with each other.”236 Social relations resulting from mass
responses put a halt to “the emergent character of the present.”237 Time in a sense
becomes petrified in false social relations:
In Adorno’s analysis, so long as individuals act freely and spontaneously and enter into real dialectical relations with others, there will be temporality and an historical dimension to action. Any system of relations in which the individual is totally subsumed by the collectivity, and his or her relations with others mechanically determined, is a de-sociated and atemporal reality, a structure from which all change
and development have been expunged.238
What is so significant for Adorno, as it is for Carter, is the interaction of past, present and future musical elements that set musical time in motion analogous to the way individuals change and progress through genuine (free) interactions with other
individuals and thus set social progress in motion.239 Witkin explores in detail the
sociological basis for Adorno’s temporal model of interaction between individuals in his
chapter “Taking a critical line for a walk” in Adorno on Music.240 It is instructive that
Witkin connects Adorno’s view of social interaction and temporality with George Herbert Mead’s philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead was an admirer of Mead’s and as
already noted Carter was influenced by Whitehead’s Process and Reality, having
studied it as a student at Harvard where Whitehead was a faculty member.241 While
exploration of this connection is outside the scope of this study, it is worth at least noting that elements of Hegel’s, Whitehead’s and Mead’s philosophies regarding ‘process’ and ‘emergence’ can be found to connect on different levels with Adorno’s
236 Adorno on Music, 182. 237 Ibid.
238 Ibid. Wiktin also problematizes Adorno’s notion of the link between “sociality and temporality” by
considering other philosophies of time, including Freud’s ‘primary process,’ and the consciousness of dream states in which the sequential nature of time is challenged by the simultaneous awareness of non- sequential events or objects (e.g., “past and present” brought together, “back and front” perceived at the same time). This notion is in fact critically important to Carter’s conception of musical time. I have addressed this in Marguerite Boland, “The All-Trichord Hexachord: compositional strategies in Elliott Carter’s Con Leggerezza and Gra” (M.A. diss., LaTrobe University, Melbourne, 1999), 10-14.
239 In Chapter 3, I discuss how the notion of ‘progress’ is in turn critiqued in the era of disbelief in “grand
narratives”; and how Carter responded to this changed understanding of time, as well as how Adorno was rethinking the notion of progress.
240 Witkin, Adorno on Music, 180-200.
philosophy and Carter’s aesthetics. Time and again, Carter places his musical ideas in opposition to mechanical expression and to social and political activity that “expunges” the temporal, instead stressing the ever-changing (and thus ever-progressing) nature of the ‘participants’ or ‘layers’ in his compositions. Carter is very clear in his discussions of repetition and form during the 1960s and 1970s: his musical forms contain no repeats. In a discussion of his Third Quartet (1971) with Charles Rosen, for example, Carter says:
What may be interesting about the form is that none of the material ever repeats literally, and this is characteristic of many of my pieces ever since the First Quartet. They never actually repeat the same theme, but they are always improvizing [sic] on a basic piece of material that holds together all the various things that are being played. There will sometimes be repetitions of certain speeds and textures that dominate different sections ... but the form is not a form in which there is literal repetition, only a constant repetition of a general principle. ... Maybe you can find one chord that is the same from beginning to end, but the main thing is the sense of constant growth and change.242
Carter’s constantly changing, growing and differentiated musical characters maintain their basic identity, while the “musical discourse” (i.e., the progressive unfolding of
form in time) is “produced by the interaction of the contributory elements” [italics
mine]. In this way, the musical materials themselves model the notion that (ideal)
human experience comes about through true subjective interaction, in which the exchange changes all participating individuals in a way that has consequences for the future.
Once again, this kind of treatment of musical material finds a parallel in the interaction between creator (composer) and receptor (listener) in Carter’s thought. In his “Time Lecture” of 1965, Carter links the composer’s treatment of the temporal aspect of music (here referred to as “the manner of dealing with time and memory”) with the listener’s experience of the social world. As in the above quote from Scheffer’s film, forms of mass communication provide the example of undesirable experience that genuine
musical expression must avoid.243 The listener is presented as a recipient whose
242 Charles Rosen, The Musical Languages of Elliott Carter (Washington, DC: Library of Congress,
1984), 39.
243 See also discussion in Guberman, “Composing Freedom: Elliott Carter’s ‘Self-Reinvention’ and the
Early Cold War,” 10 onwards; and in Brody, “‘Music for the Masses’: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory.”
capacity for memory and complex experience of time should always be addressed by the composer. Carter concludes his lecture as follows:
… the manner of dealing with time and memory has become very obvious, almost primitive. Things continue for a while in a more or less uniform way and then switch to another, contrasting stretch of similar concept. This is actually a denial of memory and time, which corresponds to the treatment of these we receive as readers of newspapers and advertisements, as targets of almost any kind of public
communication which reduces everything to superficiality and ultimately to loss of identity.244
Memory is critical to “lived” temporal experience but also to the constitution of the subject, its “identity.” Music is capable of referencing and playing with memory and time in complex ways. However, Carter sees a diminishing use of this capacity in the New Music. That Carter connects the “denial of memory and time” in musical form with “public communication which reduces everything to superficiality and ultimately to loss of identity” relates directly to what Williams notes is Adorno’s aspiration for new musical form:
Adorno hopes for a form of music in which particular moments are not subsumed by the overall structure; and it is well known that for him this vision relates to a larger concern with the ways in which all-purpose patterns of thinking crush the spontaneity of the moment.245
The “spontaneity of the moment” is where true human interaction capable of growth occurs and for this to happen time cannot be rigidly structured into “all-purpose patterns of thinking.” Carter also captures this sense of “spontaneity of the moment” in his contrasting of the “primitive’ organisation of time with his own musical treatment of part and whole:
In my own music, I am keenly aware of the ways in which some of these concepts of time can affect even small details and make them able to participate in larger
constructions. For it is the large continuity and conception of progress which
determines the choice of all the materials in my recent work—any given moment, for the most part, is a bridge from a previous one to a succeeding one and contains both
244 Carter, “Time Lecture,” 318.
the elements of unexpectedness as well as intelligible relations to the past and anticipation of the future, not always fulfilled in the way anticipated.246
Again the relationship of part to whole is presented here as a dialectic where the choice of materials are in service of the large continuity while simultaneously never ceasing to relate to their own flow. The final phrase “… anticipation of the future, not always fulfilled in the way anticipated” is laden with significance, because by allowing the spontaneous individual moment to determine the future, the form of the piece
accommodates its individual constituents rather than superimposing a pre-determined shape on their inherent expressive trajectories. As we saw in Chapter 1, the dialectical handling of part and whole was where Adorno located music’s immanent social critique. The relationship of the pre-formed material with sedimented historical meaning and the re-forming of material in a way that the particular is not subsumed or violated by the whole—in other words, the relationship of the objective and the subjective in music—must be a dialectical one for the music to contain any truth
content.247 While the concept of Subject-Object relations in Adorno’s philosophy of
music is not straightforward,248 it is worth at least sketching some of the elements in a
way that connections to Carter’s thought can be made.