In the 1971 interview with Allen Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds,
Edwards asks Carter: “It has been remarked that you are today one of the only advanced composers who really thinks of music in a contrapuntal way. Is this way of thinking
specifically related to your feelings about time-continuity and musical form?” [italics
mine]. Edward’s question elicits the following response from Carter:
While it’s obvious that the constant and over-all phenomenon of music is one in which every “moment” is in the process of coming from some previous moment and leading to some future moment - only thus contributing to what is happening in the present - it seems to me that this process can have a number of simultaneous dimensions such that, for example, the moment, as it occurs, may consist of a number of
simultaneously evolving event patterns or sub-continuities of more or less radically different musical character, which interract with each other to produce the “total” continuity and character-effect (which, as the dialectical synthesis of the contributing sub-continuities and characters is irreducible to any one of these or to any “sum” of their qualities). It seems to me that this is very much the way we think all the time and that the feeling of experience is always the synthesis of our awareness of half-a-dozen simultaneous different feelings and perceptions interracting [sic.] together, with now one and now another coming into the main focus while the others continue, more or less in the background, to influence it and give it the intellectual and affective meaning it has.207
These two very dense sentences encapsulate a number of important, interrelated ideas. Firstly, it is noteworthy that, at the end of the quote, Carter draws his preceding technical explanation back to his conviction that (as we have seen above) music can “show” something about not only the make-up of an external society but also of an internal psychology: about “the way we think all the time” and about “the feeling of experience.” Once again, Carter emphasizes the importance of taking the “human” experience as a starting point for shaping musical material. Secondly, in this paragraph Carter makes an analogy between the psychological experience of time and what he calls “the simultaneous dimension” of music—in other words, the uniquely musical way in which sounds are combined into counterpoint. The plurality of the musical
counterpoint mirrors the plurality of thought. Carter elaborately describes the individual musical lines that make up such counterpoint as “simultaneously evolving event
patterns or sub-continuities of more or less radically different musical character.” This is deliberate on his part as he is wanting to move away completely from any association with traditional musical voices. By referring to the “total” effect as a “dialectical
synthesis,” Carter squarely places his musical layers in opposition to each other, in contrast to tonal music which is thematically, rhythmically and harmonically far more integrated than the layers in Carter’s own music. The “simultaneous dimension” in Carter’s music is “irreducible” and thereby presents a space for expressing the idea of multiple self-contained thought processes flowing at the same time.
Jonathan Bernard puts “the language of ‘dialectical synthesis’” of the passage quoted above down to the influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s Marxist/Hegelian philosophy of
film.208 In a section of his article “Elliott Carter and the Modern Meaning of Time,”
Bernard explores in some depth aspects of Eisenstein’s montage techniques,
convincingly highlighting parallels with Carter’s own descriptions of his compositional techniques and his concept of form. It is worth revisiting some of these parallels. For
example, central for Eisenstein was the idea that “art is always conflict.”209 The
connection of art to social conflict and to a Hegelian dialectical ontology is given
artistic expression in Eisenstein’s montage process. His list of montage techniques
were to be used successively, bringing each technique into conflict with the next, such
that each “collision resulted in a higher unity.”210 Eisenstein’s idea of “dynamism”
animated the collisions of his montage, providing the impetus for continual change that gave the film its overall form. Of the overall direction or progress of a film, Eisenstein said that the motion of montage should be
through a simultaneous advance of a multiple series of lines, each maintaining an independent compositional course and each contributing to the total compositional course of the sequence … The general course of the montage was an uninterrupted interweaving of these diverse themes into one unified movement. Each montage-piece had a double responsibility—to build the total line as well as to continue the
movement within each of the contributory themes …Montage is actually a large,
208 Bernard, “Elliott Carter and the Modern Meaning of Time,” 667.
209 Sergi Eisenstein, “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theroy, ed.
Jay Leyda (New York and London: Harncourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 46.
developing thematic movement, progressing through a continuing diagram of individual splices.211
The similarity of Eisenstein’s language to that of Carter’s in the quote above is indeed striking, and it is even more so in the following quote where Carter elaborates on the “progressive” nature of his music as he continues his response to Edwards:
What began to interest me was the possibility of a texture in which, say, massive vertical sounds would be entirely composed of simultaneous elements having a direct
and individual horizontal relation to the whole progress or history of the piece—that
is, simultaneous elements, each of which has its own way of leading from the previous
moment to the following one, maintaining its identity as part of one of a number of
distinct, simultaneously evolving, contributory thought-processes or musical characters … the principle idea is a sort of generalized program concerned with one aspect of the formal structure, whereby the trajectory of the whole piece, its
progression or rise and fall of tension in time, from its beginning to its end, is
produced by the interaction of the contributory elements. The coordination of these contrasting layer of music then forms an integral part of the musical discourse of the work and give it its small and large formal evolution. (The form I seek is Coleridge’s “form as proceeding,” and I try to avoid “shape as superinduced.” For the latter, as he says, “is either the death or the imprisonment of the thing; the former is its self- witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency.”)212 [italics mine]
The conceptualization of formal unfolding that Carter presents here is virtually identical to the way Eisenstein expresses his idea of the motion in montage. Carter elaborates on the make-up of his simultaneous dimension, adding important emphasis on how the individualized musical characters have a “double responsibility” (to borrow Eisenstein’s
term): to their own evolving identity and to the trajectory of the whole piece.213 Time-
continuity—or “the way everything … happens as and when it does in relation to
everything else”214—is crucial Carter says, “precisely in works that seem to depend on
‘discontinuity’ for their character.”215 Carter expresses this view strongly in Flawed
Words and Stubborn Sounds:
211 Quoted in Elliott Carter: collected essays and lectures, 1937-1995, 328.. Eisenstein’s use of the word
“theme” in film could be thought of as the equivalent to Carter’s use of the term “character” in music.
212 Edwards, Flawed Words, 101.
213 Bernard, “Elliott Carter and the Modern Meaning of Time,” 667. Bernard discusses Carter’s essay
“The Gesamkunstwerk (1966/94)” and notes how central the idea of irreversibility of time is to Carter’s musical thinking.
214 Edwards, Flawed Words, 92. 215 Ibid., 93.
I take exactly the opposite stand from those composers of every stripe who don’t believe the order of presentation is important in music and who don’t appear to recognize that this order influences and in fact confers the meaning and effect that a
given set of musical events comes to posses …216
The irreversibility of time is a given for Carter, and while time can be elastic in music,
the effect of sequence cannot be avoided. This view was certainly shared by Adorno.217
The distinction between “shape as superinduced” and “form as proceeding” that Carter refers to above speaks not only to the modernist rejection of classical formal models that imposed structure on the material, but also to this specific understanding of time- continuity that Carter wishes to capture in his music, something he frequently referred to as “flow.” In an interview with Boretz around the same time as the Edwards interview, Carter said:
Composers had been very routine about what goes on in any given instant of music— simultaneously, I mean—usually they settled for harmonic effects that emphasize certain qualities of the theme, or contrapuntal ones that repeat fragments of the main theme in order, so to speak, to cook the chicken in chicken broth, to intensify its particular character. I was interested, by contrast, in flow, in the contribution of the past to the present and the effect of predicted futures on it, in dealing with the process of an emerging present.218
The idea of “flow” sits at the very foundation of dialectical thought: in both Heraclitian and Hegelian/Marxist dialectic the fundamental state of the material world and human thought is one of constant conflict, change and flux, the subject as becoming rather than
being. 219 Carter’s writings and interviews are full of references to the significance of
“flow” in his compositions.220 Its relationship to the “dialectical synthesis of the
contributing sub-continuities and characters” in Carter’s music hinges on the concept of
216 Ibid., 103.
217 Adorno’s view on time is something Witkin insightfully critiques in Witkin, Adorno on Music, 180-
200. See also Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 179-81; and Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 78.
218 Boretz, “Conversation with Elliott Carter “ 13.
219 See Cherlin, “Dialectical Opposition in Schoenberg’s Music and Thought,” 159-60. Also
“Being, nothing and becoming,” ed. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Blackwell Reference Online: Blackwell Publishing), 23 August 2016. Accessed 20 September, 2016, DOI
10.1111/b.9780631175339.1992.x.
220 For example Edwards, Flawed Words, 37 and 98-99; Boretz, “Conversation with Elliott Carter “ 13;
Enzo Restagno, ed. Elliott Carter: In Converstaion with Enzo Restagno for Settembre Musica 1989, ISAM Monographs, no.32 (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1898), 10; Carter, “Music and the Time Screen (1976),” 363; and “Sound and Silence in Time,” 136. See alsoMarguerite Boland, “‘Linking’ and ‘Morphing’: Harmonic Flow in Elliott Carter’s Con Leggerezza Pensosa,” Tempo 60, no. 237 (2006).
the “emerging present,” a concept associated with process philosophy. In this
understanding, the present is not “pointillistic”221 and cannot be grasped as a static
moment but rather is conceived as continuous, incorporating both the past, which has
just come from being the present, and the future which is about to become the present; in Carter’s words, “the ‘now’ of any given point to me is only as significant as how it
came to be ‘now’ and what happens afterwards.”222
To summarize, Carter’s idea of flow is manifest by way of a music that contains a plurality of musical motion, collectively defining the trajectory of a composition but without abandoning the relationship of each musical strand to its own past and future unfolding, in other words a dialectical interaction. Interestingly (and perhaps
provocatively), Boretz questions whether Carter’s simultaneous dimension to
polyphony might really be a “new category of textural relations” to which Carter offers
the following comment:
My musical attitude did not arise from a desire to compose a certain kind of music “original” or otherwise. Rather it came directly from my own human experience and thoughts about it, corroborated by St. Augustine, A. N. Whitehead (especially in
Process and Reality), Eliot, Williams, Proust, Joyce, Broch and others. I have been in
search of a music that would embody the human experience of process and its transcendence.223
While Carter does not explore what he means by the suggestive reference to “transcendence,” it is hard not to hear Hegelian overtones. The rich web of the influences Carter cites here is certainly connected by a shared pre-occupation with temporality, memory, and human process. Bernard examines in detail the influence of
Whitehead on Carter, as well as the influence of Proust.224 I do not wish to retrace
Bernard’s extensive coverage of these specific influences. However, I would like to draw links between Carter’s conception of how the musical moment is constituted, its relationship to “human experience,” and Adorno’s notion of the centrality of time for a musical work’s truth content. For both Carter and Adorno, the nature of temporality was determining not only for the individual psychological experience but for the human social dynamic. I will attempt to flesh out these ideas in what follows.
221 Witkin, Adorno on Music, 182. 222 Edwards, Flawed Words, 98.
223 Boretz, “Conversation with Elliott Carter “ 14.
2.4 The dialectic of musical motion: “human” and “inhuman” experiences of time