The problem of the immediacy of sound for its own sake was one that Carter shared—to
some extent—with Adorno. Recall from Chapter 2 Carter’s Letter from Europe, written
in 1962, in which Carter considers music with “only a sensuous effect” to be too “primitive”: “[m]ost of the time the possibility of communication is denied, or, if
admitted, kept on the primitive level of any music that has only a sensuous effect.”374 It
is as if being distracted by sound prevented one from thinking. Carter expressed almost a mistrust of unmediated sonority, when in 1973 he articulated the significance of the communicative act of his music as almost opposing its musical content, in this quote we have encountered before:
Sound for its own sake is of very limited interest to me. Human beings, I think, come to expect more from music than entertaining patterns of tone-colors. Mine uses a large variety of these but, I hope, always to transcend the medium of sound completely and
present a more significant human message.375
Carter expresses the desire for his music to contain “patterns of tone-colors” not for aural entertainment, but for a greater purpose, one that “transcends” the sonorous and sensual experience of music to speak of a more urgent concern to his fellow human
beings than music itself.376 The dialectical tension in Carter’s formulation can be drawn
out by comparison to Johnson’s observation that “Hegelian theory suggests that art as a material, sensuous medium is superseded by the spiritual activity of pure thought. The
thinking which art provokes is higher than its own materiality.”377 The same dialectic
of the sensuous and the intellectual nature of music is found back in Adorno’s writing. As noted above, for Adorno the sonorous nature of music (e.g. timbre, tone-colour, orchestration, harmonic colour) was too unmediated to be of use in a critical sense. Sonority, for Adorno, must always be in the service of something more “meaningful;” that is, a musical syntax expressed in thematic-harmonic interrelations—the locus, for Adorno, of the musical idea. Adorno was critical to the point of dismissing post-war
374 Carter, “Letter from Europe (1963),” 220. See also “Sound and Silence in Time,” 132. Here Carter
criticizes the lack of compositional method and a mere focus on randomly playing with “sound effects” in “all present electronic music and musique concrète.”
375 “Elliott Carter, Interview with Stuart Lieberman (1973).”; quoted in Eisenlohr, Komponieren als
Entscheidungsprozess, 243.
376 See here Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 150 on Hegel, Adorno and the function of art as
‘truth’ over beauty, pleasure or usefulness.
music’s focus on tone-colour (in orchestration and electronic music especially) as a fetishization of sonority devoid of critical potential in itself:
… in works which count [sonority] is never an end in itself, but instead is both functional in the context of the work and also provides an element of fermentation.
Schoenberg always stressed that sonority [Klang] was a means to achieve the adequate
representation of the musical idea.378
This appears to resonate on some level with Carter’s contrasting of patterns which are there for mere entertainment with patterns which carry the music beyond itself to promote a thinking which was of greater significance than the experience of the music alone, a criticism which Carter incidentally made of much music, even pre-1945. Despite Carter’s suspicion of the vacuous use of sonority, Carter did not share with Adorno the notion that only the motivic could be the bearer of meaning. In his 1968 interview with Benjamin Boretz, Carter states this position clearly:
A tone-color, a chord, or a texture can play just as substantial a role in the musical process as a theme is said to have in previous music. (I would claim, of course, that insistence on the primacy of theme in older music is one of the falsifications music theorists and critics have handed down to us.)379
According to Carter, the importance of theme was overemphasised in relation to most music and just not limited to modern music. Certainly Carter saw the unique sonority and tone-colour inherent to the musical instruments as important material with which to compose (and not just something overlaid on the so-called real musical idea). He says:
The instrumentation and its location on stage are a fundamental part of the work, giving one level of continuity that can be moulded, among many others, not unlike
that once associated with theme and development. 380
The unique sound qualities of individual instruments furnished many of the expressive ideas of the majority of Carter’s music, both chamber and orchestral, starting from the beginning of his atonal style. However, Carter too required that sonority be at least working in tandem with other material and not for purely sensuous effect but for a clear expressive purpose:
378 Ibid., 79-81.
379 Boretz, “Conversation with Elliott Carter “ 4. 380 Ibid., 5.
As I have said, I feel very strongly that the instrumental makeup of my music has to be part of the concept of the music itself, not only the source of its material, of its structure, but most important, has to be justified by the expressive vision or character of the entire work. The instrumentation, along with all the other aspects of the work,
must seem to come from some expressive need.381
As we can see, Carter already early on had a complex notion of the possibilities of tone-colour for new music, and Johnson certainly finds this to be the case in a range of other post-war composers. Johnson argues that “foregrounding timbral concerns in no way results in a lessening of syntactical sophistication” and that there exists a
“thoroughly dialectical tension in postwar music between sonority and its rational
manipulation.”382 He goes on to say that “postwar music is full of works that produce
themselves out of the incongruence of highly rational formal processes and the sonic
material which they shape.”383 He cites among others Messiaen, Ligeti and Boulez but
of course Carter belongs equally in their company.384 In both the Boston and ASKO
concertos we see examples of sonority used as principle syntactical idea. In these pieces timbre is working almost thematically and has its own trajectory and subjective
demands, interacting dialectically with musical line and chord to affect a formal transformation over each piece’s unfolding. The distinctive timbres of the ritornello sections do engulf the listener in the sensuousness of the sonority. However, on each reprise, the onward motion of constituent elements (rhythm, interval, pitch,
Scheinthemen) connect timbre with the formal flow of the piece beyond pure sound effect.
Interestingly, Carter once commented about his sensuous, very fast, continuous single-
line piece for piano, Catenaries, that it was a rather showy piece, that lots of people
seemed to like it, and that therefore maybe he shouldn’t have written it.385 The piece is
in fact very entertaining to experience because of the speed at which the performer has
381 Ibid., 4.
382 Johnson, “‘The Elliptical Geometry of Utopia’: New Music Since Adorno,” 80. 383 Ibid.
384 For example, Carter articulates this very idea about the relationship between pitch and timbre in his
Piano Concerto in Boretz, “Conversation with Elliott Carter “ 7.
385 This comment was made in an online video that unfortunately is now no longer accessible. While this
makes the source unvarifiable, the notion that the composer should not write music to gratify the audience is expressed by Carter perhaps most clearly in his interview with Andrew Ford: “I believed that a
composer had a responsibility toward the society that nurtured him. However, … it doesn’t hold water really because society is such an amorphous and uncertain thing that you can’t really know this. And it might be that you’re really serving the society better writing something that is striking and original and unusual, than by writing something that is immediately accessible to the public.” Ford, Composer to Composer: conversations about contemporary music, 4.
to make the continuous unbroken texture flow. It is, as Carter said “very unlike anything
I ever wrote before or since.”386 It was perhaps the piece’s undialectical nature that
gave him the moment of doubt. But the fact that he did write this piece and clearly enjoyed it, exemplifies the shift in emphasis from a darkness and a density of layering to instances of lightness and transparency. It also opens up the possibility that the ideological need not always be found in the same places it used to be. Utopia may need to be painted in lighter shades so as not to loose its critical potential in the present moment in history.