As I touched on in Chapter 1.3.b: Form-content dialectic, Carter’s 1956 essay “A
Further Step” articulates his idea of an “emancipated musical discourse”—of form as
self-originating and developing out of a process of constantly changing moments.405 On
the surface at least, the ideas that underpinned much of Carter’s mature music seem to be at odds with the appearance of ritornello form in a number of his later works,
including the ASKOConcerto and BostonConcerto.406 Not only is ritornello form an
archetype that fits Carter’s definition of “pre-established pattern” to be avoided in truly new music, it is also a form to which the continual return of previously heard material is intrinsic—it contains a kind of “self-evident continuity” contrary to Carter’s ideal of an “emancipated musical discourse.” But in view of the elements of lightness that
contribute to Carter’s late style and with an appreciation of Carter’s rethinking of the meaning and manipulation of musical repetition that accompany this late period, the appearance of a traditional repetitive formal structure might come as less of a surprise. Furthermore, while the appearance of ritornello form in Carter’s music could never have been predicted, two established aspects of his formal approach make it less incongruous with his overall compositional aesthetic than one might initially suspect. Firstly, in contrast to many post-war composers, Carter has on more than one occasion constructed his complex and novel formal processes in a delicate shadow of more traditional formal schemes, as for example David Schiff points out in relation to the Double Concerto
(1961) and the Fourth String Quartet (1986).407 This is of course in line with Carter’s
concern for engaging with the historical nature of musical material (traditional forms included) that we saw in Chapter 2. Secondly, Carter’s interest in the Baroque principle
405 Carter, “A Further Step (1958).”
406 And also in the Cello Concerto (2000) and the Clarinet Concerto (1996).
407 On the Double Concerto, see Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 245; on the Fourth Quartet, see ibid.,
of ensemble contrasts —fundamental to ritornello form—goes back a long time, particularly in his concerto writing, perhaps precisely because of its in-built dialectical possibilities in relation to orchestration and sonority. The Double Concerto was the first to employ soloists each accompanied by their own contrasting concertino. This
principle was later realized in various ways in the Piano Concerto (1965), Oboe Concerto (1986), and Clarinet Concerto (1996). It isn’t until the Clarinet concerto,
however, that the idea of a regular alternation of tutti and sub-sections of the ensemble
appears as a formal device. In the Clarinet Concerto, the tutti function more as transitional passages rather than full-blown formal sections, although they do recur between each of the solo sections, hinting at what is to come in later pieces. In the
ASKO and Boston concertos, Carter married the Baroque principle of ensemble
contrasts with the formal ritornello patterning.
While it is striking how easily the form of these two concertos can be grasped on first listening, Carter certainly reworks the ritornello form critically. Traditionally, the ritornellos in the Baroque concerto grosso were an important structural means of
stabilizing tonal regions, reinforcing themes and providing coherence to the (still novel)
virtuosic escapades of the instrumental solos.408 However, in the ASKO and Boston
concertos the ritornellos get their identity not from any traditional thematic return or
harmonic stability but from the memorable tutti textures. The sonority of these textures
themselves carry an important part of the musical conceit of the pieces, and are a
manifestation of the transformed role of sonority as a communicative element in its own
right. In the BostonConcerto, the pizzicato/staccato texture is so unusual and striking
that Charles Rosen’s observation about the solo classical concerto—”[t]he most
important fact about concerto form is that the audience waits for the soloist to enter, and
when he stops playing they wait for him to begin”409—could be applied here in reverse:
when the tutti gives way to the soloists, we wait for the tutti to return. This surprisingly light yet energetic orchestral sound creates an effect of shimmering movement with its frequent repetition of short single pitches and pitch intervals in individual instruments. The allusion to the rain in the lines of the William Carlos Williams’ poem
accompanying the concerto is inescapable, and the listener is undoubtedly expected to make the association (more on the poem in Chapter 5). The dialectical tension of the
408 Michael Talbot, “The Italian Concerto in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century,” in
Cambridge Companion to the Concerto, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2005), 45; also Simon and Jehoash Hirsberg McVeigh, The Italian Solo Concerto 1700-1760: Rhetorical Strategies and Style History (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), 29.
falling rain image realized by the pizzicato orchestral texture lies in a repetitiveness that
appears static but that is nonetheless created by way of continual movement. As we will
see, in both Williams’s rain and Carter’s ritornellos the dialectic of stasis and movement are ultimately shaped so as to affect a transformation although, as I argue, not a
synthesis. By contrast, the ASKO ritornellos’ loud sustained tutti chords, spread across
a consistently wide registral space, appear as static monolithic objects periodically interposed between the flowing counterpoint of the smaller concertino sections. While
Carter has not identified any poetic or textual association with the ASKOConcerto, the
orchestral sonority and static rhythmic treatment of the tutti chords are reminiscent of Varèse’s chord masses and what Jonathan Bernard has termed Varèse’s “frozen music,”
particularly in Intégrales.410 But as we will see, in the ASKOConcerto too the stasis as
well as the repetition are transformed over the unfolding of the piece. These are not pieces that Carter could have written in the 1960s, when the self-evidence of the form and the repetitive structure would have grated with an avant-garde aesthetic. Yet the treatment of repetition here is decidedly late-modernist, engaging with the temporal experience of both ‘flow’ and of ‘infinite reprise,’ bringing the ideas of development and of repetition into dialectical tension through the large-scale formal structures of the pieces. Here Carter’s use of pitch repetition is unlike the deliberate symbolic critique of
temporal stasis at the end of A Symphony of Three Orchestras, where Carter seems to be
implying, through the latent program of the piece, that minimalist repetition represents a
kind of death.411 Instead, these pieces might be heard as an ironic commentary on
repetition: it is quite surprising to discover the myriad of ways in which Carter creates the effect of repetition when in fact very little is actually being repeated and there are certainly no literal repeats. The unavoidable ease with which the ear makes connections between similar sounds means that only very little need stay exactly the same in order for the listener to associate sonic events, thus allowing for the “constant growth and change” in musical content that Carter prizes so highly, without losing the effect of a ritornello.
Carter’s “constant growth and change” is not a Schoenbergian developing variation, since there is no gradual transformation of material from one shape to the next. Nor are
410 Jonathan Bernard, “Varèse’s Space, Varèse’s Time,” in Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor,
Visionary, ed. Felix Meyer and Heidi Zimmermann (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006).
411 Kerner, “Creators on Creating: Elliott Carter.”; cited in Dyck-Hemming, “Diskurze zur ‘Musik Elliott
Carters’,” 156. See Noubel’s interpretation of the static repetition in this passage in Noubel, Elliott Carter ou le temps fertile, 181-85. Thanks to John Link for bringing this to my attention.
Carter’s “very vivid moments” completely block-like in a Stravinskyian sense; instead
there is a flow and elasticity to the motion from texture to texture.412 Carter himself
refers to the influence of late Debussy on this aspect of his formal thinking.413
Debussy’s non-systematic and discontinuous presentation of distinct musical ideas is more akin to a stream-of-consciousness approach to musical time, neither
developmental nor consisting of a collage or moment-form approach.414 Indeed, the
“constant change and growth” of Carter’s forms and his belief that “music should be continuously surprising, [but] it should be so in a sense that whatever happens should
continue an already-perceived ongoing process or pattern”415 resonates with Richard
Parks’ discussion of “kinetic form” in Debussy’s music: “Kinetic form arises from the organization of discontinuities and imparts the sense of motion that is such an important aspect of musical experience. ... Kinetic form derives coherence from a consistent
pattern of change of a particular type416 ...” On closer inspection, Carter’s particular
“re-forming” of ritornello form in the ASKO and Boston concertos reveals in each case a
struggle between the cyclical drive of the ritornello form and the kinetic drive of the materials: the pattern of change is one that unfolds linearly but discontinuously within the “infinite reprise” of the ritornello sections. In each piece, there is a clear division of basic musical content between the ritornellos and the contrasting concertino sections with which they alternate. While the ritornello sections emphasize whole ensemble playing and the vertical pitch dimension by way of vertically ordered twelve-tone chords prolonged in various ways, the concertinos—each very different from the
other—unfurl long contrapuntal melodies that emphasize the movement and interplay of lines over time. Line and chord are in a sense treated as distinct musical entities and partitioned between ritornello and concertino sections giving them contrasting characters not dissimilar to the way Carter partitions interval repertoires, speeds and
412 Schiff outlines many such “combinatorial” forms in Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter. See also
Bernard’s analysis in “Poem as Non-Verbal Text: Elliott Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra and Saint-John Perse’s Winds,” in Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretations, ed. Craig Ayrey and Mark Everist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996); and John Link on “linking” textures in “Elliott Carter’s Late Music,” 46-49.
413 Edwards, Flawed Words, 98.
414 Carter sees himself as having developed this aspect of Debussy’s music further in his own music. See
Carter, “The Three Late Sonatas of Debussy (1959/94),” 251-52. Greenbaum also notes a connection between Carter’s and Debussy’s “dialectical” approach to form in Greenbaum, “Debussy, Wolpe and Dialectical Form,” 350. For more on form in Debussy’s music see Richard S. Parks, The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Marianne Wheeldon, “Interpreting
Discontinuity in the Late Works of Debussy,” Current Musicology 77 (2004).
415 Edwards, Flawed Words, 87-88.
416 Parks, The Music of Claude Debussy, 233. My thanks to John McCaughey for making me aware of
“behaviour patterns” between simultaneous musical characters in many other compositions.
However, if this characterisation of sections holds true for the ASKO and Boston
concerto in a general sense, it is also precisely the chord-line distinction that begins to blur and change over the course of both pieces, and this process, as we shall see, provides a subtle yet powerful overarching linear continuity, or kinetic drive, which is overlaid onto the cyclic ritornello form. As we will see in Part 2, this reading posits a
more complex and ambiguous formal design to the ASKO and Boston concertos than the