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A cycle of five songs composed on the poetry of John Hollander, current poet laureate of Connecticut. ... Read more

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Includes Recitative and Improvisation. ... Read more

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Standard timp lit. = must-have for serious musicians...
If you're a percussion major ANYWHERE, chances are that you'll run into Carter's timpani etudes at some point... unless your prof. just totally hates timpani, then maybe not. But usually, yes.

CAREFUL when buying this from Amazon!

When mine came in the mail, someone had squished into a box that was too small and so it was badly crumpled up. Took a few days and a few dictionaries to (mostly) flatten it out again. Almost sent it back, but the music was fine, so I didn't. Now it's fine. I suggest putting a note on your transaction when you purchase to have it packaged CORRECTLY and with care. There's no guarantee but it's worth a shot. ... Read more

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Variations for Orchestra (1967) ... Read more

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Die Hard Forms
this was commissioned by The Louisville Orchestra, you may recall the impressive exhaustive recording agenda that orchestra had maintained,with hundreds of works played yet not all recorded.
This was Carter first primary piece for orchestra with his newly discovered musical language of the dodecaphonic :First String Quartet:, some attribute this excursis as well to the protean, lean :Cello Sonata: of 1948, and the the "Eight Etudes and a Fantasy", and also the impressive,groundtreading :Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952),but each work seeks its own agenda conceptual space and procedures,the Orchestral :Variations: of Carter has a flow, a pathway into the lineage at times to Schoenberg's unforgettable :Variations: for Orchestra:,some claim Carter's are even more interesting, Hmmm! all music seeks its own context; the genre of "variations"I would say Schoenberg's creativity was initially not as timid or self-conscious as Carters,but all these superlatives lead nowheres;"variations form" is/was one more like a study,and one duly practiced under the primary signifiers of dodecaphonic language,simple examine the music of Wolpe or Shapey,and Babbitt recall all came to terms with this genre at some time.If you don't know where to go,(in one's aesthetic, of the philosophic) usually a set of variations will suffice. These Carter "Variations" are rather terse and measured,I cannot help feel Webern's "Passacaglia for Orchestra" here juxtaposed in some skewed manner and you sense Ives' death(1954) hovering within the four pages someplace,:Variation 7: for example utilizes juxtapositon of nefarious materials,as Ivesian moments thrown together, in fact the other :Variations: can come to make reference points(punkte) within music history, this after some more obvious as :Variation 2: a canon in measured style,where the displacement of interveals comes to equal the rhythms deployed,something Carter was to developed later.Durational procedures has always intrigued Carter in his own way,the contraction and augmentation, expansion of durations in measured procedures.And he new very little at the time of the achievements of the post-war European composers/ / /
:Variation 1: is light and fast,wistful; whereas "Variation 2: is heavy and slow, exposition materials,before we ascend into greater use of abstract procedures, as "Variation 4" a continuous ritardando, where the weight,of the durational frame is burdened with a dotted value, then more, weight,:Variation 5: is somewhat a motionless etude, of wonderful timbres, strings and winds,:Variation 7 some say is like a jazzy scherzando, but nothing to me strikes of jazz in Carter, his persona was entirely opposite.I recall Solti was very fond of this work and placed it on his first European Tour with the Chicago Symphony. ... Read more

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One of the finest American composers of the 20th century, Walter Piston (1894-1976) taught for over thirty years (1926-1960) at Harvard, where he guided the education of such diverse, well-known composers as Elliott Carter, Leroy Anderson, Arthur Berger, Gail Kubik, Irving Fine, Harold Shapiro, Leonard Bernstein, Daniel Pinkham, Gordon Binkerd, Robert Moevs, Samuel Adler, Karl Kohn, John Harbison, and Frederic Rzewski. This book profiles the biographies, major accomplishments, stylistic development, and technical resources of 33 of these students, including four women. Special emphasis is placed on their relation to Piston and to each other. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on March 1, 1994. The length of the article is 1319 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and His Students, from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski.
Author: Bill F. Faucett
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 1994
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: v50Issue: n3Page: p988(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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Parts only for: 2 violins, viola and cello. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

another water mark
there are certain works within modernist repertoire that represent a new departure, a break, or rupture as the French like to expound. Alain Badiou looks at the history,or trajectories of concept is a better term of the aesthetic as those places,those works where we can say represent an "event", a work that in many ways summed up a language, the beginning of an end; and holds within its four pages some creative possibility for continuation for development,for years,not as now a speeded in Virilio-ian droma; the work, the elegant canons and mirror repetitions of Webern certainly held that for the post-war generation of composers, and on this side of the Atlantic, the works of John Cage, threw a large influential net to catch many emerging genres,and cadre of performance artists, new instruments,graphic notation and live electronics.Carter's "First String Quartet" was equally one such work, an "event", call it American neo-expressionism/or romanticism, it sounds quite odious today to utilize such jargon, Carter had left his rather facile music of the previous 20 years for a stint into the language and challenges of dodecaphonic handlings, along his own quite original trajectories, although every movement shall we say is merely different "readings" of the same differing sets of ground rules,shapes,images, and emotive content, be it Cubism, serialism, minimalism,or expressionism, now all quite useless terms ready for the scraps of history/ / /if you situate this "First Quartet" you can see where things, materials, approaches presented themselves in fairly formative dimensions,the language of the new, must be learned,by the artist;but the outwardness of this quartet was quite exciting for its time,the submission of characters and roles for each part, the cello for the most part more pronounced,lumbering along arrogant at times,to the more threadbare viola, less arduous less spontaneous so,imprisoned at times in predictable triple shapes, 3 rhythms for the most part, the first violin then sustaining pencil thin tones,and harboring its own "character" / / / the second violin interrupting all that exists with contrary rhythms,also subservient as traditional speaks to it. There are also "enclosures" of intervallic content, one sequestered limited to one particular part, only the cello is allowed expansion, this is something developed vigorously some 20 years later in the "Third String Quartet". Two duets contrast each other;the buzz of the term "metric modulation" is also here is budding forms/ / /of interjecting slowly the change of a common pulse,then accelerated but within a definable proportion. You may recall the first time you had heard this quartet, and it truly sounded like music from another place, a music of exile,not a music that belonged anywhere,until now,50 years it does take these works to become partially understood, as Adorno said Beethoven we think is better understood than Webern, but that is not true,it never was true/ / /Carter's quartets now grace untold genres, now a safe music, fully acceptable into the neo-liberal order. ... Read more

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Chapters: String Quartet No. 1, Holiday Overture, Eight Pieces for Four Timpani, String Quartet No. 2, What Next?, String Quartet No. 3, Clarinet Concerto, String Quartet No. 5, String Quartet No. 4. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 36. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The First String Quartet by American composer Elliott Carter (1908-) was written during a year spent in the Arizona desert from 1950-51. To some extent, it can be said that this was his first major breakthrough work as a composer. A primary compositional technique used in the quartet is the principle of metric modulation (temporal modulation)one for which Carter was to become particularly renowned. Although he was not the first composer to use this device (such as Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, (1920)) he was seemingly the first to develop such complex transformations. It is said that Carter assigned to tempo the structural role that earlier composers gave to tonality. The quartet embeds four movements in three sections, all contained between two solo cadenzas acting as bookends at each end of the quartet. The two cadenzasthe first for cello and the concluding for first violinframe the piece conceptually, as Carter explains: Like the desert horizons I saw daily while it was being written, the First Quartet presents a continuous unfolding and changing of expressive charactersone woven into the other or emerging from iton a large scale. The general plan was suggested by Jean Cocteaus film Le Sang dun poète, in which the entire dreamlike action is framed by an interrupted slow-motion shot of a tall brick chimney in an empty lot being dynamited. Just as the chimney begins to fall apart, the shot is broken off and the entire movie follows, after which the shot of the chimney is resumed at the point it left...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=16130990 ... Read more

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Night Fantasies ... Read more

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golden fruits of maturity
this is Carter's most interesting piano solo,written late;a quadruple commission; it seems most of his piano repertoire,his thinking excursis for the keyboard has been skewed toward chamber settings(The Double Concerto),the Wind and String Quintets(also late bloomer works) and the massive penumbral "Piano Concerto", that which has equally more interesting orchestrations than the content for what is played on the piano. The earlier Brahmsian/Copland-esque "Piano Sonata" from the Forties, has its points of interests,rolling rotund resonant timbres,bombastic declamations but that is an earlier Carter,formative times and a different set of creative paradigms at work actually, prior to the maturity and interest that set in after the "First String Quartet". . .The golden fruits of maturity has seen many works even an opera of mixed quality,and predictable-ness some of the solos and duets,dedications as "Espirit rude" are quite glib materials,tossed off. Here however the "Night Fantasies" is an interesting piece of music,certainly one that has entered the modern piano literature, a modern nocturne of darkness for dark times which never seem to recede,simply differing gradations of it. This work has entered the mainstream and academia naturally and you can see it played on piano competitions,although difficult to perform in that all the suggestive timbral layers Carter employs/deploys need continuous clarity.He sets a large pallette of piano attacks,mixed with an equal distributions of dynamics sustained moments mixed with more percussive effects,staccato with sustained, cloistered-like chorals deployed.If this agenda for "layering" is abandoned well the work will cohere-melt into one quite boring unadorned glob of timbre, suggestive of Schumann or Brahms having lived through World War 2.Ursula Oppens and Charles Rosen have exhibited the most interesting readings I think,and quite recently Pierre Laurent Aimard,in a nice recording with his own commnetary thrown in.I would like to hear Frederic Rzewski play this work, with his overriding dynamic approach and technical clarity he can summon to his fingers and perhaps glean the overbearing romantic-nesses from the work, making it leaner and more articulated.That is always the problem with modernity of this kind,it always tempts the interpreter into a more facile reading,more direct, more bound to the aesthetic of the romantic as Solti playing Schoenberg as Brahms or as he had done with Carter's "Variations for Orchestra" he had takened on tour.. If you bring direct unencumbered musicianship to Carter the music will reward you, and if you acknowledge its intellectual agendas you will be twice blessed.
Jon Link has done excellent work on mapping the poly-rhythmic distributions of this work,and David Schiff's excellent book to a less exhaustive degree and Yes! some can hear all of it,the poly-rhythms, layered textures if you have a map inside your head, and have some pre-requisite home study of the score prior to a listening experience, but short of that the work still harbors a neo-romanticism with an affinity for modernity, the wonderful fast furioso filigree displays, "fugitive" lines wanting to escape from the work's structural tyranny has a kind of other wordly quality. ... Read more

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Composed for and premiered by the Juilliard String Quartet and clarinetist Charles Neidich. 15 minutes. ... Read more

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Pages: 386 ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on September 1, 1995. The length of the article is 830 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Elliott Carter: A Bio-Bibliography.
Author: Carl Rahkonen
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 1995
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: v52Issue: n1Page: p112(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on September 1, 2002. The length of the article is 1776 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: Elliott Carter ou le temps fertile. (Book Reviews: Music Since 1900).
Author: Jean-Michel Boulay
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 2002
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: 59Issue: 1Page: 61(4)

Article Type: Book Review

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Chapters: Vilayat Inayat Khan, Elliott Carter, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Arturo Rodas, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Vladimir Cosma, Ron Nelson, Gérard Grisey, Sophie Lacaze, Marcel Poot, Jacob Druckman, Zino Francescatti, Halina Czerny-Stefańska, Samson François, Ivan Ilić, Sylvain Cambreling, Magda Tagliaferro, Charles Bruck, André Boucourechliev, Zygmunt Mycielski, Edson Elias, Paul Badura-Skoda, Leonid Karev, Art Simmons, Richard Hoppin, Antoni Szalowski, Yvonne Lefébure, Vincent Dumestre, Bruno Mantovani, Christian Ivaldi. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 109. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. (born December 11, 1908) is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer born and living in New York City. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, and then returned to the United States. After a neoclassical phase, he went on to write atonal, rhythmically complex music. His compositions, which have been performed all over the world, include orchestral and chamber music as well as solo instrumental and vocal works. He has been extremely productive in his latter years, publishing more than 40 works between the ages of 90 and 100, and three more since he turned 100. Carter's father, Elliott Carter, Sr. was a businessman and his mother was the former Florence Chambers. The family was well-to-do. As a teenager he developed an interest in music and was encouraged in this regard by the composer Charles Ives (who sold insurance to his family). In 1924 a "galvanized" 15-year-old Carter was in the audience when Pierre Monteux conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the New York première of The Rite of Spring, according to a 2008 report. Carter was again in attendance (see below) at Carnegie Hall, on the occasion of his 100th birthday in 2008, when the orch...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=246830 ... Read more