On January 28, in celebration of the upcoming Elliott Carter Centenary, Naxos of America releases Volume 1 of the Complete String Quartets of Elliott Carter (Naxos 8559362). Featuring the Pacifica Quartet, renowned for their performances of Carter’s music, Volume 1 includes String Quartets Nos. 1 and 5; it is the only recording of the latter quartet currently in-print. Volume 2 is scheduled for release in early summer. Additionally, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will present the Pacifica Quartet performing the entire Carter quartet cycle at New York’s Ethical Culture Society on Wednesday, January 30 at 7:30 PM. The quartet will sign copies of the disc after the performance.
Composer’s note:
I probably decided to write what was to be the First Quartet when I read about a composition prize in Liege, Belgium, because there were many ideas swarming around in my imagination about expression, rhythm, and harmony, mostly derived from my Cello Sonata. I read through all the Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Berg, and Ruth Crawford Seeger quartets to find a way of using the four instruments to present my ideas. As I began to compose, with a Guggenheim Fellowship, in Tucson, Arizona, I soon realized that the work would make such demands on performers that it might never be performed, yet I continued. To my surprise it won the Liège Prize and the Walden Quartet became the first of many to play it. Then my Second, Third, and Fourth Quartets developed my imaginings in different ways until I began to realize that soon I would exhaust this direction, and so my Fifth Quartet became a farewell to the previous four and an exploration of a new vision. All the quartets were written about ten years apart. Now the Pacifica Quartet has had the courage and mastery to present all of them on the same program, which is amazing.
—Elliott Carter
Beginning with his Cello Sonata (1948), Carter began to develop a new aesthetic, synthesizing the techniques of the European modernists like Berg, Bartók and Debussy with those of the American “ultra-modernists”: composers like Conlon Nancarrow and Henry Cowell. Carter’s String Quartet No 1 (1950–1951) was written during the year he spent in the Arizona desert, and it was the first work in which he blended his most advanced techniques—i.e. rhythmic contrast, based on complex polyrhythms and proportional tempo changes—on such a large scale. And while the use of proportional tempo changes was not new—Stravinsky had already utilized them—Carter expert and composer David Schiff has noted that “the scale of tempos is larger, their ratios are more complex and, most importantly, changes in notated tempo often happen within rather than between phrases.” Carter’s music from this point forward became known for this unique rhythmic innovation, to which he referred as temporal modulation (and theorists later called “metric modulation”).
Of his String Quartet No. 1 Carter has commented:
The first thing that struck me about contemporary music in general had been that there was not much interest in rhythm. Stravinsky was maybe the only one that experimented, and only in certain works like the Rite of Spring. Also, Schoenberg had looked at it in that he wanted to make music sound like talking. It had the irregular rhythms like the way we talk. I felt that I would like to find a way of making music that developed the rhythmic side more than these people had done. I really tried to do that, and also at that time began to find various chords that interested me. My First String Quartet uses one of these chords very frequently. Finally I wrote this piece that had all kinds of rhythmic innovations in it. It had a last movement in which every theme gets faster each time it comes in. There is a counterpoint of themes, some of them are getting faster at one rate, and some are getting faster at another rate. It was a very interesting kind of thing to figure out how to do that. I think it worked quite well to my surprise…The whole piece is built on this system of constantly switching from one speed to another, not suddenly, but like shifting gears in a car. You don’t know you’ve gotten into a new speed until something defines it more clearly, but at the transitional moment, you don’t know that it’s changing.
In his liner notes for the disc, Bayan Northcott writes: “The quartet is organized in a quasi-Classical four-movement sequence: Fantasia, Allegro scorrevole (a kind of scherzo), Adagio, and Variations, with only two short pauses in its 45-minute unfolding, occurring not between, but within movements; the first pause is in the middle of the Allegro scorrevole, and the second shortly after the beginning of the Variations. Moreover, Carter begins with a jagged solo cello recitative that is only completed by the violin at the end of the quartet, as if to suggest that everything that happens in between is a gigantic parenthesis in time.”
String Quartet No 5 (1995) consists of six short movements and five interludes and, in direct contrast to Quartet No. 1, displays a playful freedom that borders on improvisation. Mr. Northcott continues, “The even-numbered movements comprise a suite-like series of character pieces, each focused on a particular area of expression or tone color: a nervy, volatile Giocoso; a Lento espressivo of slowly shifting chords; a scurrying, scherzo-like Presto scorrevole; an Allegro energico of forceful rhetoric; a remote Adagio sereno of high string harmonics; and finally, a bizarre pizzicato coda marked Capriccioso. By contrast, the comparatively random-sounding (though exactly notated) Introduction and linking Interludes 1-V evoke those breaks in rehearsal when individual players may be heard simultaneously practicing snippets of a movement just played, or the next to come. The result is a teasing kind of double focus in which the same materials are heard in contexts of order and (apparent) disorder, raising interesting questions about the nature of musical coherence and continuity, and typical of the mercurial lightness of spirit that has increasingly characterized Carter’s later works.”
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