Elliott Carter

Despite their common purpose, these Carter centennial publications could hardly be more different. While the volume emanating from the Paul Sacher Foundation—repository of a major collection of Carter manuscripts and other documents—is weighty and beautifully produced, the Pendragon Press Festschrift is slim and, in many ways, rather shoddy. Proofreading is appalling, and the thinking behind it is also open to question—not least the idea that extracts from compositions by several of the contributors deserve space that might have been given to more extended articles, or more extracts from Carter's own music (not, to be fair, that these are stinted). But no reader can complain that a variety of viewpoints is not presented, and several worthwhile ideas emerge. As is to be expected, the articles in A Centennial Celebration are by admirers and collaborators: Pierre Boulez is represented by a rather desultory interview, John Ashbery by an even more perfunctory memoir. But Charles Rosen finds a consistent concern with the shaping of a sustained line in works as widely separated and stylistically disparate as the Piano Sonata (1945–6) and Dialogues (2003), while Paul Griffiths (or ‘Griffith’, as he is spelt here) is illuminating on Carter's concern with words, and the way thinking for voices affects musical materials, especially in the John Hollander cycle Of challenge and of love (1994).

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