Elliott Carter

Born December 11, 1908, New York City.

Réflexions

On December 11, his one-hundredth birthday, Elliott Carter celebrated in Carnegie Hall; accepted cheers for his latest composition; and listened to the packed house sing "Happy Birthday" while a large cake, decorated with musical notes and piano keys, was wheeled out on stage. There's really no precedent in the history of music for a career as long and adventurous--and as continuously vital--as Carter's. Verdi wrote Falstaff, his last opera, at eighty; Richard Strauss signed off with his Four Last Songs when he was eighty-four. But Carter's eighties and nineties have been a time of ambitious pursuits and big projects: he completed his largest orchestral work, the triptych Symphonia, at eighty-eight, and wrote his first opera, What Next?, at ninety, an age when most important composers are content to host retrospectives.

When Carter was asked to comment on the horrors of September 11, 2001, which he watched from his Manhattan apartment, he recalled how deeply affected he was when he visited the battlefields of Verdun and Rheims in 1922--a reference that makes the span of his adult life seem improbably broad. (There's certainly no other significant living composer who could make the same claim; Olivier Messiaen, who was born the day before Carter, died seventeen years ago.) Carter's musical roots reach back to the dawn of modernism. He was born the year Schoenberg composed his Five Pieces for Orchestra; he knew Edgard Varèse, who lived just down the street, and Charles Ives, with whom he attended Boston Symphony concerts.

Several years ago, Carter was profiled in Fortune magazine, in an article on the now-fashionable phenomenon of "Working Past 90." Along with Philip Johnson, the iconic American architect, and Harlem minister William Lee Freeman, Carter was heralded for going strong as one of what Fortune carelessly called the "old-old"--workers today who defy life's clock. "I get tired when I don't work," he was quoted as saying. Carter still writes nearly every day. He turned out ten new pieces in 2007 and six more last year. He composed two new works for last summer's Tanglewood Festival, and this past September, his new flute concerto was premiered at the Jerusalem Festival. In December, the week of Carter's birthday, the Boston Symphony unveiled a new piano concerto, Interventions, which was commissioned by James Levine, who conducted, and Daniel Barenboim, the soloist.

Carter first attracted attention with chamber music: his Cello Sonata of 1948 and First String Quartet that followed two years later announced a radical new voice in music--and introduced Carter's most celebrated innovation, "metrical modulation," which, at first hearing, suggests instruments moving at different speeds, almost oblivious to each other. Both his second and third string quartets, which continued this exploration, won Pulitzer prizes. Stravinsky called Carter's powerful Double Concerto of 1961 a masterpiece, and the other concertos that have followed over the subsequent years (including the Cello Concerto commissioned by the Chicago Symphony and premiered here with Yo-Yo Ma in 2001) have demonstrated time after time Carter's affinity for big orchestral pieces that turn convention on its head. These works, along with a handful of other instrumental scores, such as the Symphony of Three Orchestras and the recent Symphonia, are the pieces that get mentioned first in any discussion of Carter's achievement--they are not only the great landmarks of his output, but also some of the defining musical monuments of the twentieth century.

Carter composed Réflexions to honor the eightieth birthday of another modern master, Pierre Boulez. The friendship between these two men began after Carter first heard Boulez's landmark Le marteau sans maître in 1955. Since then, Carter has been an avid follower of Boulez's music, and Boulez has become an important conductor of Carter's. Paul Griffiths has described Carter's birthday present as a "swirl of reflections on six notes that spell out the dedicatee's surname." It unfolds as a sequence of virtuoso solos and duets, characterized by sparkling textures, lively wit, and musical humor (when the cello plays a wrong note, B natural, the orchestra corrects it, by playing B-flat). Written for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which Boulez founded in 1976 (and which later gave the premieres of several works by Carter), Réflexions is scored for the ensemble's distinctive lineup. It opens with the startling sound of glockenspiel mallets striking a single large stone--pierre in French.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Program notes copyright © 2009 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All Rights Reserved. Program notes may be reprinted only in their entirety and with written consent of Chicago Symphony Orchestra. For reprint permission, contact Denise Wagner, Program Editor, by mail at: Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 220 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60604, or by email.

These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs and artists subject to change without notice.