[Trombone-l] Elliott Carter

[Bill Dinwiddie]

I knew it all the time:

Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:53 pm From the
Associated Press NEW YORK --- 

American composer Elliott Carter, an exemplar of
the atonalist style of modernism and according to admirers the greatest
living practitioner of his craft, apologized to music lovers around the
world today for what he called "a half century of wasted time." "What
was I thinking?" the venerable Mr. Carter, 99, said at his home in
Manhattan.
"Nobody likes this stuff. Why have I wasted my life?" Carter said he "went
wrong" bac k in the 1940s and spent the next 60 years pursuing the musical
dead-end of atonality.

In the past seven decades, he has produced five string
quartets, a half dozen song cycles, works for orchestra, solo
concertos and innumerable chamber works for various combinations of
instruments --- all
in an advanced, complex style he now dismisses as "noise." Despite
consistent encouragement of many mainstream musicians such as Boston
Symphony Music Director James Levine, for Chicago Symphony conductor Daniel
Barenboim, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Carter said his many admirers were
"delusional." "The critics who said they were just congratulating
themselves for being
smarter than everybody else were right all along," he said. "We should
all go back and get our heads on straight." Carter said he blamed his late
wife, Helen, for turning him into an unrepentant modernist. "She liked
this stuff,
and I could never say no to her," he said. Mrs. Carter died in 2003 at age
95. Since then, Carter said, he has been reevaluating his aesthetic.
"I'd like to write something pretty for a change --- maybe something
based on an Irish folk tune," he said. He was uncertain whether he would
withdraw
his substantial catalogue from the repertoire, though one alternative
would be to revise his works, ending each with a tonic triad, he said.
"I feel
like an enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders," Carter said.
"From now on, I promise to be good."




...hysterical! alas, Vonnegut did not live to read this...

Bill Dinwiddie
billdin at comcast.net