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Title: Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation With Elliott Carter by Allen Edwards, Elliott Carter ISBN: 0-393-02159-9 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 1972 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.25

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: expositions of an American structural thinker
Comment: This is the early Carter, we hear about his early days with Mlle.Boulanger,her perceptive clarvoyance for her illuminations of a work,her deep concern for her students,including the selctions of gifts for travel back to the United States,well New York. Stravinsky was the genius of the age, the Twenties, Carter had heard at a soiree, Persephone, with Mr. Stravinsky at the piano. He always brought an impeccable sense of rhythm, of precision, of attack.Carter distinguishes the piano composer Ravel, Igor.

There are great issues discussed here as the future of the orchestra, how difficult it has become to give everyone in the modern orchestra something to play. These interviews traverse only to 1971, Carter was on the threshold of his monumental Third String Quartet. But we obtain quite well thought out reflections of the darkly brooding "Piano Concerto",a work completed during a stay in Berlin with students, Rzewski among them, and the "Concerto for Orchestra". The latter he had fragmented the modern orchestra into 'concertini', small ensembles of fascinating timbres.

Carter here is quite social in his reflections of tradition and the elitist endeavor of writing music. He reflects that we really cannot speak of a national consciousness for serious composers as Carter has so obviously become in the past ten years. That perhaps writing music for the primary venues will be something for the past. And if we warp=speed to the present from 1971 we see the corporate agenda for orchestral commissions as Eisner's vacuous vision of "Mickey Mouse" giving music money to Alan Jay Kernis and Michael Torke for modern creations, creations quite obvious and predictable.Yet without points of interest.

Carter reflects quite profoundly on his working methods, the five and seven tone chordal structures, in the "Piano Concerto", and The powerfully wrought "Concerto for Orchestra", the latter written during the Vietnam Times, of street anti-establishment rebellion.

We learn the impetus of Carter's musical aesthetic as linear, the only aesthetic worth pursuing, and he makes a profoundly convincing arguments against contra the texture bound creations a la Stockhausen, where texture became boring after the first initial moments. Or he reflects deeply on the vacuity of serial thinking that never lets the EAR be the primary focus for music, rather the highly abstracted geometric sense of music not for the EAR but the self-indulgent mind.

Shame this is out-of print, I have an old tattered copy that I cherish deeply.