Getting to grips with Carter, part 1
Anyone reading this blog who has come to it via my Twitter feed (@5357311) will almost certainly be aware of my ongoing struggle with the piano music of Elliott Carter, posted in the form of “535 vs. Carter match report[s]“. When I started work on Caténaires last year in earnest, I knew little else of Carter’s output, and had been drawn to the piece after hearing Pierre-Laurent Aimard give its première performance at the Proms in 2008. 12 pages of semiquavers at breakneck speed. “How hard can it be?” thought I.
Needless to say, I found Caténaires extraordinarily trying from the off. Yes, slow practise is the way to get round a piece like that – but the other problem was getting it to stick, even at a slow speed. It’s a little like playing Feldman at the speed of light, as there are patterns in there, but even when they repeat, they’re modified. In essence, what you have is a sequence of thousands of notes with very few triggers for memory. It really isn’t possible – for me, at least – to read a piece like that at the speed it needs to be played.
After several months of trudging through the first few pages, I bailed out. This wasn’t simple cowardice or frustration, I hasten to add, although I’d done my fair share of shaking my fist in a rage, furious with this pesky 100-year-old man whose brain was still evidently more musically agile than mine will ever be.
I decided, in a moment of rare clarity, that what was going wrong must be more than just a localised issue with Caténaires. I simply didn’t have a feel for whatever it was Carter was getting at. I resolved to do two things: listen to a representative sample of his work, and try to play an easier piece.
Ploughing through the string quartets, assorted piano works, and the Nonesuch box set, what I discovered was something that must already be blindingly obvious to anyone who is a devotee of the great man: there’s something unquantifiably and wonderfully right about Carter’s music. It might be fiendish, but it fizzes with energy and fun.
Inspired, I got hold of scores of the Two Diversions, 90+, and Retrouvailles, and selected the last of those as my first target, reasoning that it was short and looked as though its demands upon fingers and brain wouldn’t be too severe.
Thus began the start of a beautiful relationship…
>>there’s something unquantifiably and wonderfully right about Carter’s music. It might be fiendish, but it fizzes with energy and fun.
Hurrah! Wonderful to know there’s another fan out there who is “getting” Mr. Carter’s music in the right spirit.
To give you some encouragement: I saw Ursula Oppens perform Catenaires live at Symphony Space, NYC, in January 2008. It was the last piece on the program, and she performed brilliantly, of course. The audience gave her a standing ovation, and we weren’t letting her go. It was obvious we wanted an encore. As I had been sitting in the front row, I caught her eye, pointed to the piano and mouthed the words, “Do it again.”
She shook her head at me and mouthed back, “No, it’s too hard.”
Stuart: Just saw your tweet about needing two brains for the Diversions. As for No. 1, just keep in mind that the basic pulse is 40. You don’t need to count all the tied quintuplets and such. Just keep to 40 and work all the other stuff around it. Eg., on the first page, the half thr hslf note is given as 64. Multiply by five (for the quintuplets) and you get 320. Now divide that by eight (since he’s tying the quintuplets together in groups of eight), and you get (ta-da!) 40 again. It works that way througout the piece. Forgive me if you already know this. It’s one of the few bits of mathematics I’ve ever figured out in a Carter score.
Thanks for both your comments, Joe. Good to know that even Oppens isn’t superhuman enough to play Caténaires twice!
I did realise that the long chords in the first Diversion were in a steady pulse but hadn’t done the maths to know what that pulse was! Given that Carter is so fond of providing preambles to his own scores it’s rather a pity that he didn’t go into that level of detail with the Diversions’ foreword. I think I’m going to have to count it as written to work out the relationships and to get the hang of how it should sound, and then play it – rhythmically at least – by ear.