By Andrew Porter

The simple label for Elliott Carter is “the greatest living composer.” I’m not much of a one for labels but will endorse that one. What follows is a personal assertion about music that has meant so much to me. Not technical: Many years ago, at a Cologne ISCM Festival where new works by Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Ligeti, Buscotti were pouring out and as a young critic I was struggling to find my way through them, that wise musician Hans Keller said to me, “Stop bothering! Trust your instinct, your intuition. Just listen. Follow up the pieces that as you hear them speak to you, even if you don’t ‘understand’ them at the time.”

Twenty years ago I moved from Europe to America—to New York, to become the music critic of The New Yorker. In Europe, life had been charted by each new work of Britten, Tippett, Henze, Boulez, Stockhausen as it appeared. Elliott Carter lived in New York: His Third String Quartet had its premiere that season—played by the Juilliard Quartet, in Alice Tully Hall. As prep, I got to know his First and Second Quartets (on the Nonesuch recording by the Composers Quartet)—and discovered the American composer whose works were to be the landmarks of the 20 years that I then spent in New York.

Carter was born in New York in 1908. He studied at the Horace Mann School, at Harvard, and then in Paris. By European standards he was a late starter—34 when his First Symphony appeared, in 1942, though there had been acclaimed works before it. His First String Quartet, of 1951, was a turning point. To write it, he left the city, moved for months to the desert, there worked out the musical ideas that had been churning, wondered if the result would ever find performers and listeners. It did. The quartet became his composition most often performed.

And in succeeding decades there followed a confident stream of works in almost every form except opera: the Variations for Orchestra, the Concerto for Orchestra, the Symphony of Three Orchestras; the concertos for piano and harpsichord, for piano, for oboe, for violin; Penthode and the Triple Duo; three more string quartets; the Brass Quintet; the violin-and-piano Duo; for piano solo, Night Fantasies (there was already the towering Piano Sonata); a return to the voice in the song cycles with ensemble A Mirror on Which to Dwell, Syringa, and In Sleep, In Thunder. Also, over the last decade, a series of exquisitely worked, inspired “miniatures,” including the Riconoscenza for solo violin, Esprit Rudel Esprit Doux for flute and clarinet, Enchanted Preludes for flute and cello (enchanted indeed), Scrivo in Vento for solo flute, and, most recently, Trilogy for oboe and harp.

As I list the pieces, memories flood in of what each one meant to me as first I heard it, and new emotions are stirred as I recall them. There is no easy way of communicating the joy that Carter’s music can bring. Not everyone feels it. New York Times critics have seldom felt it. The Piano Concerto—with the soloist and his or her small band of instrumental supporters upholding their beliefs against a brutal , hostile orchestra—seems to me an emotionally charged, tragic composition; but in its “ bitter clashes” and “whirling detail” a Times critic found “no want to please, to stir, to sadden or to unsettle,” and ended his review with a sneer: “The cognoscenti who extol Carter’s genius ask us to try harder so that we, too, may leave the ranks of the unwashed and join the anointed.”

Times pronouncements carry weight in America. And yet, although last year we were told that Carter’s string quartets “have virtually no public,” in New York on a night when tempest swept the city, long lines formed to attend a thronged performance, by the Juilliard Quartet, of the four quartets in sequence. These quartets have now been commercially recorded three, four, or five times over. Number 4 was within a few years of its appearance played hundreds of times, in a dozen countries, by 14 different ensembles. His music is valued and cherished the world over. In Italy, France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal there have been abundant Carter celebrations, Carter festivals.

I must not suggest that the music is unfailingly easy to follow! What is easy is to be daunted by the challenge the music presents. Challenging it is. (I don’t pretend to “understand” the Third String Quartet, for example; I just like listening to it. And poring over blueprints of its elaborate construction does not explain why it proves so exciting to hear.) Carter does not exploit outré playing technique; he writes lovingly for traditional instruments, used in traditional ways. But he is forever trying new things, new ideas of ordering music’s notes in time. The intricacies come from his search to achieve as precisely and communicatively expressive statements as possible.

So what can someone who loves Elliott Carter’s music and is moved by it say to a doubter? Perhaps just “Listen!” Listen to the way the lines move. Listen to the move of line against line. Forget the intricacies and elaborations you may have read about—the “metrical modulation,” the five-against-four-against- three meters, the chordal tables and charts. Just listen. And hear the romance of the composer.

The vision of an America spanned by a Brooklyn Bridge—that “path amid the stars crossed by the seagull’s wing,” somehow miraculously extended so that it reaches from East Coast to the Pacific, “tying the Eastern to the Western sea”—was dreamed by Walt Whitman (though it was the Union Pacific Railroad he hymned) and by Hart Crane. The airplane made it a tangible adventure (until in recent years passengers were required to pull down the blinds and in daytime-darkness watch an ill-projected movie instead of seeing the great panorama of America unfurl beneath them). Carter in the 15 orchestral minutes of the Symphony of Three Orchestras creates that adventure—starting with an evocation of the bridge where (in Crane’s words) “Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream/ As though a god were issue of the strings,” and a solo trumpet sounds the seagull’s soaring flight; and moving then into a kaleidoscope of images that form an exuberant but disciplined dance.

Carter has found song for American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery. In his chamber pieces he has given song to instrumentalists—endowed each of them with an individual voice, created a personage with a particular way of feeling and uttering. Sometimes his music suggests conversational interplay between lively, interesting people. Sometimes it suggests a drama, even a dance—drama, as each instrument-living its “essential nature” to the full—enters with its own special intervals, rhythms, and inflections, but is attentive and responsive to those of the others. Carter has written what have been called “scenarios to be enacted by instruments.” There is often wit and humor to be heard in his work; anger in some of the earlier big pieces; increasing lyricism and beauty in the compositions of the recent decades. He is America’s great musical poet.

Andrew Porter was educated at Oxford University. He edited The Musical Times (London) before becoming the music critic of The New Yorker in 1972. His reviews have been collected in five volumes, covering the years through 1986; there is another volume to come. He returned to London in 1992 to become the music critic of> The Observer. Among the many magazines he contributed to while in America were High Fidelity, Opera News, and Keynote. His translations of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Tristan, and Parsifal, many Verdi, and most of Mozart’s operas have won considerable acclaim, and he is currently at work on a companion to opera.