Tracing the dialectical in Carter’s compositional aesthetic
3.3. a – Repetition
Adorno’s critique of repetition was forcefully levelled at Stravinsky in Philosophy of
New Music. Adorno later certainly recognized the undialectical treatment he had given Stravinsky in that work, and in later writings he refined his theorising of repetition, examining the necessity for a dialectical handling of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ in
music, and the subtle manner in which materials could articulate these categories.348
346 Recall the discussion in Chapter 1, pp. 35-36.
347 Johnson points out that “Adorno tells us that categories of aesthetic judgement are themselves
historically defined.” Johnson, “‘The Elliptical Geometry of Utopia’: New Music Since Adorno,” 70.
Adorno nonetheless maintained that certain kinds of repetition were no longer tenable in music. Identical repetition, which constituted the reprise of material in historical formal models such as the recapitulation of sonata form, was no longer possible (recall
discussion in Chapter 2). 349 Such a recapitulation was the result of functional tonal
forms in which the repetition participated in the creation and diffusion of tension that defined the flow of time. Without that productive tension, identical repetition resulted in stasis or the denial of time flow, as did attempts at total differentiation, where rapid
constant change had the effect of constant sameness.350 Johnson analyses how Adorno
refines his thinking on repetition by way of Stravinsky and Beckett in Adorno’s 1962
essay “Stravinsky: a dialectical portrait,” as well as in his posthumous Aesthetic
Theory.351 While not reneging on his earlier assessment of the dead-end nature of repetition in Stravinsky’s music, Johnson shows that Adorno now allows for another possibility: Adorno suggests that the opposition of static-dynamic has come to be replaced by the “spurious infinity of … reprise” such as found in the repetitions in Beckett’s plays. The flow of time in Beckett’s work (and in instances of Stravinsky’s music) is being constituted by an unending series of sameness that nevertheless contains difference rather than pure invariance (identical repeats). Johnson quotes Adorno from
Aesthetic Theory:
Repetition in authentic new artwork is not always an accommodation to the archaic compulsion toward repetition. Many artworks indict this compulsion and thereby take the part of what Karl Heinz Haag has called the unrepeatable; Beckett’s Play, with the spurious infinity of its reprise, presents the most accomplished example. …
Enciphered in modern art is the postulate of an art that no longer conforms to the disjunction of the static and dynamic. Beckett, indifferent to the ruling cliché of development, views his task as that of moving in an infinitely small space toward what is effectively a dimensionless point. This aesthetic principle of construction, as the principle of Il faut continuer, goes beyond stasis; and it goes beyond the dynamic in that it is at the same time a principle of treading water and, as such, a confession of the uselessness of the dynamic.352
349 Ibid., 177-79.
350 Williams, “New Music, Late Style: Adorno’s ‘Form in the New Music’,” 205; Paddison, Adorno’s
Aesthetics of Music, 179. Carter articulated his thinking about textural differentiation in similar terms, see Boland, “The All-Trichord Hexachord: compositional strategies in Elliott Carter’s Con Leggerezza and Gra,” 13.
351 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1984). On Adorno’s late interpretation of Stravinsky, see also Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 276-70.
While in the pre-war period new music’s “dynamism”353 challenged the static
oppression of temporal flow, mid-century new music was quickly loosing an objective
goal for its dynamic motion.354 Instead of Adorno’s earlier prediction of complete
disintegration, the idea emerges that music (like society, like history) just keeps on
going ad infinitum, feeling its way to the next point instead of moving to a prescribed
conclusion. The subjective expressive impulse, instead of being killed off altogether by an ever-greater alienation, now finds a way to accommodate living with that alienation
(à la Beckett). The never-ending but varied reprise provides a means of going from
moment to moment, with the musical structuring (form) responding to the momentary
need (material)—indeed Adorno’s ideal of a musique informelle. This new attitude
toward musical time is late-modern: in the changed historical moment of late-
capitalism, the notion of progress itself becomes in need of challenge. Johnson sees the later music of Boulez and of Feldman as well as Ligeti’s music as embodying this notion of musical time that challenges the idea of progress while not being merely static.
Carter’s response to repetition and the changing experience of temporality toward the end of the twentieth century has taken a number of forms. For Carter, minimalism in music remained a denial of lived temporal experience, “mechanical and inhuman,” a repression of human expressivity, “a kind of death;” this position he held right to the end of his life, as we saw Chapter 2. Temporal flow remained essential to musical expression for Carter. However, like Adorno, Carter recognized a different way in which such flow could manifest itself and that the negation of repetition no longer retained the critical force it once had. The continuation of music, its never-ending
onwardness, its repetition, that Adorno points to by way of Beckett’s Il faut continuer,
is recognisable in a number of late compositions in which Carter employs his ‘long line,’ an extended musical line that weaves its way through large stretches of a
composition, morphing and adapting itself constantly. While this technique had its roots in Carter’s ‘Boulanger’ education, and can certainly be found in earlier compositions (the Variations for Orchestra and the First String Quartet are good examples), it is something Carter retained as an expressive resource and arguably foregrounded in
353 See ibid. Recall the discussion of Eisenstein’s “dynamism” in Chapter 2.
354 See for example Judy Lochhead, and Joseph Auner, ed. Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought
(London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 5-7; also Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), xi-xxii.
recent compositions more explicitly that in the middle period music.355 Clear instances
of Carter’s ‘long line’ can be found for example in Triple Duo (1983), Pentode (1985),
Violin Concerto (1990), Adagio tenebrosa (1994)but also much later pieces such as
Caténaires for solo piano (2006) and Interventions for piano and orchestra (2007).356
Perhaps the most evocative example is Carter’s character of Rose in his opera What
Next? (1999). Rose sings a continuous wordless melodic line from the beginning of the opera till the end. Librettist Paul Griffith writes: “‘the whole thing will be, for her, a performance, in which she tries out various parts—in vocalise except when she has to take part in the verbal drama. ‘And the meaning of this’, Elliott says, ‘is that it’s like
music: nobody knows what it means, but it goes on and on without stopping.’”357 Here
Carter seems to be in agreement with his modernist fellow-travellers about the unfaltering continuation of musical expression regardless of the direction of history’s progress. His comment that “nobody knows what it [music] means” can be given a
double layer of meaning if related to the opening of Adorno’s essay “Vers une musique
informelle” which quotes Beckett: “Dire cela, sans savoir quoi.” The meaning of the
Beckett quote is elaborated on in Adorno’s final sentence of his essay: “The aim of
every artistic utopia today is to make things in ignorance of what they are.”358 Adorno
(through Beckett) articulates an artistic aspiration that is freedom from the known, from control by externally imposed structures. The process towards achieving this aspiration is, on the other hand, a dialectical one between freedom and control. This resonates greatly with Carter’s compositional processes: Link points out that “Rose’s ability to spin out beautifully formed and continuously varying lines with great virtuosity is unhampered by her limited intervallic repertory, which is both the smallest and the most rigorously adhered to in the opera. Her entire vocal part is written using only four
intervals ….”359 Carter lets the music go “on and on” with a repetitiousness of intervals
but without an imposed formal scheme or goal for Rose’s singing. In using the interval as the unit of repetition Carter avoids literal reprise as well as motive repetition which maintains a fluidity to variation that nonetheless has a recognisable sonic identity.
355 See Link’s discussion of the role of the “lyric voice” in projecting continuity “despite interruptions” in
Link, “Elliott Carter’s Late Music,” 49.
356 See the discussion in Jonathan Bernard, “The true significance of Elliott Carter’s early music,” 31. 357 Paul Griffith, “What Next?—A Journal,” in Elliott Carter:What Next?/Asko Concerto (ECM New
Series 1817, 2003, compact disc), 33.
358 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle.” Quoted in Johnson, “‘The Elliptical Geometry of Utopia’:
New Music Since Adorno,” 75.
359 Link, “Sense and Sensibility: Music on Stage in What Next?,” 214. Link also reads irony and comedy
in Rose’s part (pp. 213-4). Whittall similarly sees a comic side particularly to Rose’s ending, in Whittall, “‘A play of pure forces’? Elliott Carter’s opera in context,” 5.
Related to the shaping of Rose’s minimal material into a continuous flow is what
Whittall identifies as “late-modern thematicism” in Carter’s late music.360 According to
Whittall, this late-modern thematicism incorporates repetition as a response to the “cultural situation” of the late twentieth century:
What brings particular power and strength to Carter’s own later music is the way he uses small-scale repetitions of rhythmic patterns and lyrical ideas to provide a core of stability which the rest of the music challenges, plays with, but never entirely escapes. And this seems to be his way of working out a response to the cultural situation which
he defined with unusual sarcasm, even bitterness, in a discussion in Banff in 1984.361
The cultural situation Whittall is referring to is that of the “post-modern” shift in musical expression as found in stylistic imitation of Romantic music and in minimalist styles. Carter forcefully rejects these two choices. Whittall argues that Carter responds with a new thematicism that sits in the gap between the traditional theme and the post- tonal theme: not a theme in the tonal sense, and not quite a ‘classical’ post-tonal theme in that there is no varied repetition by way of canonical transformations, augmentations, diminutions or other tricks that maintain the essential intervallic relationships in the theme. Instead Carter’s late-modern thematicism can be exemplified by his use of a set type, such as the ubiquitous all-trichord hexachord. Such a set appears as a prominent melodic element—what Whittall terms a “recognisable object” in the music—without there ever being a literally repeated or systematically transformed theme. Whittall’s
coining of Scheinthemen to identify this kind of apparent but not actual recurring theme
is an important analytical tool in Carter’s late work, and I will explore instances of
Scheinthemen in the analytical chapters.362 At work is a dialectic of sameness and
difference contained within each reference that also plays with the workings of memory. The listener, in a sense, can recognize the reprise of something, or the experience of hearing something that might have gone before, but the reprise is different enough that the similarity is not easily grasped with confidence. In this way the ‘thematic’ material avoids participating in defining a formal structure. Instead it leaves the listener
360 “The search for order: Carter’s Symphonia and late-modern thematicism.”
361 “Review of Elliott Carter: A Centennial Celebration; and Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in
Letters and Documents,” 726. In the Banff discussion Carter attacks minimalism as amoral, see Carter, “Elliott Carter in conversation with Robert Johnston, Michael Century, Robert Rosen, and Don Stein (1984),” 253.
362 Whittall, “The search for order: Carter’s Symphonia and late-modern thematicism,” 66. Jeff Nichols
convincingly demonstrates something similar in the much earlier Variations for Orchestra (1955) in Jeff Nichols, “Mistaken Identities in Carter’s Variations for Orchestra,” Elliott Carter Studies Online 1 (2016), http://studies.elliottcarter.org/volume01/05Nichols/05Nichols.html.
questioning their memory and expectation, or perhaps conversely questioning the
music’s progression and relatedness. The analyses of the Boston and the ASKO
concertos will provide concrete examples of how Carter achieves this play with memory and recognition.
Link notes that “since the 1980s, Carter’s avoidance of repetition has given way to an
approach that might be called “reduce, reuse, recycle,” cleverly using a metaphor that
connects Carter’s music to the social movement for ecological sustainability which has
characterized the modern world since the 1980s.363 Carter’s “re-using” notably includes
materials that previously would have been considered uniquely defining of an individual composition: background polyrhythms, harmonic collections and forms. Noubel
interprets this approach to repetition by way of the metaphor of a “deforming prism”
that allows us to perceive within the familiar sound world of Carter’s “Ultima Practica”
minutely changed details. Noubel claims this “connects [Carter] with certain Baroque composers’ ability to draw on materials and musical ideas already exploited in order to create something new without yielding to facility or renouncing any of their deeper artistic aspirations.”364 In relation to Three Illusions, this changed attitude to repetition can be likened, according to Noubel, to Carter mixing “up the cards of his single pack, displaying a range of combinations always surprising despite the remarkable economy
of means.”365 Again, this kind of reprise plays with listener memory across the piece’s
unfolding as well as across the boundaries of different compositions, making the ‘coming back’ to something familiar in a different context a surprising experience. These ‘repetitions’—that also extend beyond the individual work and create a thread
through groups of pieces366—link to the idea of ‘inexhaustibility’ as we’ll see next.