Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World ed. by Lisa Kirchner (review)

over the course of these lectures is more focused on promoting his own work and ideas than on discussing the music of others in any significant detail. What purports to be analysis is often simply glancing mention: in introducing the score of Penderecki’s Threnody, for example, Carter admits, “I don’t know what the instruments always are, what their arrangement is, but it does not matter very much anyway . . . . I don’t know what all the symbols mean” (p. 80), after joking that it makes no difference whether the score is upside down or right side up. The most substantive analysis of another composer’s work, Nono’s Il canto sospeso, is lifted, errors and all, from earlier writing by Reginald Smith Brindle (p. 62). Partially, this superficial approach may be explained by the lectures’ audience, which ostensibly consisted of laymen. On the other hand, Carter is unafraid to use very technical terminology in the description of his own work, and the audience’s questions are generally informed. So, one wonders at his lack of depth in addressing other composers’ work. The most successful portions of the lecture series are those that focus on Carter’s individual worldview and experience (especially in lectures 1 and 3). In these areas, his off-the-cuff approach is appropriate, and tucked into his unplanned statements and digressions are moments that offer legitimate insight into his work. In a discussion of orchestration in his early ballet Pocahontas, for example, Carter casually remarks, “This is also something that greatly interested me ever since: the idea of having a theme not accompanied in a traditional way, by the bass or an instrument lower than the theme, but something that is plastered right on top of it, and it is of a different color” (p. 116). It’s also fascinating to read, in his own words, Carter’s subjective reaction to pieces that were contemporary at that time and have since found their way into the unassailable academic canon. The most productive way of framing these lectures may not be as Elliott Carter explaining music, but rather as Elliott Carter explaining Elliott Carter. In 1967, Carter was at the zenith of his influence as a composer, positioned equidistantly between two Pulitzer Prizes and about to begin a new teaching position at Cornell University. At the age of fifty-eight, he must surely have thought that his career was closer to its end than its beginning. The Minnesota lectures have a confidently valedictory feel to them: one can sense Carter’s belief that his current perspective, and the repertoire upon which it’s based, will remain valid—or at least relevant—into the foreseeable future. Astonishingly, Carter outlived that foreseeable future. One wonders what pains and pleasures he experienced while reconciling the worldview expressed in the Minnesota lectures with the diminishing influence of both his artistic approach and concert music in general over the next forty-five years. By the time he died in 2012, at the age of 103, Carter was the most decorated of any American concert composer but also one whose musical language had moved to the edges of the craft. Certain of the composers he lauds in these talks—Varèse most especially—had drifted out of concert halls and into music history texts. In a way, Elliott Car­ ter Speaks is most fascinating as a time capsule, taking us into the mind of a self-assured artist, at the height of his powers, unaware of the long, winding journey yet to come.