Elliott Carter as (Anti-) Serial ComposerAuthor(s): Daniel A.

Guberman
Source: American Music , Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 68-88
Published by: University of Illinois Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/americanmusic.33.1.0068

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 DANIEL A. GUBERMAN

Elliott Carter as
(Anti-­)Serial Composer

Was Elliott Carter a twelve-­tone or serial composer? For decades scholars

and critics have argued about the basic methods behind Carter’s com-
positions, and still today scholars offer contradictory answers to this
seemingly straightforward question. On the one hand, Joseph Straus, in
his Twelve-­Tone Music in America, writes: “During the war, a rising genera-
tion of twelve-­tone composers (including Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter,
and George Perle) was already at work, forging new ways of composing
with twelve-­tones related only to each other,” and Mark Evan Bonds,
in A History of Music in Western Culture, states: “[Carter’s] early music
tends toward the Neoclassical, but he later embraced serial composi-
tion.”1 On the other hand, some see Carter’s antiserial statements as a
defining characteristic. Charles Rosen, a close friend of Carter, declares:
“Carter is perhaps the only major composer of our time who has never
even tried to write a serial work,” and Steven Mackey adds: “Elliott
Carter, in fact, has always been provocatively anti-­Serial.”2 This confu-
sion stems, in part, from Carter’s statements on the matter, which were
inconsistent and often purposefully muddled the issue. For example, in
his 1960 article, “Shop Talk by an American Composer,” he answers the
question “Do you use the twelve-­tone system?” by joking, “Some critics
have said that I do, but since I have never analyzed my works from this
point of view, I cannot say.”3

Daniel A. Guberman is teaching assistant professor of music theory, composition,

and musicology at East Carolina University. He is currently working on a mono-
graph that analyzes relationships between Elliott Carter’s career and cultural
politics during the early Cold War. Other current projects examine gender and
politics in heavy metal music and how to apply Universal Design for Learning
objectives in music theory and history teaching.
American Music  Spring 2015
© 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 69

In this article, I detail Carter’s conflicted and changing relationship

with twelve-­tone and serial methods through an examination of pub-
lished writings and interviews alongside unpublished recordings of spo-
ken lectures, correspondence, and drafts of writings from the Paul Sacher
Foundation archives. These sources reveal the thoughts of a composer
struggling to understand the compositional world around him while
seeking to carve out his own unique compositional identity. Examining
Carter’s struggle also provides new insight into recent debates concern-
ing the concept of a twelve-­tone or serial “tyranny.” His writings and
interviews indicate that the precise definition of twelve-­tone and/or
serial methods was often unclear, even to composers who were well
established within the advanced or modernist compositional community.
Through examining Carter’s thoughts and statements, we find that the
empirical evidence and retrospective statements that have dominated
debates regarding the “twelve-­tone/serial tyranny” often miss the rap-
idly changing nature of the contemporary composition scene at the time.4
One of the challenges in approaching Carter’s attempts to construct
his identity with regard to the concept of twelve-­tone techniques and
serialism is that they themselves are constantly evolving. I view serial-
ism along the same lines outlined by Arnold Whittall in Serialism for the
Cambridge Introductions Series: “‘Serial’ is a much more comprehensive
term than ‘twelve-­tone.’ . . . [A] series of pitches can comprise fewer than
twelve tones. Similarly, a series can be devised for other musical ele-
ments, or parameters.”5 Twelve-­tone techniques, as derived from Arnold
Schoenberg’s theory, are a subset of serial composition, describing one
way of handling pitch serially. While this definition is more straight-
forward than that of serialism, we will see that it is malleable in similar
ways. For Carter and certain portions of the public at large, twelve-­tone
and serial methods were almost interchangeable, representing an idea
about contemporary composition methods moving toward mathemati-
cal, scientific, and objective approaches. Similarly, one could approach
twelve-­tone music from the opposite side and include instances of com-
posers making use of the entire chromatic pitch-­class collection as a type
of twelve-­tone composition that would include Bach and Mozart. As we
will see, Carter took advantage of this range of definitions in his writings,
lectures, and correspondence as a means of defining himself within or
in opposition to these approaches.

Twelve-­Tone Sketches
Carter did experiment with serial approaches to composition. Of course,
this should hardly be surprising for a composer just beginning a teach-
ing career in the late 1940s. Carter’s brief experiments survive in a few
sources from this time, often regarded as a transitional period.6 The

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 70 GUBERMAN

earliest evidence of Carter’s experiments with twelve-­tone composition

appears on the back of a piano reduction of his Holiday Overture, probably
made in 1944. He first considered incorporating twelve-­tone techniques
into a piece while sketching the 1945–46 piano sonata, by beginning and
quickly abandoning a “twelve-­tone episode.”7 He attempted to compose
using twelve-­tone techniques again in a sonatina for oboe that he worked
on as late as 1947 but never completed.8
Examining the piano sonata sketch, we find evidence of Carter’s
loose definition of twelve-­tone composition at the time. Most histo-
ries of twelve-­tone music take advantage of the fact that today many
undergraduate students have a firm grasp of the principles and tech-
niques involved in Schoenberg’s approach to twelve-­tone composition.
In the 1940s, however, many American composers created a range of
approaches to the process of composing with twelve tones as demon-
strated by Straus.9 In this planned “twelve-­tone episode,” Carter begins
with a straightforward statement of the row and starts to manipulate it,
but, almost immediately, he transitions to an approach that would be
better described as free atonality. (I use atonality here in a broad sense
referring to all types of nontonal writing.) By the end of the sketch,
which does not even fill a page, Carter has almost entirely abandoned
the pretense of a twelve-­tone row or even complete chromatic aggregates
(collections of all twelve chromatic pitches).
More detail concerning Carter’s vision of twelve-­tone composition in
the 1940s may be found in his writings from the period. In a 1946 Musical
Quarterly article about Walter Piston, Carter praises his former teacher
for combining older styles with more modern approaches, especially his
inclusion of twelve-­tone techniques. In his description of Piston’s twelve-­
tone writing, Carter highlights the completion of chromatic aggregates as
evidence of dodecaphonic technique, with one set of instruments using
pitches from one part of the chromatic collection and another set of instru-
ments using the complementary pitches.10 Like many American compos-
ers of his generation, Carter learned more details about Schoenberg’s
twelve-­tone practice in the late 1940s through reading René Leibowitz’s
book on the topic, and it seems that after this point he began to connect
dodecaphony and twelve-­tone composition with Schoenberg’s approach
and not with this broader sense of aggregate completion.11 We will see,
however, that in attempts to challenge those who would label him a
twelve-­tone composer, he returns to aggregates to put himself in the
same category as Mozart, Bach, and other historic figures.

Responding to the Growth

of Twelve-­Tone Composition in America
Beginning during the Second World War, Carter depicted two large
groups of American composers in his writings. The first group of

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 71

composers sought to write specifically American music, generally based

on either popular or folk materials. The second group, including himself,
wrote in what he called an international style.12 During the war, these
American international composers adopted neoclassicism and a return
to diatonicism. After the war, Carter saw internationally minded com-
posers, including himself, change focus, now placing an emphasis on
finding ways of ordering pitch in an atonal sound world.
This postwar emphasis on atonality comes to the forefront in Carter’s
article on twentieth-­century music for Encyclopaedia Britannica, written in
1950. Carter describes neoclassicism and atonality, including twelve-­tone
composition, as the dominant trends of the century. Taking advantage
of contemporary politics, he highlights the rejection of these approaches
by authoritarian governments: “When the Nazi and Soviet states in the
1930’s and 1940’s began to legislate against those using the newer styles,
it was clear the modernists were to be reckoned with.”13 After finding
common political ground between these approaches, Carter discusses
musical and/or philosophical similarities as well, focusing on their lead-
ing composers, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
Carter claims that both sides rely on combining a strict musical element
(a rhythmic pulse for neoclassicists and pitch structure for atonalists)
with freedom in other areas:
Technically, composers of the first half of the 20th century seemed to
have been mainly occupied in breaking up the relationships between
the various elements of musical discourse and in reintegrating them
on a level of greater freedom. . . . This freedom was usually ordered
by new kinds of self-­imposed formal and stylistic restrictions. The
neoclassicists favoured strict mechanical regularity of pulse while
employing great liberty in the irregular distribution of accents and
in all the other elements; the atonalists adhered to a strict system of
ordering the tones of a composition, allowing the greatest license
in other directions.14
Carter does not praise one method over the other; instead, he discusses
structural similarities lying behind both approaches. This came at a time
when he was exploring different types of strict and free writing in his
own compositions, seen most prominently in the juxtaposition of a strict
staccato quarter-­note piano line against a free, off-­the-­beat cello line in
the first movement of his cello sonata (1948). Carter justifies the emphasis
on these methods by listing composers who use or were influenced by
them: “Around 1940, many composers like the former neoclassicist, Ernst
Krenek (1900–[91]), and the young Italian, Luigi DallaPiccola [sic] (1904–
[75]), began to use this system as did many others in most important
musical centres. It also had an indirect influence on Bartók, and on the
Americans, Sessions and Wallingford Riegger (1885–[1961]).”15 He does
not detail how a composer such as Bartók, praised earlier in the article

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 72 GUBERMAN

as an original thinker, appropriated the lessons of twelve-­tone compo-

sition, and this was well before George Perle’s discussion of Bartók.16
Here, it seems that, as in his earlier article about Piston, Carter takes an
expansive view of twelve-­tone composition, connecting it with other
atonal compositional methods.
In this encyclopedia article, Carter presents an upbeat assessment of
the current environment with these various trends, affording compos-
ers the freedom to experiment. However, his vision of American com-
position was not so rosy in his private discussions, as evidenced in his
refusal to write an article on contemporary American music for Wil-
liam Glock’s The Score. In a 1950 letter to Glock, Carter expresses disap-
pointment with recent developments in composition, explaining that
he would prefer not to write rather than to place American composers
in a poor light: “I am too disheartened by most of the works of my col-
leagues to write with any enthusiasm.” Carter instead recommended
that Glock ask Richard Franko Goldman, “who apparently feels more
hope than I do.” Writing in confidence to Glock, Carter then shares his
thoughts on the state of American composition: “This year has seen a
gradual revolution in contemporary music circles; the two rival organi-
zations, the League of Composers and the ISCM, both were faced with
the resignation of their chairmen. . . . Since I am the only one on both
boards and never say a word at any meeting, I was nominated to suc-
ceed both of the presidents—I provisionally accepted the ISCM, mostly
devoted to 12-­tone music which I can stand in small doses, but a little
less cliquish than the League.”17 While Carter mostly dismisses twelve-­
tone compositions by his colleagues, he also states that the only excit-
ing concerts of the past season were Webern revivals. Cognizant of the
inconsistency between dismissing American twelve-­tone composers and
praising Webern, Carter explains that he dislikes American twelve-­tone
compositions because too many students adopt these methods without
sufficient training. As a result, young composers create music lacking
individuality: “The young aren’t very well trained and fall easily into
the dodecaphonic trap, with its ready-­made expression and its Viennese
grimaces.”18 As a composer who valued originality, Carter’s problems
lay not with the twelve-­tone system itself but with the ways in which
young composers applied these methods.
By 1954, however, Carter had found new confidence in a rising genera-
tion of American composers. In “Music in the United States,” for the Bel-
gian journal Synthèses, he again highlights a division between American
composers who evoke a “native spirit by the use of folklore or by some
other means” and those who use an international style. Within each of
these groups he emphasizes variety, from “conservative” to “extreme.”
In the international category, Carter considers tonal and neoclassical
composers, including Samuel Barber and Randall Thompson, to be

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 73

conservatives. On the “extreme” side, Carter combines the aleatoricism

of John Cage and Morton Feldman with the electronic music of Otto
Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, reflecting two approaches to com-
position that do not interest him.
Twelve-­tone and serial techniques fall in the middle of Carter’s interna-
tional style, exemplified by Walter Piston and Roger Sessions. He explains
that Sessions’s “complex” style has gained favor recently in the United
States, and his students have successfully developed his ideas: “Now his
seriousness of purpose and his devotion to the tradition of music have
not only won him many listeners but many interesting young followers
like Leon Kirchner, Andrew Imbrie, and Milton Babbitt, each of whom
uses a more involved technique than has been customary in American
music.”19 In the short span of four years, Carter had shifted from a com-
plete dismissal of the younger generation of American twelve-­tone com-
posers as lazy students to praising a group of Sessions’s students for their
originality in developing new methods from these techniques. Perhaps
he saw these composers undergo the same evolution as he did in the
late 1940s, initially pursuing experiments with twelve-­tone techniques
and later discovering their own varied approaches to pitch organization.
Most importantly, the defining characteristic of their music became not
the techniques themselves but the individual styles they had developed
after their study of these techniques.
During his 1953–54 fellowship at the American Academy in Rome,
Carter reflected on his own developing style and the influence of Schoen-
berg. As part of the compositional process for his own variations for
orchestra, he studied Schoenberg’s op. 31. After returning to the United
States, he received an invitation to contribute to a Canadian Broadcast-
ing Company radio series featuring composers discussing their favorite
twentieth-­century masterpieces, and he felt that this offered an ideal
opportunity to introduce North American audiences to Schoenberg’s
orchestral variations. While drafting the presentation, Carter struggled
with how to frame Schoenberg’s twelve-­tone technique and the impor-
tance of technical knowledge in appreciating the composition. While the
published version of the essay includes little about his own methods,
an early draft delves deeply into the relationship between Schoenberg’s
methods and his approach.
Let me also say that the remarkable amount of thinking, of logical
yet realistic musical understanding that supports this method and
the authority of the important works using it make it a very per-
suasive method of composition. Its range is very great as is clear by
comparing some of the works of Webern with those of Berg and it
is not at all surprising, in fact it is even encouraging that so many
younger composers are using the system. I myself do not use it and

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 74 GUBERMAN

probably will not, as I find that the kind of musical ideas I have are
hindered in their development by its use. I find that I must have
some subconscious system of my own which I am trying to organize
and which takes the question of time into account in a way.20
By the mid-­1950s Carter had changed from complaining about students
relying on twelve-­tone techniques as a shortcut to bypass traditional
training to finding some encouragement in their use of these methods.
Furthermore, he contemplated what might lie behind his own methods,
claiming to be uncertain if his works were systematic in a similar way.
After learning that Carter had given a lecture on Schoenberg’s varia-
tions, William Glock asked Carter to teach the piece at the Dartington
International Summer School in England, scheduled just after lessons
in analysis by Pierre Boulez. Previously, Carter wrote Glock about his
disappointment in how many American composers had adopted twelve-­
tone techniques; however, in this response, he downplays the relevance
of these methods: “In the context of American society the question of
twelve-­tone music is restricted to a small [and] not influential—although
interesting—group.” Despite reservations concerning the value of fur-
ther study of twelve-­tone techniques, he ultimately views the workshop
with interest: “Nevertheless your suggestion has acted as a challenge to
me and I must say I welcome the stimulus to find my way around in
the twelve-­tone literature, much of which I have enjoyed without both-
ering to count to a dozen.”21 Perhaps he anticipated the study of how
composers used these techniques leading to a deeper or more systematic
understanding of his own compositional methods.

Defining His Own Methods

and Expanding the Definition of Serialism
While his compositions from the late 1940s marked a turning point in
Carter’s style from populist neoclassicism to atonality, Carter often
pointed to his second string quartet, composed in the late 1950s, as his
“most representative work.” David Schiff, in the first edition of The
Music of Elliott Carter, proposes that Carter’s development during this
period reflected the influence of the European avant-­garde at Darm-
stadt.22 David Harvey, also writing in the 1980s, argues that Carter’s
pieces beginning with the second quartet developed from “a systematic
exploitation of the work’s source material.”23 Partly because of Carter’s
long life and the significant style changes he underwent in the 1980s,
this shift toward increasingly systematic handling of musical material
in the late 1950s has been overlooked by recent scholarship.
Carter’s conception of the second string quartet is similar to the first
movement of his cello sonata, in which each instrument takes on a clearly

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 75

defined musical character. In the second quartet, however, these char-

acters are created in a much more systematic way through both pitch
and rhythm. Each instrument has a primary repertoire of characteristic
intervals—minor thirds, perfect fifths, major ninths, and major tenths
for the first violin, for example. Along with intervals, each instrument
has consistent rhythmic qualities; for example, the steady pace of the
second violin at metronome markings 70, 140, and 280 contrasts with the
slowing down and speeding up of the cello. What differentiates Carter
from the concurrent emphasis on strict precompositional controls is that
with these structures as a background Carter experiments freely in the
foreground. These intervals are not the only ones played by each instru-
ment, but they are the most common.24
Alongside his development of tighter precompositional controls over
musical material, Carter began to reframe his discussions of American
composition in relation to Europe. Instead of pointing to American com-
posers such as himself as internationalists, he began to highlight differ-
ences between the continents. He saw European composers adhering
much more strictly to twelve-­tone systems or, in some cases, total serial-
ism, whereas he felt that American composers adopted these lessons to
write in a more free and expressive manner. This change comes across
most clearly in his 1958 essay, “A Further Step”:
In Europe, the search for emancipated musical discourse has been
much more closely associated with the twelve-­tone system than in
the United States. . . . But the recent European school seems to have
become occupied with pattern alone, hoping somehow that interest
and meaning would emerge. Even on their own admission, this has
not always been the case. . . .
In the United States, the tendency has been to start with a co-­
ordinating principle having to do with techniques of listening or to
begin with our experience of time and not some arbitrary numero-
logical formula. Examples of emancipated discourse in America are
beginning to be more numerous.25
Of course, this description reflects primarily his own concerns. Through-
out the 1960s Carter lost interest in trying to understand contemporary
approaches to the compositional process, as he stated in a 1969 letter
to Peter Mennin at Juilliard concerning his teaching responsibilities: “I
am really no longer interested in analyzing most other contemporary
composers’ music, and cannot afford the time necessary to do this for
students.”26
Amid his attempts to differentiate American composition from Euro-
pean serialism, Carter did not break from twelve-­tone techniques entirely.
His new emphasis on coordinating principles had roots in the study
of Schoenberg for sure, and he continued to find that many pieces he

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 76 GUBERMAN

admired were derived from twelve-­tone techniques, even if he did not

actually analyze these pieces to understand how the system functioned
within them. Describing his experience as a judge at the 1960 ISCM com-
petition in Cologne, he explained that twelve-­tone works won the compe-
tition because they were the best entries, not because of biased judging:
“After looking through all the scores, however, although this matter was
never again referred to, it was obvious to me that the preponderance of
well-­written, carefully planned works had some connection with the
twelve-­tone world. Most of the others were definitely of inferior character,
a thing that was not true even seven years ago.”27 Carter often discussed
his own compositional goals and other works that he appreciated by
emphasizing the communicative power of music. This statement is par-
ticularly notable because it is one of the rare instances where he adopts
the values of serial composers through his attention to careful planning.
Also in 1960, Carter wrote an article for Musical Quarterly aimed at
more technically savvy readers. This was “Shop Talk with an American
Composer,” based on a symposium given at Princeton University. While
presented in the journal as a transcription of the symposium’s question-­
and-­answer segment, his writing was actually crafted through numer-
ous drafts. While working out the introduction, Carter struggled with
how to present information relating to serial methods. Continuing his
ideas from the New York Times article, an early draft stresses the use of
preplanned structures: “To me all the bits and pieces of a composition,
all the techniques, all the motions over large sections must come from
a ruling conception, more today than ever before. How things hang
together, how one idea enhances another, how what goes before affects
what comes later, it is in this domain that serious music lives, and gains
its power.”28 Carter’s ruling conceptions here, however, are not the same
as applying twelve-­tone techniques to a piece. While he had previously
praised other composers for finding their own approach to incorporating
twelve-­tone techniques, he now sees himself taking this a step further
by constructing a new system unique to each work: “Each work of mine
has lived in its own world, with its own techniques that sometimes carry
over from one work to the next or even come from outside influences
and traditional techniques but are all very much reworked to suit the
needs of the particular work.”29 Here in 1960, Carter fashions himself as
a composer adopting the lessons of wide-­ranging but unnamed sources,
a trend we will see continue in later descriptions of his influences. This
lack of specificity enables him to claim that he has developed a highly
personal style. This is supported by Paul Henry Lang’s editorial introduc-
tion to the issue, in which he depicts Carter as an independent thinker
in the battle between extremists.30
In the question-­and-­answer session, Carter sought to address his use
of twelve-­tone techniques directly by having a student inquire: “Do you

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 77

use the twelve-­tone system?”31 No record of how he actually answered

this at Princeton is known to survive, but in his first draft of the article he
wrote a particularly straightforward and honest answer: “No, I do not.
Since so many do use it, I suppose I should heed to explain what might
now be considered an aberration. I have frequently tried to use it, for I
would welcome anything that would simplify or coordinate the task of
composing, but I find that I personally am unable to find a way of using
it that will allow me to accomplish the kind of composition I try to write.
It just seems like a needless hindrance as far as I am concerned.” In the
final version, however, Carter turns the question into an opportunity for
a joke, giving an obtuse answer to what was clearly a straightforward
question:
Some critics have said that I do, but since I have never analyzed
my works from this point of view, I cannot say. I assume that if I
am not conscious of it, I do not. Naturally out of interest and out of
professional responsibility I have studied the important works of
the type and admire many of them a great deal. I have found that
it is apparently inapplicable to what I am trying to do, and is more
of a hindrance than a help. . . . I must also say that having known
many of these works all of my adult life, I hope the recent fad will
not cause them to seem commonplace too soon. The results of total
serialization are more recalcitrant to musical handling, I think.32
In this published version, Carter turns the question into an attack on
critics for not understanding his works and methods. He also carefully
explains that he has a great respect for twelve-­tone works.
Analysts may have interpreted Carter’s published response as an
invitation for further study, seeking to understand his compositions’
structures. However, Carter often resisted inquiries from scholars who,
he complained, were missing the real substance of his pieces. Conduc-
tor Paul Freeman wrote to Carter in 1961 to ask questions for his study
tentatively titled “Influence of Twelve-­tone Technique upon American
Composers.” Freeman explains that, after listening to Carter’s works, he
wanted to learn more about his use of dodecaphony, never acknowledg-
ing the fact that Carter might not even consider his music to entail such
procedures. In a response, rather than explicitly denying his own use of
twelve-­tone techniques, Carter asserted that nobody really uses the sys-
tem or that there even was such a thing: “I think that Arnold Schoenberg
was a great composer but not a strict or true twelve-­tone composer—if
such a thing exists or can exist.” Carter stated that his compositions were
put together for artistic reasons, implying that composers who strictly
used serial techniques were not composing artistically. Finally, he turns
to the subject of influences, claiming that they cannot be identified or dif-
ferentiated: “All my compositions are or are not influenced by the music

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 78 GUBERMAN

of what are called ‘twelve-­tone composers’ as much as they are influenced

by Guillaume de Machaut, Bach, Beethoven—I cannot distinguish. . . .
[T]he daily newspaper (particularly these days) influences me more than
anything else (not, of course, on the music page).”33 Here, Carter carves
out a large open space for himself and his colleagues that either shrinks
or expands the definition of twelve-­tone techniques to the degree that
it becomes impractical and meaningless. Either everyone writing in a
chromatically saturated language is a twelve-­tone composer or no one is.
Carter continues to position himself in relation to these extreme defini-
tions of twelve-­tone composition in a 1963 lecture series at Dartmouth
University in which he spoke about his own works alongside contem-
porary trends. Other than his own pieces, he devotes the most time to
Luigi Nono’s Il canto sospeso (1956), which he called “one of the best
works . . . that has been written since the war by a European.” For Carter,
Nono’s piece exemplifies effective use of serial techniques, evidenced
by the extraordinary emotional intensity of hearing the work. Having
a basic understanding of Nono’s serial technique, Carter declares that
its expressive power originated from the composer’s intervention in
the serial process: “I don’t know how you write any kind of music this
way, but somehow they [Nono and Messiaen] do it. . . . [S]ome other
factor must come in that makes the composer decide that some of this
won’t do. . . . [T]here must be some kind of system of choice that makes
these works effective.” Carter assumed that for Nono, serialism served as
background structure rather than as an end in itself, in a manner similar
to the American composers he praised in the 1950s for using the lessons
of these techniques to develop an individual style.34
In a later lecture in the Dartmouth series, Carter complained that mod-
ern audiences were too distracted by the concepts of twelve-­tone and
electronic composition, missing the actual content of the music. Such
techniques, he explained, are secondary to artistic expression and com-
munication: “I always find that whenever I am interviewed there are
two questions which people ask . . . what do you think about twelve-­
tone music and . . . what do you think about electronic music? No one
ever asks what do you think about flute music?” In equating twelve-­
tone and electronic music, Carter highlights their scientific associations,
and in dismissing them as less important to the composer than “flute
music,” he undermines his own previous emphasis on ruling concep-
tions. Placed within this scientific context, Carter described the preoc-
cupation of writing serial music as simply a fad: “This is almost a style
that has universally been used by almost all composers since the war
including older composers and at the present time is about to die out
in a way, although all the lessons that were learned in writing this had
a very strong effect.”35 Not having studied how strictly Nono followed
serial structures, Carter assumed that Nono was representative of an

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 79

emerging post-­twelve-­tone environment, when in fact Nono followed

serial procedures rather strictly.
Perhaps Carter’s greatest frustration with the serial question came
from the fact that critics and audiences frequently identified him as a
twelve-­tone composer. He wanted professional critics to stop categoriz-
ing him and instead discuss the effectiveness of his music. A critic labeled
him a twelve-­tone composer as early as 1956 in a review of the double
concerto performance at the Tanglewood Festival. Carter complained
about the review in a letter to Paul Fromm, describing the label as part
of a “long list of misinformation.”36 In 1966 pianist Samuel Randlett
directed Carter to an even more egregious error while working on a
review of John Gillespie’s Five Centuries of Keyboard Music.37 According to
Randlett, Gillespie credits Carter with “three piano sonatas and a work
called Music for Piano,” and he includes Carter in a list of “composers
using twelve-­tone techniques.” In his response, Carter takes a moment in
the middle of an otherwise light-­hearted letter to speak about the poorly
defined nature of twelve-­tone composition: “As for ‘Composers Using
Twelve-­Tone Techniques,’ I am not sure what this means (especially when
employed in the plural—I mean techniques). I certainly have never used
a twelve-­tone row as the basis of a composition, in the way described in
Schoenberg’s Style and Idea, nor are my compositions a constant rotation
of various permutations of twelve-­tone rows. You can count to twelve,
however, more often in them than in Mozart, who employed ‘twelve-­
tone technique’ at the beginning of the C-­minor Piano Concerto and for
the stone guest in Don Giovanni.”38 Here, Carter proposes two possible
definitions of the twelve-­tone system, either strict reliance on row forms
or any use of full chromatic collections, allowing himself to be a twelve-­
tone composer only if he can bring Mozart along as well.
As we have seen, in the early and mid-­1960s Carter took multiple
approaches to his discussions of twelve-­tone composition, often chal-
lenging the definition of what it means to be a twelve-­tone composer.
He argued that twelve-­tone techniques could aid in writing excellent
works, so long as composers ultimately exerted their own artistic control,
allowing the possibility that he may have drawn on these methods in
his own works. Ultimately, this personal approach led to an expansion
of twelve-­tone composition, as seen here. In other forums he adopted a
doctrinaire definition of twelve-­tone composition so that he could pres-
ent these ideas as a passing fad. Perhaps the one constant was his feeling
that critics and scholars were missing the point and misrepresenting his
techniques and methods to the public. One reason he struggled to avoid
the twelve-­tone label was the lack of a functional term to replace it. Carter
finally found a new way to describe himself through the composer and
critic Eric Salzman, who coined the term “new virtuosity” in his 1967
history of twentieth-­century music.

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 80 GUBERMAN

New Virtuosity as an Appropriate Category

Eric Salzman traveled within many of the same circles as Carter, study-
ing initially under Babbitt and Sessions at Princeton in the 1950s and
then with Goffredo Petrassi and Nono in Italy.39 In his historical survey,
Salzman seeks to explain Carter’s philosophical approach to composition
rather than how he arrived at his pitch collections. In doing so, he iden-
tifies a trend among composers who combined the lessons of serialism
(ultrarationality) and aleatoricism (antirationality) in order to expand the
possibilities of music, which he calls “The New Performed Music”: “It is
the actual range of perception and comprehension that is involved, and
the new music is ‘about’ the quality and nature of heightened experience,
perception, thought, and understanding, communicated throughout
the range of human capacities. There is here a new totality of forms and
psychological validities which come out of a universalized experience
but which are re-­established in particular by each work.”40 This concep-
tion of the new performed music emphasizes and values virtuosity, as
well as complexity, in many forms, over a preoccupation with pitch con-
tent. Salzman discusses the complexity of contemporary compositional
methods, the difficulty of performing the new works, and the challenges
they pose to listeners. He points to various works from the mid-­1950s as
showing traces of this trend, including Nono’s Il canto sospeso, alongside
compositions by Stockhausen, Boulez, and Babbitt; however, he declares
Carter the primary composer to whom the development of this new
virtuosity can be traced.41
Carter adopted Salzman’s language almost immediately because it
highlighted his own innovations and offered an alternative to being
called a serial or twelve-­tone composer. In a 1967 lecture series at Car-
leton College in Minnesota, Carter uses Salzman’s terms to describe
himself: “This kind of intellectual publicity of some sort of a catchword
like aleatoric or electronic has no relation to my music. I discovered as
a matter of fact in a book that just came out, written by the critic Eric
Salzman, what my music was, and I had never really noticed it before.”
Carter then quotes extensively from Salzman.42 This broad musical com-
munity based on virtuosity was particularly engaging for Carter, who
had always prized musical virtuosity not only in his own pieces but in
others’ as well. Even in earlier talks, when discussing the Nono work,
he focused on the difficulty of performance. Perhaps the focus on the
resultant performance or sound rather than compositional technique or
method drew Carter to this label.
After establishing this new compositional identity at the start of these
1967 lectures, Carter began to discuss his own precompositional methods
in more detail, drawing clearer connections between himself and Schoen-
berg and Webern. When the topic of serial methods arose, Carter praised

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 81

these Viennese school composers seeking to portray their use of these

methods as part of a historical continuity. In fact, Carter emphasized
serial procedures as something that provided them with background
structure upon which they could continue to compose freely, as they had
done in their earlier works (continuing his idea from the CBC presen-
tation on Schoenberg a decade earlier): “The serial method in Webern
I think allowed him a freedom which he might not have been able to
achieve without it, that is, the serial method gives a fundamental coordi-
nation to all the material and therefore a sense of freedom in its ordering
in time and its method of construction.”43 By describing Schoenberg’s
and Webern’s use of serial techniques as a means of coordinating back-
ground structure that allows free composition in the foreground, Carter
positioned himself as the inheritor of their legacy. He proposed that his
use of precompositional materials had no bearing on listeners’ enjoyment
and comprehension. In the discussion of his own 1964–65 piano concerto,
Carter downplays the importance of these precompositional materials,
highlighting instead the communicative and expressive qualities of the
work: “In that very noisy place [presumably the section culminating in
measure 616] where everybody plays all the things there are 84 notes
sounded together, 72 by the orchestra and the remaining 12 by the piano
and there are little holes left in the orchestra for those notes to be played
by the piano. Actually you can’t hear that, it wouldn’t make any differ-
ence as far as I can see whether they were doubled or not, but this is a
kind of a conceit.” Carter takes an unusual path in suggesting that the
specific notes in the piece do not matter as much as what the listeners
hear, emphasizing the idea that his pieces were created to communicate
larger ideas with audience members.44
During the lecture series, which included a performance of the piano
concerto, he pointed to elements of the piece that could be traced to
serial thinking. He felt that this marked a turning point in which his
music began to “fall into twelve-­tone patterns.” He credited this new
development to the construction of his “Harmony Book”—a personal
documentation (published decades later) of different chord types and
relationships between them—during the compositional process: “This
to me was a very fascinating thing, I never thought of doing this before
and part of the whole building up of this theoretical construct was one
of the things that was very time consuming as you can imagine but it
was also a very fascinating one.”45 On the one hand, Carter presented
his music in a way that more closely approximates the precompositional
emphasis on technique and construction of serial composers. On the
other hand, he argued that the vast majority of serial composers missed
the real value of these approaches by relying too heavily on the structure
and expecting that a meaningful work would emerge fully formed. Now,
finally comfortable with the “new virtuosity” label, Carter attempted to

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 82 GUBERMAN

appropriate the legacy of Schoenberg and Webern into his own music.
Four years after the Dartmouth lectures, Carter again discussed Il canto
sospeso, but, surprisingly, these new discussions lack his earlier enthusi-
asm. He introduced the composition by saying it is constructed on “what
might be considered an artificial order” but nevertheless produces a
work that “in many ways is a very remarkable piece of musical expres-
sion.” He then cautioned against the work’s effectiveness: “I’ve gotten
hesitant about this,” suggesting that after learning the extent to which
Nono relied on precompositional materials Carter became less enamored
with the piece.46
Carter began the analysis of the second movement by contrasting
Nono’s row with those used by Schoenberg and Webern, claiming Nono’s
row lacks musically interesting material: “It really doesn’t make any
difference what the row of this work is since it is not a thematic work at
all, its main characteristic is a series of just notes, separate notes usually
played by just one instrument or sung by one choral part after another
and it makes clouds of sound.”47 Then Carter had difficulty getting the
phonograph to work and so needed to speak off-­the-­cuff, answering
questions while assistants tried to fix the machinery. Carter explained
that, in his opinion, serial works lack a clear aural identity: “In any case,
it proves, partly . . . that these pieces in some way don’t have any sense
of shape, they have their remarkable moments in them and they are also
almost too much alike in character. It’s always the same technique of
little spots of sound that sneak in and out.” Still speaking extemporane-
ously, he discussed the leading European serialists of the time, Boulez,
Stockhausen, and Nono: “Well what bothered me was that these people
both seem to have not found any future for themselves. They came to a
certain point, wrote some very interesting works, and then there seems
to have been very little that they have been able to do in the last three
or four or five years.”48
Organizers of the Minnesota lecture series wanted to publish the tran-
script as a book, but by this point in his career, Carter had little interest
in such things. He was perpetually late as it was in fulfilling his commis-
sions, which were becoming more numerous and lucrative. He increas-
ingly insisted that his music should speak for itself and that he lacked the
time to refine and edit his lectures properly. As a compromise he agreed
to participate in a series of interviews with Allen Edwards that covered
many of the same topics in more detail and with more precision. In a
letter to composer-­theorist Carlton Gamer, Carter says that the careful
revision process employed in the resulting book, Flawed Words, makes it
the first time his thoughts and opinions had been accurately recorded.49
Flawed Words contains three large sections: the first on differences
between the United States and Europe, the second on Carter’s musical
development and biography, and the third on technical issues. In the

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 83

third section, Carter highlights his writing for instruments as a defin-

ing characteristic of his style, derived from Salzman’s “new virtuosity.”
Carter, however, takes the idea much further by transforming the con-
cept into a historiographical project. He describes composers during the
Baroque era as composing in the abstract or at a keyboard and then tran-
scribing music from the keyboard to various instruments. He suggests
that Classical and Romantic era composers overcame this problem by
beginning to consider the characteristics of specific instruments. How-
ever, the problem returned in the first half of the twentieth century with
composers such as Stravinsky and Copland, both of whom composed
primarily at the piano. (Both were also important influences and close
friends earlier in Carter’s career.) Serial composers went even further,
creating what Carter called a “uniform canon” of musical sonority and
behavior to which instruments would then be made to conform.50 In
his historical analysis, sonority and timbre take on primary importance,
while other musical characteristics such as pitch, rhythm, and dynam-
ics become secondary. Thus, the primary achievements of nineteenth-­
century music centered on instrumentation.51 By positioning himself
within a long history of composers struggling with the relationship
between the abstract compositional process and the instruments that
play the parts, Carter becomes both a radical and a historically grounded
composer, both reclaiming and building on the nineteenth-­century tradi-
tions that appealed to broad audiences.
As the discussion of technical issues progressed in the book, Carter
and Edwards turned to serialism. Edwards asked about recent attempts
to “rationalize” posttonal composition, establishing Carter’s antiserial-
ist stance through his statement: “In writing your own works you have
conspicuously avoided fealty to any of the various systems, particularly
the serial system, that have purported to provide a rational basis and
method for coming to terms with the linguistic problems of post-­tonal
music.”52 This wording frames serialism as a scientific rather than a
musical phenomenon, much as Carter had done in his lecture, and Carter
responded by describing the two primary characteristics he looks for in
music: communication and “musical sense.” Carter did not specifically
define the latter, but, based on his other discussions, presumably it has to
do with the coherence of a work as a whole. Serialism, in Carter’s mind,
fulfills this function of constructing a coherent framework; however, this
is the lesser of the two characteristics. According to Carter, the rational
structures provided by serialism should be used “only to achieve the
desired communication, which must therefore in every case be the prime
and ultimate determinant of any musical system pretending to genuine
musical rationality.” Because serial systems do not assist the composer’s
desire to communicate, they “are often useless for musical purposes.”53
Carter’s discussion of complex frameworks for communication promises

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 84 GUBERMAN

that, with careful listening, audiences will begin to recognize that his
compositions are capable of communication, much like works by the
great composers of previous generations still heard regularly in concert
halls.
Carter continued to justify the use of mathematical properties in his
own compositions by writing that these procedures enable him to explore
new sounds:
It’s obvious that the real order and meaning of music is the one the
listener hears with his ears. Whatever occult mathematical orders
may exist on paper are not necessarily relevant to this in the least.
Now it’s true that in writing my own works I sometimes try quasi-­
“geometric” things in order to cut myself off from habitual ways of
thinking about particular technical problems and to place myself
in, so to speak, new terrain, which forces me to look around and
find new kinds of ideas and solutions I might not have thought of
otherwise. Nonetheless, if what I come up with by these methods is
unsatisfactory from the point of view of what I think is interesting
to hear, I throw it out without a second thought.54
Even when Carter used serial-­like procedures, his reliance on his ear sug-
gested to him a clear difference between his own methods and those of
serial composers whom he presents as mathematicians using an abacus
rather than listening to their works. This represents a transition in his
thought throughout the 1960s. When first discussing Nono’s approach to
serialism in his 1963 lectures, Carter assumed Nono’s process was similar
to his own, and he praised Nono’s listening-­based adjustments. In 1963,
even if Nono relied more heavily on serial methods, it was a difference
of degree and not of kind. In Flawed Words, Carter spoke abstractly about
serialism as merely finding a formula, plugging in numbers, and watch-
ing a piece come out as a result. In trying to distance himself from the
ideologies surrounding serial composition, Carter reframed these meth-
ods, removing the individuality and communicative properties he had
so highly valued only a few years earlier. Carter then repositioned his
own use of methods related to serialism as a means of exploring “new
terrain” and breaking his normal habits and practices.

* * *
Carter’s final break with serialism came over a decade later with the
response to Schiff’s Music of Elliott Carter. Schiff analyzes Carter’s com-
positions using terms the composer himself had developed. He hoped the
book would be accessible to both theorists and the record-­buying public.
Carter and Schiff had already struggled with their attempts to appeal
to this vaguely defined public, and they found no American publishers
willing to take up the project.55 Upon the book’s release in England, the

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 85

American music theory establishment praised it for its scope and breadth
but criticized Schiff’s analytical methods, which did not align with the
systematic approaches to discussing nontonal pitch structures developed
in the theoretical profession over the previous decades.
Carter believed that music theorist Andrew Mead’s critique of the
book in Notes faulted him for not embracing the twelve-­tone system.
Carter continued to feel this way over a decade later, when he wrote a
letter in 1993 to musicologist Felix Meyer: “What I do is, of course, very
different from the Schoenberg methods . . . and I do not always use the
entire twelve notes before I go on to the next section!”56 Mead himself
took great care to avoid labeling Carter in his study of pitch structures
based on twelve-­tone theory, as evidenced by the cautiously worded title
“Twelve-­Tone Composition and the Music of Elliott Carter.”57 As he had
earlier in his career, Carter became most invested in defining twelve-­tone
composition to avoid being labeled a composer of these works.
Whether we consider Carter a serial composer, a composer within a
larger twelve-­tone/serial enterprise, or something else entirely, he himself
frequently saw his own practices in relation to the compositional world
around him. Examining Carter’s developing musical-­compositional
persona reveals that one problem with defining a twelve-­tone or serial
“tyranny,” forcing young composers to follow these methods, through
statistics or retrospective statements is that many composers themselves
did not clearly define these terms, nor did they fully grasp the composi-
tional methods developed and used by their peers. For those who saw
themselves outside the establishment, Carter represented the embodi-
ment of a “serial tyranny,” as one of the most celebrated composers
both in America and abroad.58 For Carter, who attempted to cultivate a
unique compositional identity in the midst of these debates, the same
establishment became a system that he defined himself against.

Notes

1. Joseph Straus, Twelve-­Tone Music in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2009), 46; Mark Evan Bonds, A History of Music in Western Culture (Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006), 657. Straus complicates his statement in a brief section devoted
specifically to Carter in which he states that the composer never thought of himself as a
twelve-­tone composer.
2. Charles Rosen, The Musical Languages of Elliott Carter (Washington, DC: Library of
Congress, 1984), 2; Steven Mackey, “A Matter of Taste,” New York Times, September 7, 1997.
3. Elliott Carter, “Shop Talk by an American Composer,” Musical Quarterly 46, no. 2
(April 1960): 196.
4. See, for example, Joseph N. Straus, “The Myth of the ‘Serial Tyranny,’ in the 1950s
and 1960s,” Musical Quarterly 83, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 301–43; and Anne C. Shreffler, “The
Myth of Empirical Historiography: A Response to Joseph N. Straus,” Musical Quarterly 84,
no. 1 (Spring 2000): 30–39.
5. Arnold Whittall, Serialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3.

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 86 GUBERMAN

6. See, for example, James Wierzbicki, Elliott Carter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2011).
7. See Stephen Soderberg, “At the Edge of Creation: Elliott Carter’s Sketches in the
Library of Congress,” in Elliott Carter Studies, ed. Marguerite Bond and John Link (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 236–49.
8. See Felix Meyer, “Left by the Wayside: Elliott Carter’s Unfinished Sonatina for Oboe
and Harpsichord,” trans. J. Bradford Robinson, in Bond and Link, Elliott Carter Studies,
217–35.
9. Straus, Twelve-­Tone Music.
10. Elliott Carter, “Walter Piston,” Musical Quarterly 32, no. 3 (July 1946): 354–75.
11. René Leibowitz, Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage in the Language of
Music, trans. Dika Newlin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949).
12. See, for example, his 1945 essay outline, “Music in America at War,” reprinted in
Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, ed. Felix Meyer and Anne C.
Shreffler (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2008), 67–70.
13. Elliott Carter, “Music of the 20th Century,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 16 (Chicago:
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1955), 16.
14. Ibid., 16–17.
15. Ibid., 17. Carter does not provide any explanation or evidence for the suggestions
that these composers were influenced by twelve-­tone techniques.
16. George Perle, Twelve-­Tone Tonality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
17. Elliott Carter to William Glock, September 6, 1950, in Meyer and Shreffler, Elliott
Carter, 95–96.
18. Ibid., 96.
19. “Music in the United States,” Synthèses (1954): quoted in Meyer and Shreffler, Elliott
Carter, 114. Originally published in French as “La Musique aux États-­Unis,” Synthèses 96
(May 1954): 206–11. The version I am using is an original draft in English in the Sacher
collection and printed in the Meyer and Shreffler book as “Music in the United States”
(1954).
20. Elliott Carter, “Schoenberg Lecture” draft, Elliott Carter Collection, Paul Sacher
Foundation, Basel, Switzerland. The final version of the presentation is Elliott Carter,
“Arnold Schoenberg: Variations for Orchestra, op. 31” (1957), in Meyer and Shreffler, Elliott
Carter, 141–47.
21. Elliott Carter to William Glock, May 3, 1957, in Meyer and Shreffler, Elliott Carter,
148. Carter’s decision to list Berg and not Schoenberg or Webern is particularly odd for the
time. Possibly the influence of Schoenberg over his own recent variations led Carter to feel
that Schoenberg’s methods were too far afield from contemporary twelve-­tone composers,
but there is no indication why he would not have used Webern as a model instead, as so
many twelve-­tone and serial composers of the era did.
22. David Schiff writes that when he asked about the influence of Darmstadt, Carter
said at the time he did not find it important, but Schiff postulates that Carter profited from
working with foreign styles: “Like Jacob, he wrestles with angels to become himself. As
Carter’s sense of his own individual style has become increasingly confident his confron-
tations with alien ideas and styles have grown more daring. With every such encounter,
the expressive and technical domain of Carter’s music has expanded” (The Music of Elliott
Carter [London: Eulenberg Books, 1983], 192–93).
23. David I. H. Harvey, The Later Music of Elliott Carter: A Study in Music Theory and
Analysis (New York: Garland, 1989), 72.
24. See Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot, Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1976), 204–7. Cogan and Escot saw Carter’s work
here as one of many approaches that developed out of serial techniques.

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 Elliott Carter as (Anti-­)Serial Composer 87

25. Elliott Carter, “A Further Step” (1958), in The American Composer Speaks: A Historical
Anthology, 1770–1965, ed. Gilbert Chase (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1966), 253–54.
26. Elliott Carter to Peter Mennin, September 25, 1969, Elliott Carter Collection.
27. Elliott Carter, “Sixty Staves to Read,” New York Times, January 24, 1960.
28. Elliott Carter, “Shop Talk by an American Composer,” draft, Elliott Carter Collection.
29. Ibid.
30. Paul Henry Lang, “Editorial,” Musical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (April 1960): 145–54.
31. Carter, “Shop Talk,” 196.
32. Ibid.
33. Elliott Carter to Paul Freeman, undated, Elliott Carter Collection.
34. Elliott Carter, “Dartmouth Lectures,” August 5, 8, 12, and 13, 1963, Elliott Carter
Collection. While the 1956 Nono composition was not discussed in the Dartmouth talk,
in an article from the same year he positioned the composition as the height of this “post-­
Webernian” serialism. See “Letter from Europe,” Perspectives of New Music 1, no. 2 (Spring
1963): 195–205.
35. Ibid.
36. Elliott Carter to Paul Fromm, August 26, 1956, Elliott Carter Collection.
37. Samuel Randlett to Elliott Carter, March 22, 1966, Elliott Carter Collection. See also
John Gillespie, Five Centuries of Keyboard Music: An Historical Survey of Music for Harpsichord
and Piano (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1965), 422–23.
38. Elliott Carter to Samuel Randlett, April 11, 1966, Elliott Carter Collection.
39. Salzman interviewed Carter for an article upon the completion of the second quartet.
See Eric Salzman, “Unity in Variety,” New York Times, March 20, 1960. While I have not found
a correspondence between Carter and Salzman, the two were presumably friends, because
Carter wrote a recommendation for Salzman’s appointment to the faculty of Queens Col-
lege in 1966.
40. Eric Salzman, Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-­Hall, 1967), 171.
41. Ibid., 172.
42. Elliott Carter, “Minnesota Workshop,” July 4, 1967, Elliott Carter Collection. The
quotations came from Salzman, Twentieth Century Music, 172.
43. Elliott Carter, “Minnesota Workshop,” undated, Elliott Carter Collection.
44. Elliott Carter, “Minnesota Workshop,” July 6, 1967, Elliott Carter Collection.
45. In a 1969 letter to Effie Carlson, answering questions related to her dissertation on
twelve-­tone composition, Carter discusses how he thinks that the best composers make
the techniques, specifically row material, sink to a “second, third, or even fourth level
of importance.” He then lists composers he feels do this effectively, crossing continental
boundaries: Stravinsky, Dallapiccola, Petrassi, and Sessions.
46. Carter, “Minnesota Workshop,” July 6, 1967. The “Harmony Book,” which Carter
continued to update over the following decades, would be published in 2002, edited by
Nicholas Hopkins and John Link.
47. Carter, “Minnesota Workshop,” July 6, 1967. His comments about the row being
nonthematic refer to its construction as a wedge. See Jeannie Ma. Guerrero, “Serial Inter-
vention in Nono’s Il canto sospeso,” Music Theory Online 12, no. 1 (February 2006).
48. Carter, “Minnesota Workshop,” July 6, 1967. Many composers did turn away from
serialism, but it is unclear if Carter was aware of this at the time of the talk.
49. Elliott Carter to Carlton Gamer, May 7, 1974, Elliott Carter Collection; Allen Edwards,
Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1984). Gamer reviewed the book for Perspectives of New Music, writing his review in
the form of an interview with himself. See Carleton Gamer, “Flawed Words and Stubborn

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 88 GUBERMAN

Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter,” Perspectives of New Music 11, no. 2 (Spring–
Summer 1973): 146–55.
50. Edwards, Flawed Words, 68.
51. See Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1974), 94–95. Cone quotes from this section of Flawed Words to compare Carter’s new con-
ception of the intrinsic characters of instruments to Berlioz; however, he does not attempt
to construct a history in the terms Carter envisions here, only drawing a line from Berlioz
to Carter.
52. Edwards, Flawed Words, 79.
53. Ibid., 80, emphasis in the original.
54. Ibid., 80–81.
55. Carter discussed his struggles relating to attempts to find an American publisher
in his correspondence with William Glock, who initiated the project in England through
Eulenberg Books.
56. Elliott Carter to Felix Meyer, April 19, 1993, Elliott Carter Collection.
57. Andrew Mead, “Twelve-­Tone Composition and the Music of Elliott Carter,” in Concert
Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin
and Richard Hermann (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1995), 67–102.
58. Richard Taruskin exemplifies this view when he writes about Carter’s and Milton
Babbitt’s “absurdly overcomposed monstrosities . . . reverently praised by critics and turned
into obligatory models for emulation by teachers of composition” (“The Poietic Fallacy,”
Musical Times 145, no. 1,886 [Spring 2004]: 17).

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