Elliott Carter Studies
Cambridge Composer Studies Series

Over the course of an astonishingly long career, Elliott Carter has engaged with many musical developments of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries - from his early neo-classic music of the interwar period, to his modernist works of conflict and opposition in the 1960s and 1970s, to the reshaping of a modernist aesthetic in his latest compositions. Elliott Carter Studies throws new light on these many facets of Carter's extensive musical oeuvre. This collection of essays presents historic, philosophic, philological and theoretical points of departure for in-depth investigations of individual compositions, stylistic periods in Carter's output and his contributions to a variety of genres, including vocal music, the string quartet and the concerto. The first multi-authored book to appear on Carter's music, it brings together research from a distinguished team of leading international Carter scholars, providing the reader with a wide range of perspectives on an extraordinary musical life.

Preface Marguerite Boland and John Link; Part I. Overview: Music Early and Late: 1. The true significance of Elliott Carter's early works Jonathan Bernard; 2. Elliott Carter's late music John Link; Part II. Analysis and Aesthetics: 3. The search for order: Carter's late-modern thematicism Arnold Whittall; 4. Ritornello form in Carter's Boston and ASKO concertos Marguerite Boland; 5. 'The matter of human cooperation' in Carter's mature style John Roeder; 6. Time management: rhythm as a formal determinant in certain works of Elliott Carter Andrew Mead; 7. 'I try to write music that will appeal to an intelligent listener's ear': on Elliott Carter's string quartets Dörte Schmidt; 8. Composition with intervals: melodic invention in Elliott Carter's recent concertos Stephen Heinemann; Part III. Sketch Studies: 9. Left by the wayside: Elliott Carter's unfinished sonatina for oboe and harpsichord Felix Meyer; 10. At the edge of creation: Elliott Carter's sketches in the Library of Congress Stephen Soderberg; Part IV. Music and Text: 11. Three Illusions … and maybe a fourth: a hermeneutic approach to Carter's music Max Noubel; 12. Layers of meaning: expression and design in Carter's songs Brenda Ravenscroft; 13. 'It's as if our voices made no sound': irony in episodes 10-15 of What Next? Guy Capuzzo; 14. Words and music in The Defense of Corinth Annette van Dyck-Hemming; Bibliography.

Marguerite Boland is a researcher in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her scholarly interest is twentieth-century modernist music and aesthetics, particularly the music of Elliott Carter and of Johanna Beyer.
John Link is a composer and Professor of Music at the William Paterson University of New Jersey. He is the author of Elliott Carter: A Guide to Research (2000) and co-editor, with Nicholas Hopkins, of Elliott Carter's Harmony Book.