Introduction: History and Reception of Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1

Elliott Carter (1908–2012) played a pivotal role in defining American musical modernism after the Second World War. Sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose mission was to organize cultural events that promoted American artists and intellectuals, Carter became one of the most prominent American voices during the Cold War period. He would receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice – in 1960 for his String Quartet No. 2, and in 1973 for String Quartet No. 3. But it was his String Quartet No. 1 (1950–51) that marked a turning point in the development of his new musical language and expression and, as David Schiff – Carter’s former student at Juilliard – notes, “put Carter on the musical map.”Footnote ¹

Scholars have singled out Carter’s five string quartets as his most essential and recognized works. Schiff, for instance, refers to them as “the spinal column of his body of work.”Footnote ² Among them, String Quartet No. 1 has been the most celebrated, performed, recorded, and analyzed. It debuted Carter’s novel ideas that he was developing at the time, including the individualization of instruments, superimposition of thematic material, use of complex polyrhythms, tempo modulations, chordal sonorities as a means of unifying the work, intricate textures, and novel forms.Footnote ³ Jonathan Bernard, while discussing the beginnings of Carter’s “mature” works (with compositions such as the Cello Sonata [1948], the Woodwind Quintet [1948], Eight Etudes and a Fantasy [1949–50], and Eight Pieces for Four Timpani [1949]), noted that with String Quartet No. 1, “the first breakthrough was still to come.”Footnote ⁴ Bernard further observes that the Quartet, which in 1953 was submitted anonymously to a string quartet competition in Liège, Belgium, won first prize and thereafter received wide exposure both in Europe and the United States, consequently “establish[ing] Carter’s reputation for good.”Footnote ⁵ Schiff describes String Quartet No. 1 as “the grandest of the quartets in conception, the one that stands closest, for all the innovations of its syntax, to Beethovenian models,”Footnote ⁶ declaring the Quartet and Carter worthy of such recognition and attention.

In short, the reputation of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 has reached mythical proportions, an image that was carefully crafted by scholars, the powerful institutions that supported him, and Carter himself. At the time the Quartet was being glorified and cementing Carter’s placement “on the musical map,” virtually no one had heard this work. Although Virgil Thomson eventually wrote a positive review of the work, the premiere by the Walden Quartet of the University of Illinois on February 27, 1953,Footnote ⁷ received a lukewarm reception, which Carter mentioned in his early drafts of the program notes of the quartet:

Following the premiere, Carter submitted the quartet to a small and unknown string quartet competition in Liège, Belgium, the same year, where it was awarded first prize before being disqualified for having had a prior public performance. String Quartet No. 1 did not receive wider recognition until a year later, in 1954 when it was performed at the Rome Festival, where it also received mixed reviews,Footnote ⁹ and then two years later, in 1956, when it was recorded by the Walden Quartet.

Thus, a question arises: How did String Quartet No. 1 contribute to Carter’s meteoric rise and notoriety so early on? After all, it is a piece that only a small, exclusive audience in New York City had heard (until the Rome performance and subsequentially the first available recording in 1956), that only one ensemble could play at the time (and whose premiere was not well received), and that had won a rather insignificant award before it was disqualified from that competition.

Unquestionably, Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 is a seminal work in the composer’s oeuvre, which introduced many novel ideas that would define his new musical style and expression. That is, the ideas Carter had been developing since 1944 found their fullest expression in his First Quartet. For instance, Carter remarks that String Quartet No. 1 marked his “most extreme adventure” into “metric modulation” – a seamless shift from one tempo into another, which becomes integrated with surface rhythms.Footnote ¹⁰ The Quartet also features a complex superimposition and juxtaposition of multiple textures of differing speeds, rhythms, and characters; an individualization of instruments; a harmonic language based on all-interval tetrachords; and a formal structure that features four movements that flow into one another, but with the stream of music being broken twice by dramatic pauses, pauses that do not coincide with the beginnings or endings of the movements.

Out of nearly 180 compositions in Carter’s oeuvre, String Quartet No. 1 is most often analyzed – from its harmonic, rhythmic, metric, formal, and textural structure to its compositional process, literary influences, and the work’s receptionFootnote ¹¹ – as well as performed and recorded.Footnote ¹² As a Carter scholar myself, I was drawn to these (complex) musical features and I have certainly contributed to its scholarship. In this Element, I offer a new analysis of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1: not by analyzing the piece itself, but by examining the intriguing and captivating narratives that helped propel Carter’s First Quartet to its success, including the socio-cultural-political context in which these narratives were born and continued to live, and the powerful institutions and individuals who supported Carter’s rise to becoming one of the most dominant American composers.

Carter supplies some of the answers for his early success in his “The General History of My String Quartet” document preserved at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel, Switzerland). Despite the work’s rather tepid premiere, the 1953 performance received “a glowing review” from Virgil Thomson, who was the most significant music critic in the United States at the time. Carol Oja, for instance, writes that Thomson – who had worked as a critic since the early 1920s, first for the Boston Evening Transcript, Vanity Fair, and Modern Music before moving to the New York Herald Tribune, a position he held from 1940 through 1954 – became “one of the most prominent opinion shapers of the second and third quarters of the twentieth century.”Footnote ¹³ In his lectures and interviews dating from this period, Carter also remarked that the composers themselves had stepped into the role of critics and Carter himself worked with Thomson as a critic for the New York Herald Tribune for several years. Carter further explains that in order to secure the programming of new music at concerts, these “composers-critics” would generally not go to concerts unless contemporary music was played, jokingly admitting that this practice was “a kind of blackmail that resulted in many performances of contemporary music.”Footnote ¹⁴ Carter also noted that in New York, Thomson refused to go to concerts that did not program music by American composers, affirming that it greatly helped all composers, especially since he would not review concerts unless the music of “important American composers” was played.”Footnote ¹⁵ Lightheartedly, Carter concludes that this behavior “jacked up the field greatly,” even if Thomson did not always give “good reviews.”Footnote ¹⁶

Unsurprisingly, Carter’s colleague and friend Thomson wrote a favorable review of the premiere of String Quartet No. 1, dubbing it “A Powerful Work”: “The piece is complex of texture, delicious in sound, richly expressive, and in every way grand. Its specific charm is the way in which it sounds less like a classical string quartet than like four intricately integrated solos all going on at the same time […] It is an original and powerful piece, and the audience loved it.”Footnote ¹⁷

Following Thomson’s glowing review and the announcement that the Quartet had won a string quartet competition in Liège, Belgium, the work was performed on April 11, 1954 by the Parrenin Quartet at the Music in the Twentieth Century festival in Rome, Italy, organized by Nicolas Nabokov, Carter’s close friend, and sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, in which Nabokov served as Secretary General (Figure 1).Footnote ¹⁸ This crucial performance, attended by Luigi Dallapiccola, Goffredo Petrassi, Roman Vlad, and William Glock (who shortly after became the head of music at the BBC), as Schiff notes, resulted in “immediately establish[ing] Carter’s European reputation.”Footnote ¹⁹ Other commendations for Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 began to pour in from across the United States and abroad. Michael Steinberg wrote an adulation of the performance in Rome in his 1954 review for the New York Times: “Not in years has such an addition to quartet literature been made, and perhaps one must reach back as far as the Fourth Quartet of Béla Bartók to find its peer.”Footnote ²⁰

Figure 1 Parrenin Quartet performs Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 at the Rome Festival in April 1954.

Photo by Elio Soro, Agenzia fotografica. (Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Used with permission)

William Glock, Carter’s close friend, whom Carter described as “an early champion of the work,” in June 1954 wrote the following review in Encounter, a British-American journal Taruskin described as the “Congress’s English-language organ”:Footnote ²¹

Desmond Shawe-Taylor in his 1954 review for the The New Statesman & Nation expounds on Carter’s impressive undertaking with this work:

On January 5, 1956, following a performance by the California String Quartet, Alfred Frankenstein, in the San Francisco Chronicle, remarked on Carter’s already recognizable unique expression, while also placing Carter’s work among the established “greats” of this period – Bartók and Schoenberg: “It is an extremely long work – 45 minutes – but its loftiness, grandeur, and power justify its size. That Carter has lived in the age of Bartók and Schönberg is obvious but he has absorbed his indebtedness into an extremely important style of his own, one that is especially remarkable for its rhythmic complexities and the freedom of its part-writing.”Footnote ²⁴

In addition to the advantageously positive reviews, it was likely Virgil Thomson who secured the recording of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 with Columbia Records. That is, Thomson served as the chairman of the committee of American composers, who reached out to Columbia and proposed the recording of music by American composers under the Modern American Music Series. The committee, also comprising Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, and William Schuman, would select the genres, composers, works, and specific performers that they wanted to record, which included Walden Quartet’s 1956 recording of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1.Footnote ²⁵ The liner notes to the Walden Quartet performance on Columbia Records explain how the recording came about:

Now we understand better how Carter’s inner circle paved his road to success – the composers, who served as critics and were on the programming boards and committees for festivals and recording contracts, all worked together to promote their own music, or as Carter called it, “jacking up the field.” Even though Schiff remarks that Carter’s path “certainly did not fit the usual model of musical development,”Footnote ²⁷ it is evident that with his connections his path and success could not have been any more assured: on a recommendation by Charles Ives, Carter studied composition at Harvard with Walter Piston, which he followed with studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris for three years (1932–35). Soon after, he would receive two Guggenheim and the American Academy in Rome fellowships, become an elected member of the Institute of Arts and Letters, serve as a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, and hold an active role in the International Society for Contemporary Music, the League of Composers, and the American Composers Alliance.

Thus, Carter himself contributed the mythical narratives, seeking to distance himself from his prewar “American” music and establish his new ideas in the context of the postwar modernist impulse, actively impacting the meteoric success of his String Quartet No. 1. In his conversation with Allen Edwards, Carter candidly revealed his attitude toward his need to develop new ideas and his lack of concern for the reception of the quartet:

Yet, archival documents reveal that while Carter was composing the Quartet, he was very much concerned with what the critics, the audiences, and the performers would think of his new ideas – he worried the quartet would never get performed because of its technical difficulties, the performers “grumble[d] about” performing this music, and that the piece would be “too much for most audiences to take.”Footnote ²⁹ It would take him quite some time and several drafts of the program notes to reach the self-assured infamous line, “to hell with the public and with the performers too.” While in his latest book on Carter, Schiff retrospectively acknowledges that over time “Carter’s story … mixed fact and mythology in a seductive way that seems increasingly problematic, though not necessarily deceitful,”Footnote ³⁰ early Carter scholars and critics, nonetheless, greatly contributed to the formation of the mythical narrative surrounding String Quartet No. 1. As Richard Taruskin writes, “David Schiff’s frankly hagiographic account” paints the undisguised picture of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 as “uncompromising and visionary.”Footnote ³¹ Taruskin continues with a crucial observation, recognizing that Schiff’s use of words like “uncompromising” “monastic seclusion,” or “conversion” to describe this work carried “social and political as well as religious connotations in the context of the Cold war.”Footnote ³²

In the following sections, I will closely scrutinize the narratives surrounding String Quartet No. 1 that greatly contributed to Carter’s incredible success. I argue that it was not necessarily the work itself, which was neither well known nor understood at the time, and whose early performances had received lukewarm and mixed reviews, but rather the compelling narratives developed by the powerful critics, scholars, institutions, and Carter himself that ensured his triumph. Particularly, I will focus on the accounts of the “desert myth,” intertextuality and extramusical associations, musical borrowings and homages, the Liège competition, and the Cold War political ideals of individualism and freedom to demystify Carter’s spectacular and not entirely surprising rise to the top.

1 The Desert Myth Narrative

Elliott Carter’s “Desert Myth” narrative is all too familiar: after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 (his second), Carter decided to leave his “usual New York activities to seek the undisturbed quiet,” where he could work out his new musical experiences and processes.Footnote ³³ As Carter jots down in an unpublished note, he had been waiting for just such an opportunity “to give form to a number of novel ideas that [he] had been thinking about over the past previous years, and work out bit by bit a composition of suitable character.”Footnote ³⁴ Carter found the “undisturbed quiet” in the desert near Tucson, Arizona, where he settled down to an “arduous year’s work building up a whole world of musical thinking and feeling,” in which every detail, practically, was a step into an “unexplored and novel realm.”Footnote ³⁵ The piece that emerged from Carter’s year in the desert was his seminal String Quartet No. 1.

In his 2018 article, Sudip Bose effectively illustrates the jarring dissonance of Carter’s striking decision to withdraw for a year into the Sonoran Desert and the outcome of that decision:

Carter’s own desert narrative contributed to the “mythology” surrounding String Quartet No. 1, a story that Carter scholars turned into religious imagery, as Taruskin notes.Footnote ³⁷ For instance, Schiff writes that Carter’s friends “refer to this time in the desert” as his “monastic seclusion” and a “conversion,” after which a “new composer emerged.”Footnote ³⁸ However, Carter’s experience in the desert was neither “monastic” nor “hermetic.”Footnote ³⁹ For one, Carter was with his family during his stay in the Sonoran Desert, in the vicinity of Tucson, a city that was rapidly growing in the 1950s. Further, he met and conversed with other people daily, such as Joseph Wood Krutch (a naturalist, who was writing The Desert Year at the time). Notably, Carter also took breaks from his “seclusion” to explore the Arizona landscape, attended various lectures and events, and even visited Conlon Nancarrow in Mexico City, Mexico.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet, the carefully crafted desert narrative of the monastic seclusion (which incorrectly implies that Carter’s wife and son were not with him) and the ensuing “conversion” created a compelling story that gave Carter – and the genesis of his String Quartet No. 1 – a certain depth and validation: a composer, who was willing to abandon New York City, the center of modernism (vividly described in Oja’s seminal book, Making Music Modern), for a secluded desert to dedicate himself entirely to his craft, required to be taken seriously.

Perhaps, akin to the Biblical Exodus – a forty-year-long journey of Israelites through the desert in a flight from bondage in Egypt – Carter, too, at the age of forty-two embarked on a self-discovery journey through the desert, fleeing the bondage of his noisy and routine life in New York City and his prewar traditional (neoclassical) compositional style. But why specifically the desert imagery? In his book, The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture, David Jasper notes that the desert “tests the people up to and beyond their limits.”Footnote ⁴¹ It is a place where people go to find “new beginnings.”Footnote ⁴² Thus, when David Klemm poses the question, “Why do they leave the shelter of all things familiar?,” he concludes that “to wander in the desert is a metaphor for the human situation, once our eyes are opened to the truth that all philosophical theology reveals.”Footnote ⁴³ Scrutinizing this religious connotation further by borrowing the terminology from Edward W. Said, Jasper likens the Biblical Exodus to Kant’s “exodus” into the “freedom of reason,” which is associated with a journey across the desert. The “desert,” of course, is understood as a space both interior and exterior: “The ‘desert’ refers to a complex locus of experience and reflection; it is simultaneously an interior space of the mind; an exterior place where pilgrims, adventurers, and travelers can visit and dwell; and an intertextual space produced by cross-references among cultural creations dealing with the desert as archetype or icon of the imagination.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Because of its subjective and multifaceted connotations, the desert has fascinated artists, poets, and composers for centuries.Footnote ⁴⁵ While Jasper observes that in a poet’s mythic imagination, the desert becomes the Waste Land,Footnote ⁴⁶ bringing to mind T. S. Eliot’s physical description of the desert landscape but also a metaphorical image of death, decay, brokenness, and loss in his 1922 poem, The Waste Land, Aidan Tynan effectively describes the artists’ attraction toward the desert, with all its dichotomies and oppositions: “We can grasp [the desert] as a natural wilderness or as a barren wasteland, as an ecology sometimes unusually rich in life and surprisingly fragile, as an idea of geographical extremity or alterity, as a sacred or accursed site, as a metaphor for nullity, as a subjective or existential terrain, or as an object of sheer aesthetic exultation.”Footnote ⁴⁷

For Carter, it is precisely this “magical kingdom” of the desert that left an indelible mark on his journey of self-discovery – both from the experience of seclusion and from the musical inspiration he had drawn from the desert ecology. It also mirrors the experience and fascination his close friend, Edgard Varèse, described during his two-year exploration of the deserts of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1936–37 while working on Espace, an elaborate project that he would eventually abandon but use its sketches to compose Déserts (1950–54).Footnote ⁴⁸ For Varèse, the desert existed not only in nature but also in one’s mind or space,Footnote ⁴⁹ as he explained:

In other letters, Varèse expounds, “I have chosen deserts because I feel them and love them, and because in the United States this subject offers unlimited possibility of images which are the very essence of a poetry and magic.”Footnote ⁵¹ Even twenty years later, in his program notes for String Quartet No. 1, Carter vividly remembers his discussions with Joseph Krutch about the ecology of the desert, and also evokes Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain in his descriptions of these magical, almost mythical, images of the landscape:

Carter’s choice of words in this note is significant, as specific phrases he used in this program note to illustrate the ecology of the desert are the same ones he used to depict the musical events in his String Quartet No. 1, a work in which the process of interruption is one of the principal characteristics of the piece. For instance, Carter’s account of the droughts that are interrupted by “spectacular but brief cloudbursts,” manifest in his description of the second movement, Allegro scorrevole, which features a sound mosaic of “brief fragments, interrupted by a pause, again resumed, and finally interrupted by another outburst that forms the beginning of the Adagio.”Footnote ⁵³ Here, Carter refers to the form of the work, which comprises four movements (Fantasia, Allegro scorrevole, Adagio, and Variations) that flow into one another, yet the music flow is interrupted twice with dramatic pauses.Footnote ⁵⁴

While Carter does not use the actual sounds of nature in his piece, his representation of the desert in String Quartet No. 1 is metaphorical. Carter sought to abstractly portray the life of the desert in his piece, without explicit imitation, analogous to how Ezra Pound’s notion of “absolute rhythm” offers a composer a way of communicating poetic meaning without resorting to excessive imitation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Carter’s approach also parallels William Carlos Williams’s observations during his own trip southwest to the desert of El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico in 1950, which resulted in his 1951 poem, The Desert Music, as he noted: “To copy nature is a spineless activity; it gives us a sense of our mere existence but hardly more than that. But to imitate nature involves the verb: we then ourselves become nature, and so invent an object which is an extension of the process.”Footnote ⁵⁶

For Williams, a poet who had fascinated Carter since his college days,Footnote ⁵⁷ imitating the desert and its music is also metaphorical. That is, as John Lowney observes, the music that Williams hears is an abstract “music of survival, subdued, distant, half/heard,” the barely audible “desert music” that links his consciousness to the harsh desert landscape.Footnote ⁵⁸ For Carter, too, the sounds of the desert are abstract in his Quartet: he sought to portray the experience of the passage of time and the life cycle in the desert, the drastic changes in the landscapes, and its diverse ecology: “Like the desert horizons I saw daily while it was being written, the First Quartet presents a continuous unfolding and changing of expressive characters – one woven into the other or emerging from it – on a large scale.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Thus, String Quartet No. 1 features “many-layered contrasts of character,”Footnote ⁶⁰ themes that emerge simultaneously with other themes, vanish at certain points, and reappear to start their cycles anew – constantly unfolding and changing. For Carter, applying the metaphor of desert ecology to his quartet was a way to engage with the meaning of events in their environment, which he had experienced after spending a year in the desert, trying to understand them, adapt to them, and replicate them musically.Footnote ⁶¹

While “ecology” has become a crucial word today, as Jasper observes – “as the post-industrial parody of the wilderness, its wasteland” – it threatens, “in all its destructiveness, the fragile emptiness of deserted places.”Footnote ⁶² This “frontier,” Jasper continues, “is the line that is always being pushed back, across the desert, beyond which is the fabled country – the new promised land – of California and the West Coast with its City of Angels. […] Yet, for others, the paradise lies not beyond the desert, but within.”Footnote ⁶³ Although the desert came to be associated with the “wasteland” in the verses of T. S. Eliot and was a metaphor for a personal struggle after overcoming an illness for William Carlos William, rather than associating it with death, dryness, and decay, Elliott Carter likened the Sonoran Desert to the “magical kingdom,” a place that had remained protected from and immune to the noise and land pollution of the cities, a utopia.

The desert’s landscape and ecology undoubtedly inspired Carter’s ideas while working on his String Quartet No. 1. But perhaps even more importantly, the experience of “secluding” himself in the desert (even if not in a “monastic” way as described by Carter himself, his friends, and scholars) and being one with nature, put him in the company of those he greatly admired, explicitly Eliot, Williams, and Varèse, but also Henry David Thoreau, who spoke of the “absolute freedom” of Nature when he said, “Let me live where I will … on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness […] in Wilderness is the preservation of the World.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Perhaps, like the dense monochrome paintings of Mark Rothko, an internal desert of extraordinary experience, where one finds oneself “neither inside nor outside, but both at once,”Footnote ⁶⁵ Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 came to represent such a depiction of the desert: a place where both internal and external times emerge, develop, and progress simultaneously.

Whether inspired by the mythological “magical kingdom” or the religious sacred desert, or perhaps the need to follow the footsteps of other modernists he greatly admired, or to truly seclude himself from the daily disturbances of the city to focus on developing his new musical language and expression, Carter’s experience in the Sonoran Desert created one powerful narrative. It established Carter as a serious composer who exemplified an admirable dedication to the craft in the most arduous conditions. The narrative added another layer of depth to Carter’s new ideas and the piece that resulted from this experience. It also created the myth surrounding Carter – about his “monastic seclusion” and consequent “conversion” from which a new composer emerged.

This compelling desert narrative thrust both Carter and his quartet to reach a special status – String Quartet No. 1 became the piece that separates Carter’s compositional life into the “before” and “after.” That is, only a couple of years earlier, Carter was writing pieces like his ballet The Minotaur (1947), a work that some critics even cautioned their readers against listening to because it disrupts the mythical narrative of the First Quartet. Schiff, for instance, writes of the ballet, “Perhaps, more than any other work, The Minotaur presents problems for anyone attempting to trace Carter’s development.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Richard Franko Goldman’s “pioneering” article on Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 went even further by stating: “The Minotaur is a good score, of which almost any American composer might be proud, but it is not altogether representative of the essential Carter style.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus the myth was solidified: Carter was no ordinary American composer, certainly not after the rebirth in the desert, and String Quartet No. 1 was the piece that exemplified Carter’s essential style.

2 Intertextuality and Extramusical Associations

New York was a special place in the 1920s. Vividly described by Carol Oja, it “stood at a hub of action,”Footnote ⁶⁸ becoming “the capital of the musical world.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In Making Music Modern, Oja captures what it meant to be in New York during this decade:

David Schiff gives a similar account:

This is the New York in which Elliott Carter grew up. He recalls in one of his last interviews:

As a teenager, Carter attended the performances of new music in New York and Boston, recalling that he was “old enough to have known a period when The Rite of Spring, when played, chased everybody out of the hall,” further explaining, “You see, in those years, when I was in high school, and even in college, Stokowski used to play Varèse around and occasionally in concerts, so I knew all that stuff. That was all very exciting to me.”Footnote ⁷³

In 1924, Carter met Charles Ives, who, recognizing his talents, took a liking to young Carter and introduced him to notable figures in his circle, brought him to concerts, and even wrote a recommendation for his studies at Harvard. In 1926, Carter began his undergraduate education in English, with secondary concentrations in philosophy and classics.Footnote ⁷⁴ Carter was rather disappointed with his music education at Harvard, where his teachers included Walter Piston and Gustav Holst, noting that no one there took an interest in new music:

Further, he points directly to his Harvard education as a cause for composing in the “Stravinsky-Hindemith” neoclassical style during the 1930s and 1940s,Footnote ⁷⁶ namely before the String Quartet No. 1, noting that the conservative environment at Harvard also affected his tastes in music, but that luckily, he never lost his desire or drive to write the music that he always liked: “As a result [of education at Harvard], my tastes also changed, although I never gave up the idea that I would eventually learn how to write the kind of advanced music that I do write now.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Despite his dissatisfaction with music at Harvard, Carter was thrilled to live in Boston, where he would enjoy new music concerts at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Sergei Koussevitzky. As Carter remarks on his Boston experience, “I went to Harvard, for instance, not because of Harvard, but because the Boston Symphony was playing contemporary music under Koussevitzky. I heard a lot of concerts.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Carter was introduced to the world of modernism through both music and literature. His earliest compositions, during the decades of the 1930s and 40s, are vocal works, which allowed him to combine his two passions – poetry and music.Footnote ⁷⁹ Following a long pause, Carter returned to the genre of vocal music in 1975 with A Mirror on Which to Dwell, setting to music the works of his favorite modernist poets, such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot.Footnote ⁸⁰

Growing up in New York in the age of modernism allowed Carter to see the many innovative ways artists found to appropriate ideas from other arts; as Jonathan Bernard notes, this was the time when “poetry borrowed from painting, painting from music, film from literature, and vice versa, and so on.”Footnote ⁸¹ Carter not only set the lines of poetry to music but also seized the opportunity to incorporate extramusical ideas and use metaphors derived from other arts to describe the experience of time in his music, stating, “Time is the canvas on which you consider music to be presented, just as the spatial canvas of a painting furnishes the surface on which a painting is presented.”Footnote ⁸² Such a visual metaphor of time is perpetuated in Schiff’s discussion of the “cinematic continuity”Footnote ⁸³ in String Quartet No. 1: “Where the other quartets demand concentrated listening, the first calls for an expansive, imaginative response; the listener has to create a mental movie for which the quartet, so rich in its evocative powers and broad in its vision, is the soundtrack.”Footnote ⁸⁴

While Carter had already introduced the metaphor of the desert and its ecology into String Quartet No. 1, he also started describing this work as having evolved from the many readings and his thinking on the topic of the human experience of time. Most notably, his influences were novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights, such as Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Anton Chekhov, Jean Cocteau, Sergei Eisenstein, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose works, in his view, have encouraged musicians “to find new ways of dealing with perception, recognition, understanding, experience, and memory.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Further, at the time Carter was developing his new ideas in String Quartet No. 1, he was also avidly reading philosophical essays about the different ways of the experience of time, most notably the writings of Henri Bergson, Gisèle Brelet, Michel Butor, Charles Koechlin, and Pierre Suvchinsky. While the desert narrative already ushered in the extramusical meaning into Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, incorporating modernist literature, film, and philosophy on time theories into the origin of the piece intensified the enigma and intrigue surrounding this work, and for Carter, enhanced his music with an added layer of prestige, positioning him as an especially intellectual and literary composer.

In addition to setting the verses of poetry to vocal music, Carter introduced literary sources to his instrumental music even before his String Quartet No. 1 – not only that his ballet, Pocahontas (1939), is based on the Native American saga of the Earth Mother, but the scenario by Lincoln Kirstein, who was the founder of Ballet Caravan, who had commissioned the ballet, included a verse from Hart Crane’s poem, The Bridge:

Although Carter did not inscribe this verse into the scenario himself – rather, as Schiff notes, he thought that Kirstein’s citation was “merely an attempt to give the ballet some literary prestige”Footnote ⁸⁷ – he did base his 1976 work, A Symphony of Three Orchestras, on the same poem. In addition to Crane, Carter also based his Concerto for Orchestra (1969), on Vents [Winds], a poem by Saint-John Perse.

Around the same time Carter was developing his ideas and introducing the extramusical into his instrumental works, a French philosopher, Étienne Souriau, was writing about the ways arts relate to one another. He specifically examined the question about “inspirations” and “transformations” from one art form into another and pondered if there is a risk that such “representation of a representation”Footnote ⁸⁸ would appear as a merely derivative response. “There is something odd, and even disturbing, in second-hand inspiration, sought in the works of someone else, and sought in an art form of which the aims and the means are very different from those which characterize poetry. Is this really legitimate? Is this truly useful and fruitful?”Footnote ⁸⁹

In her work on musical ekphrasis, Siglind Bruhn offers insight into the notion of such “transformations” or new representations in another sign system. While the concept of ekphrasis first appears in the Roman Greek period to refer primarily to a literary work that derives from a visual work of art,Footnote ⁹⁰ Bruhn has expanded and adapted the term “musical ekphrasis” to signify a relation between music and other adjoining artistic fields.Footnote ⁹¹ For Bruhn, thus, Carter’s use of verses by Crane and Perse, just like Ravel’s reference to the three poems of Aloysius Bertrand in Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is not just a matter of applying a vague or impressionistic “program.” Rather, in these musical compositions, a transformation of a message from one medium into another takes place.Footnote ⁹² Such transformations occur when composers capture the content, form, imagery, and suggested symbolic signification from a poem (or another art) into their compositions. In these compositions, such connections to an extramusical stimulus allow listeners to fully understand a piece only when appreciating it as a transmedialization of a corresponding poem (or another work of art).Footnote ⁹³

Musical ekphrasis in Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 is more nuanced and complex. Unlike A Symphony of Three Orchestras or Concerto for Orchestra, which were directly inspired by poetry verses, the influence for the Quartet was drawn from intangible ideas in modernist literature and film to portray musically the nonlinear experience of time. Although, as discussed previously, Carter was stirred by the desert landscape and listened to its ecology, it was not just the visual aspect of the desert that appealed to Carter. Rather, he was also intrigued by the cycle of events unfolding in this ecology, for he writes, “Like the desert horizons I saw daily […] the First Quartet presents a continuous unfolding and changing of expressive characters – one woven into the other or emerging from it.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Thus, for Carter, the concept of cycles (and circularity) and the psychology of the passage of time, that is, the temporal aspect of music, were most essential while developing his new ideas in the Quartet.

The temporal aspect of music continued to intensify for Carter after the Quartet – from the 1980s onward, Carter structured virtually all of his music according to the principle of long-range polyrhythms – rhythmic relationships that guide the structure of an entire composition.Footnote ⁹⁵ The depth of his thinking on this topic is also revealed in the essays and lectures he had written over several decades, including “The Rhythmic Basis of American Music” (1955),Footnote ⁹⁶ “The Time Dimension in Music” (1965),Footnote ⁹⁷ “Music and the Time Screen” (1976),Footnote ⁹⁸ and “Time Lecture” (1965/94),Footnote ⁹⁹ as well as his unpublished notes (housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung) about his thoughts on the topic of time and music.

These essays and especially the notes tell us not only that the concept of time permeated Carter’s thoughts, but how they concretely influenced his ideas in String Quartet No. 1. In 1970, two decades after he had written the First Quartet, Carter offered a detailed explanation about how Jean Cocteau’s Reference Cocteau1930 avant-garde film, Le Sang d’un poète [The Blood of a Poet], gave him the idea for the structure of his Quartet. That is, Cocteau frames the entire movie with a shot of a collapsing chimney – we see the beginning of the collapse in the opening scene of the film and then its disintegration at the end (Figure 2). Carter applies this technique to the form of his quartet by framing the work with two solo cadenzas – the first one by the cello at the beginning of the quartet that is continued by the first violin at the very end of the piece (Figure 3), between which the music unfolds in the work’s “internal time” as he explains:

(a) the opening frame of the collapsing chimney, 02:02;

(b) the closing frame of the collapsing chimney, 50:07.

Figure 2 Jean Cocteau, Le Sang d’un poète (1930);

(a) the opening cadenza, cello solo, Fantasia, mm. 1–12;

(b) the closing cadenza, violin solo, Variations, mm. 490–504.

Figure 3 Elliott Carter, String Quartet No. 1 (1950–51) Copyright © 1956 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission;

However, other than mentioning literary authors in his lectures and essays, Carter was less clear about how the various literary sources actually helped him derive and transform the ideas in his Quartet.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Fortunately, his unpublished notes shed more light on this topic. Most notably, Carter was influenced by Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu,Footnote ¹⁰² which was (posthumously) being released in Paris at the time when Carter was living in Paris, allowing him to read the first edition of the novel in French, and then several more times throughout his life.Footnote ¹⁰³ Many of his notes reference Proust as a direct influence on his music. As I have shown in my earlier work on Carter, even though the discussion of Proust does not appear in the published versions of the essays, Carter initially planned to start his “The Time Dimension in Music” lecture with a discussion of “Proustian Time.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Further, his other unpublished notes spell out Proustian techniques and how he transformed those into his First Quartet, and also how they, generally, changed his thinking about music. In one note, Carter writes,

As Carter jots down several passages from Proust’s novel in French, he also offers his own assessment on the topic of “Proustian time” (while also referencing Edgar Allan Poe, Rilke, and Chekhov) and how these literary techniques are reflected in his String Quartet No. 1. He writes:

1. 1. The meaning of the time-dimension as seen in our time: Proust

   1. (a) a large stored composite of many impressions, feelings, thoughts, skills which our memory has knitted together in many different. [sic] Sometimes according to what may seem like inconsequential or irrelevant tags which may plumb the very depths of our thoughts as the famous madeleine or the doorbell heard in his childhood, that were the touchstones for Proust of his entire vision of life.

   2. (b) This collection of memory impressions is in one sense the source of our identity as Proust said: […] and the passing of time as it partially obliterates our memory robs us of our own identity – Rilke.Similarly the passing of time can also modify and change our memory store and revise its meaning and emphasis.

   3. (c) this is very obvious, and in the present century many writers besides Rilke and Proust have considered the question of time from special points of view. For instance, the influence of Chekov’s plays with its new concept of continuity was crucial. For him, linear plot following in a casual order was discarded as it was in Proust for contextual or concentric actions. Characters are shown each in their special way, revealed one after the other reactiong [sic] to special situations – each of which could have given rise to the plot of a play but which as Chekov presents them are passed by, for another revelation. There is a similar method in the “epiphanies” in Joyce’s work. In fact, Ulysses and Finnegan’s [sic] Wake the complex layers of consciousness bring different ideas and experiences into focus one after the other relating them somehow to the total background of the character’s situation or as, in the case of Finnegan, the entire range of human experience. So that experience, the storage of events in time is constantly referred to and illumines in various ways, comically, or tragically the events of the present.

      Now without this background of experience, of memories, both as human being and as listeners to music it is obvious that a work of music can have very little meaning to its listener.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Following these thoughts on the treatment of time in modernist literary works, Carter proceeds to explain more concretely how he adapted these ideas while writing his String Quartet No. 1 (and in his works since 1950, generally).

While Carter does not directly translate any lines from literature into music in the String Quartet No. 1, intertextuality and extramusical associations in this work are quite evident. Specifically, Carter transforms Cocteau’s formal scheme into the structure of the quartet and translates literary techniques into his compositional techniques. This is reflected in Carter’s development of musical characters – perhaps akin to Proust’s development of “the little phrase” in his novel, which undergoes transformations as do places, objects, and ideas associated with each characterFootnote ¹⁰⁸ – but also the simultaneity of themes, multiple speeds of different musical layers, and the circularity of themes that start, spiral, and vanish, just to start anew. Thus, Carter found in these artists a method to focus on the time dimension in music, or to reflect on new ways of structuring and thinking about time in the twentieth century, leading him to conclude that the most compelling aspect of music is time – more specifically, recognizing that within each present point, there are infinite points in the past, and memory plays a key role in relating all events in time and space.

Situating himself among the notable modernists of his time was essential to Carter and the early reception of his Quartet. As he noted previously in reference to the appearance of Crane’s poem in the scenario for Pocahontas, likening his music to literature added some “literary prestige.” By referencing Proust, Joyce, and Cocteau, among others, as his direct influences for his String Quartet No. 1, Carter effectively elevated the reputation of the work, as the quartet is seldom discussed without placing it in the company of notable twentieth-century modernist writers and artists. Hence, Carter placed his String Quartet No. 1 at the center of most notable modern artistic achievements, during a turning point in the American (musical) postwar period.

3 Musical Borrowings and Homages

In his 1957 review of the Walden Quartet’s recording of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, George Rochberg wrote:

Rochberg’s review, which precedes Goldman’s analysis of the quartet, set a precedent for all subsequent reviews and scholarship on this work, effectively creating a narrative that puts the discussion of Carter’s quartet in direct dialogue with those of Bartók, Berg, and Schoenberg, and later of Ruth Crawford. While the earliest reviews of the first performances of the quartet merely mention Bartók and Schoenberg – such as Steinberg’s observation that not since Bartók’s Fourth Quartet has there been a significant addition to the quartet literature or Frankenstein’s statement that by hearing Carter’s quartet it was evident that “Carter has lived in the age of Bartók and Schönberg”Footnote ¹¹⁰ – Rochberg directly compared Carter’s quartet to the notable works of the leading composers of contemporary music at that time. Thus, by situating Carter’s quartet along Bartók’s quartets, Schoenberg’s Trio, and Berg’s Lyric Suite, Rochberg created a narrative that placed Carter deservingly in the company of the most notable and respected composers at the time, concluding that such assimilation, while creating one’s own musical expression, is only logical:

Soon after Rochberg’s review, Goldman’s essay on Carter’s music solidified the idea that, unlike other young composers who were running out of original ideas and unsuccessfully imitating others, Carter stood out among all of them as an example of the most original, exciting, and “first-class” American composer, who managed to both assimilate the best these “masters” had to offer, while also distancing himself from his predecessors to give us something quite new:

Goldman’s overwhelming and hyperbolic support for Carter is apparent; his statement that the 1950s have been “uneventful” until Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 took the stage is rather subjective and arguable. In Europe, Pierre Boulez’s Polyphonie X (1950–51) and Structures (1952) were premiered during this period, followed by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Punkte and Spiel (1952). In the United States, John Cage debuted his indeterminate music, first with Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), and then with the application of I Ching to derive chance operations in Music of Changes (1951), and the ground-breaking 4’33” (1952), while Conlon Nancarrow’s Rhythm Study No. 1 for Player Piano (1949–50) was published in 1951, just to name a few notable musical achievements of the early 1950s. Morton Feldman, for instance, describes this decade as one of the most productive and creative periods in the arts because of the “freedom of people to be themselves,” exemplified by Mark Rothko, in his view, an artist “who was free to do only one thing – to make a Rothko – and did so over and over again.”Footnote ¹¹³ As Feldman distinctly describes the bustling artistic scene in New York City at this time, surrounded by painters (such as Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Sonja Sekula), sculptors (Max Ernst, David Hare, and Richard Lippold), writers (Frank O’Hara), performers (David Tudor), and composers (Cage, Henry Cowell, and Pierre Boulez), among many others, the 1950s could hardly be conceived as “uneventful.” Nonetheless, Goldman proclaims Carter’s quartet as the most important American musical accomplishment of the decade: “The 1951 String Quartet […] is almost without doubt the most important and imposing accomplishment of American music in the last decade; it has aroused the keenest interest and discussion in both Europe and the United States.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Joseph Kerman’s 1957 review of Walden Quartet’s Columbia recording likened Carter’s quartet to another of history’s “greats”: “When Carter makes a solemn unaccompanied da capo of the opening of his first movement as a final variation in his last movement, the result is no more than a paradox. One thinks idly of the finale in Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

This type of adulation for Carter’s quartet, while assigning the work a certain prestige by comparing it to renowned figures continued even in more contemporary reviews. For instance, in 2018, David Schiff noted that by successfully distancing himself from Schoenberg, Carter was “the emancipator of musical discourse” and the “inheritor not only to the entire tradition that culminated in Schoenberg’s music, but to other traditions as well.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ For Schiff, Carter was ostensibly the greatest innovator of the century, who declared himself “not just the equal of the Einstein of twentieth-century music but his rightful successor.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ It is virtually impossible to find a piece of scholarship on Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 that does not mimic the same observations set forth by Rochberg and Goldman, as illustrated in Schiff’s reiteration that Carter’s quartets continued Bartók’s great trajectory of the genre: “Carter’s five quartets […] take up the genre of the modernist string quartet where Bartók had left off. Like the Bartók quartets, Carter’s are virtuosic and meditative, emotionally intense yet structurally rigorous. Like Beethoven’s and Bartók’s, they may be seen to form a spiritual autobiography.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

In his discussion of the String Quartet No. 1, specifically, Schiff continues with the comparison of this work to Schoenberg, Beethoven, Berg, and Bartók, and also Ruth Crawford, an American “ultramodernist”:

Jonathan Bernard also compares the sheer size of the work to Beethoven and Schoenberg: “There is, first of all, the matter of sheer length: approximately thirty-five to forty minutes depending on the performance, thus demanding the unbroken attention of listeners on the scale comparable to that of Schoenberg’s first quartet or one of the late Beethoven quartets.”Footnote ¹²¹

Similarly, Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler note that “Carter’s quartet shares with Schoenberg’s First String Quartet its length, extensively contrapuntal texture, and wide expressive range,” and that its formal design “recalls the continuous, interlocking four movements of Schoenberg’s quartet.”Footnote ¹²² Dörte Schmidt confirms the parallels, stating that “the references in the First Quartet reveal a particular interest in Bartók and the Viennese School, in keeping with Carter’s reorientations in the late 1940s.”Footnote ¹²³

Thus, it would appear that Carter evoked the sounds and grandiose scale of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Berg, Bartók, Crawford, and Debussy,Footnote ¹²⁴ but had also successfully distanced himself from all of these composers to make a new statement. Shreffler, however, reveals that Carter derived many of the “distinctive features” that characterize his String Quartet No. 1 – namely, “the differentiation of voices, the exploration of clusters as timbre, and the generation of rhythmic processes” – directly from Crawford’s 1931 String Quartet.Footnote ¹²⁵ Nancy Yunhwa Rao substantiates this claim by tracing the evolution of Carter’s dissonant writing to Crawford.Footnote ¹²⁶

The evocation of the “masters” of the earlier generations in less critical reviews may be understood as a tribute, a way for Carter to pay homage to the composers he greatly admired and whose music helped him shape his own musical expression. The comparison to Schoenberg is perhaps the most significant because it similarly justifies the complexity of Carter’s new language in the quartet. As the work’s early critics noted, the quartet is “extremely long” and features “rhythmic complexities” (Frankenstein), and its sheer difficulty makes Schoenberg seem not more difficult than Kuhlau or Clementi (Glock). However, these critics also recognized that such complexity emerged not for the sake of just being difficult, but from Carter’s need to express his new ideas about rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, form, time, and characters he was developing at that time. Even though Carter famously exclaimed, “To hell with the public and with the performers too,”Footnote ¹²⁷ Glock concludes that Carter’s quartet does more than subject the audience to “forty-five minutes of admirable hell.” Thus, Carter sought to restructure the rhythmic expression in his music not only because he wanted to write a composition that would be compelling to him without compromising any of his new ideas for the sake of satisfying the audience or performers but, more importantly, because he saw it as a necessary step in the logical path of music discourse. Similarly, Schoenberg also described his method of composing with twelve tones as growing out of necessity.

Carter’s path to new ideas was indeed an arduous one, taking seven years to formalize in String Quartet No. 1. On some level, it parallels Schoenberg’s twelve-year process of developing his method of composing with twelve tones.Footnote ¹²⁸ For both composers, the challenge was not only about developing new ways of expressing musical ideas but also about the acceptance of the method. Schoenberg decided to keep silent for two years, anticipating resistance and confusion,Footnote ¹²⁹ while Carter, fully aware of the complexity of his new musical language, was concerned about whether the piece would ever be performed or understood by the audience.Footnote ¹³⁰ To justify the difficulty of his new harmonic method, Schoenberg reminded us of Brahms and how his music was deemed too difficult and incomprehensible at the time: “Younger listeners will probably be unaware that at the time of Brahms’s death this [Cello] sonata [in F major] was still very unpopular and was considered indigestible. Older listeners will no doubt remember that for twenty years the Violin Concerto was thought to be unplayable, unviolinistic, despite Joachim’s advocacy.”Footnote ¹³¹

By bringing up the progressive music of Brahms, Schoenberg in effect established his own credibility and justified that he deservingly carried forward the lineage of history’s most significant composers. Hence, Carter’s comparison to Schoenberg is rather noteworthy as it now puts Carter directly as the carrier of this extraordinary lineage, establishing Carter’s own authority and thus his well-deserved placement in the musical canon.

Carter himself directly contributed to the intrigue and reception of his String Quartet No. 1 by explaining that he used direct quotations in this work to pay homage to the composers whose rhythmic innovations inspired him to pursue his own ideas – Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow. Carter writes:

Indeed, the opening theme of Ives’s First Violin Sonata is quoted by the cello in Carter’s Fantasia movement, starting in m. 27 (Figure 4). Carter’s choice of this particular selection is peculiar – the theme opens with an F-minor triad, a type of harmonic sonority Carter sought to avoid in his String Quartet No. 1.Footnote ¹³³ Further, the theme is not quite discernible as it is neither a prominent theme in Ives’s oeuvre nor is it necessarily noticeable in Carter’s quartet – the theme is buried within the busy texture of four simultaneous themes at different speeds, articulations, rhythms, and characters.Footnote ¹³⁴ Perhaps, quoting Ives was not so much of a homage as it was Carter’s public apology to his mentor, whom he openly humiliated in his brutal review of the Concord Sonata in Modern Music, following the piece’s first performance in New York in 1939 by John Kirkpatrick. In his scathing review, Carter wrote:

This blistering review permanently strained Carter’s relationship with Ives, who only a decade earlier had written a letter of recommendation for Carter to the Dean of Harvard University. In that letter, Ives described Carter as an “exceptional boy … of good character” and noted his “reliability, industry, and a sense of honor.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Yet, there was nothing honorable in Carter’s public discredit of Ives. Perhaps, Carter resented that Lawrence Gilman, a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, had just proclaimed the Concord Sonata “the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication.”Footnote ¹³⁷ After all, this review was not written by the “reborn” Carter of the String Quartet No. 1 era, but the Carter who composed Pocahontas, a piece so ill-received that it prompted Copland to write a letter to Koussevitzky to say, “I need not tell you about the quality of the piece as you can see that for yourself.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Still elated from his recent studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Carter was looking for ways to find his own voice and place in America upon his return from Paris and to make a mark in the trajectory of American modernism. Before he would compose his landmark String Quartet No. 1, which would just achieve this goal, Carter asserted his dominance through this cruel review of Ives’s Sonata, a deed he would come to regret his entire life.

Figure 4 (a) Charles Ives, Violin Sonata No. 1, m. 1.

Figure 4 (b) Elliott Carter, String Quartet No. 1, Fantasia, mm. 27–30: musical quotation of Ives’s First Violin Sonata in the cello.

Copyright © 1956 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Even though Carter tried to redeem himself by writing two other essays about Ives in the short period after – “Ives Today: His Vision and Challenge” (1944) and “An American Destiny” (1946),Footnote ¹³⁹ he certainly drew much attention to his admiration for and friendship with Ives by quoting Ives in his String Quartet No. 1. Thus, the use of the musical quotation of an Ives theme is just as much a humble apology as it is an homage to a great friend. Both of these interpretations created an astonishing narrative for Carter’s Quartet, as an homage to Ives became inextricable from the discussion of the quartet itself. The impact of the Ives quotation on the reception and our understanding of Carter’s quartet is quite powerful, more so than any other comparison of this work, as vividly illustrated by Meyer’s and Shreffler’s statement that “if Schoenberg, Berg … and Bartók were the quartet’s European ancestors, its American grandfather was Ives, whose influence Carter explicitly acknowledged by using the head motive from Ives’s First Violin Sonata as one of the main themes of the first movement.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The circumstances surrounding the Nancarrow musical quotation are even more intriguing. In his notes for the String Quartet No. 1, Carter wrote that the beginning of the Variations movement quotes a theme from Nancarrow’s Rhythm Study No. 1, a statement that has been taken de facto by Carter scholars. Schmidt, for instance, makes a general observation that the themes and motives in the String Quartet No. 1 appear within a context that is quotational,Footnote ¹⁴¹ while Shreffler similarly notes that Carter both quotes a Nancarrow study and devotes much of his music to the “Nancarrow problem”: “developing a notation that allows complex rhythmic relationships like those in Rhythm Study No. 1 to be read and performed.”Footnote ¹⁴² Schiff states with a factual tone that “at the beginning of the Variations Carter quotes a passage from Conlon Nancarrow’s Study No. 1 as a homage to his polyrhythmic experiments.”Footnote ¹⁴³

However, Nancarrow’s theme does not actually appear in Carter’s quartet, but rather, the Variations movement, at best, alludes to Nancarrow’s Rhythm Study No. 1, a piece Carter knew quite well. Carter first heard the piece in January of 1951, when he briefly left the Sonoran Desert to visit Nancarrow in Mexico City. A year later, Carter himself published this etude in New Music QuarterlyFootnote ¹⁴⁴ and wrote about Nancarrow’s use of “unusual” polyrhythms in Rhythm Study No. 1, which employs the combination of four distinct planes of rhythm in the piece’s “most elaborate measures” (illustrated in Figure 5).Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Figure 5 Conlon Nancarrow, Rhythm Study No. 1, mm. 50–51.

Further, sketches for String Quartet No. 1 confirm that Carter was familiar in fine detail with Nancarrow’s work while composing his quartet since some of the folios in this collection indicate that he was trying to replicate a part of Nancarrow’s rhythmic design. For instance, one sketch shows that Carter is striving to superimpose three polyrhythms in order to create three distinct rhythmic planes.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The excerpt is notated in the same tempo and meter as the fourth staff of Rhythm Study No. 1: 7/8 meter at the tempo of an eighth note at 210.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ While the texture and harmony on this sketch show an uncanny resemblance to Nancarrow’s score – both are characterized by widely spaced trichords, superimposed fifths in Nancarrow and a combination of fifths and sixths in Carter – this sketch does not make it into the final version of the Quartet. Thus, the sketch suggests that Carter was only using Nancarrow’s piece as a study for developing his new rhythmic technique rather than as a direct source of the material; that is, the lack of the actual quotation would imply that the quotation is not literal but, rather, conceptual.

Thus, while the opening of the Variations movement in String Quartet No. 1 echoes Nancarrow – it is characterized by four instruments playing themes at distinct speeds, where the top voice plays triple-stops of widely spaced chords and the cello plays accented quarter-note regular downbeats, as illustrated in Figure 6 – the allusion is not a direct quotation as Carter had initially explained it. This mystery is revealed in an unpublished interview Carter conducted in 1982 with Frans van Rossum, in which he explained the context of the missing Nancarrow quotation:

The information Carter discloses in this interview is illuminating on two points. First, for Carter scholars, it truly solves the mystery of the missing Nancarrow quotation: simply, it is not there. Second, perhaps even more stunningly, the revelation acknowledges the fact that there was an earlier version of the Rhythm Study No. 1 with four introductory measures that the composer had cut from his score before its publication. This earlier version of the etude does not survive, as it does not appear within the complete Nancarrow estate housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. Thus, in essence, Carter deliberately decided to include a Nancarrow musical quotation and coincidentally Nancarrow happened to cut the said quotation from his piece, ultimately defeating the notion of a musical quotation.

Figure 6 Elliott Carter, String Quartet No. 1, Variations, mm. 1–4.

Copyright © 1956 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Nevertheless, it is curious that Carter continued to claim, even twenty years later (his essay on his first two string quartets was written in 1970), that the opening of the Variations movement uses a theme from Nancarrow’s Rhythm Study No. 1, even though the theme had been removed from public record. It is even more peculiar that scholars continued to perpetuate this claim when it was evident to everyone who had examined the score that the Nancarrow quotation did not exist. One can only speculate on Carter’s intent. What we know for certain is that Carter greatly admired Nancarrow, his music, and especially his rhythmic innovations, and had intended to quote a theme from Rhythm Study No. 1. Perhaps, Meyer and Shreffler come closest to finding an explanation – they note that Carter needed to create a narrative of his “open acknowledgment of the American ‘ultramodern’ tradition of Ives, Ruggles, Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Nancarrow” in order to send a clear signal that with his String Quartet No. 1, Carter had left behind neoclassicism and has managed to successfully merge the European traditions” (i.e., Schoenberg, Berg, and Bartók) with the “dissonant” and “advanced” music of the American ultramodernists.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Thus, both homages to Ives and Nancarrow were Carter’s calculated move to distance himself from The Minotaur and Pocahontas and create a compelling new narrative of Carter’s new, reborn, and modern musical language of String Quartet No. 1.

4 Liège Competition

We see the now-already familiar narrative present in Robert Erich Wolf’s Reference Wolf1957 review of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Wolf’s article, published after the performances of the quartet had taken place in both the United States and Rome and around the same time the reviews at home and abroad were being published (including the articles by Rochberg and Goldman), as well as after the release of the recording of the work by Walden Quartet, carries the same language and descriptions established by critics early on: Carter’s quartet is discussed in the context of Beethoven and Bartók.Footnote ¹⁵² However, a close scrutiny of Wolf’s review raises some contention. For instance, it is highly debatable whether the audiences in Liège truly made this assessment on their own; that is, the quartet had already been reviewed in print. But what we do know of this performance in Liège is that the ensemble struggled greatly with Carter’s quartet and could barely play it. It is hard to imagine that such a performance would generate such a favorable reception and response from the audience. Even Carter’s own recollection of the performance contradicts Wolf’s observation:

Joking aside, Wolf’s assessment of the grandeur of this performance is highly unlikely – Charles Rosen notes that the players “broke down trying to perform it.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In fairness, the committee had received 117 submissions of string quartets in all styles, which the ensemble was supposed to decipher and learn in only two months.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Carter’s own admission is not only that the performance of his Quartet in Liège was far from great, but that he was utterly surprised when he was notified that he had won the competition. Schiff cites that the reason Carter was surprised is that he felt that sending his piece to Belgium was “like dropping a message-filled bottle off a boat in mid-ocean.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ This is quite a hyperbolic description of the situation. For one, the Concours international de quatuor à cordes de la ville de Liège [the Liège String Quartet International Competition] was run by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, an organization with whom Carter had close professional ties. For instance, Carter’s Holiday Overture (1944) was awarded the first prize at the Independent Music Publishers Contest in 1945; the judges for that contest were Nicolai Berezowsky, Aaron Copland, and Serge Koussevitzky.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Thus, Carter submitting his quartet to the Liège competition was not quite like dropping a bottle in the ocean; he knew exactly where it was going and whom it was going to reach.

Further, Wolf, like Carter himself (and scholars alike), emphasizes and reiterates the point that Carter’s submission to the Liège competition was anonymous. This attribute of anonymity is significant as it implies that the work was evaluated objectively and fairly. Even more so, it is a crucial detail because anonymity was one of the criteria of the competition. While Carter did remove his name from the score and entered the competition under the pseudonym Xpovometros (Chronometros, or “timekeeper),”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ there was, however, nothing anonymous about his submission. That is, one has to wonder: How could it have been possible for Carter to submit his String Quartet No. 1 anonymously, a piece that had already been performed several times by Walden Quartet, had published reviews written about it, and a publication contract in place with American Music Publisher? We may speculate that this is the reason why Carter was actually surprised to learn that he had won the competition: he knew that he was ineligible to compete in the first place, let alone win. The contest rules clearly indicated that the competition was designed for works without prior performances or publications, that the winning piece would be premiered by the Liège City String Quartet, and that the organization would arrange the publication of the work. Thus, knowing that Carter had broken the rules of even qualifying for the competition was the truly surprising element of Carter’s award.

Carter was in residency at the American Academy in Rome (AAR) in 1953 when he was notified that he had won the Liège competition. Rather than expressing any jubilation, he instead started writing a storm of letters to ensure that he could, indeed, win the award despite his clear ineligibility. He engaged his closest friend, Nicolas Nabokov, Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), who was organizing the 1954 music festival in Rome and programming the Parrenin Quartet’s performance of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 in it.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Carter strategically reached out to Nabokov to intervene, knowing of his significant political connections and the backing by the United States government. Nabokov attempted to mediate the situation by writing to Louis Poulet, the organizer of the competition and the violist of the Quatuor Municipal de Liège, and proposed that his ensemble participate in the Rome Festival and perform Carter’s piece, among others:

The Liège organizers refused Nabokov’s proposal, likely because its quartet could not play Carter’s piece. Even during the competition deliberations, Henri Koch wrote in his notes to the jury, “To Chronometros: No! Despite everything! Impossible to play!”Footnote ¹⁶¹ Daniel Guberman speculates that Nabokov acted on Carter’s request not only out of his wish to help his close friend but likely out of his own (political) interest – he saw an opportunity to expand his Rome Festival by inviting additional European ensembles to perform the works by American composers,Footnote ¹⁶² thus fulfilling the purpose of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

But for Carter, winning the Liège competition was primarily about expanding his own international visibility and gaining new professional opportunities. For instance, two days after learning that he was awarded the Liège prize, Carter received a congratulatory letter from Harold Spivacke of the Library of Congress, who was interested in organizing a performance of the work in Washington D.C. and also offered to add Carter’s Quartet to the Library of Congress collection.Footnote ¹⁶³ As Guberman speculates, Carter feared that being deemed ineligible for the Liège coemption would result in a significant loss of professional opportunities.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Thus, before responding to the Liège competition organizers, Carter sought advice from Olga Koussevitzky of the Koussevitzky Foundation and Richard French of American Music Publisher (asking if AMP would consider collaborating with the City of Liège on the publication of the work),Footnote ¹⁶⁵ in addition to Nabokov and Spivacke.

Eventually, Carter did respond to the Liège competition committee, but as Guberman notes, Carter’s letter did not express any “joy, gratitude, or excitement” for winning the award.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Instead, he was focusing on the technical wording of the competition regulations and was trying to argue his legality of entering and winning the award. In one letter, Carter writes:

However, the Liège organizers did not succumb to Carter’s arguments, notifying him in November 1953, two months after informing him that he had won, that his quartet had been officially disqualified.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Nonetheless, Carter (and his supporters) maintained that Carter had won the competition, despite his clear disqualification. Even decades later, Carter still claimed that he did not feel that he had done anything wrong:

This is, of course, not an accurate portrayal of the events. As Carter himself states in the letter to the Liège competition organizers, the quartet already had two performances in New York before he had even submitted it to the competition, and two additional performances at music festivals since having had submitted it. Further, his argument that university performances should be considered private events is farcical. In a 1952 letter he wrote to John Garvey of the Walden Quartet, upon learning that the ensemble would be performing his piece at Columbia University, he assured him that he would do his best to secure the attendance of a critic at the concert and be in a position to arrange for the recording of the piece, as well. He writes:

Clearly, Carter was not envisioning a private event but rather a public premiere that would be covered by the press and result in a recording of the work. This is precisely why Carter, upon learning that he had been awarded the Liège prize, instead of celebrating his achievement, sought advice from his friends on how he could bypass his ineligibility due to prior public performances of his quartet and keep the prize. But the question arises: Why did such a small, and rather insignificant competition that hardly anyone had really heard of before Carter, matter so much to him?

The Concours international de quatuor à cordes de la ville de Liège was founded in 1951 by Louis Poulet, a violist of the Liège City String QuartetFootnote ¹⁷¹ and a professor of chamber music at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels, and Paul Renotte, a councilman of fine arts in the city of Liège. It was sponsored by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and in addition to the members of its Foundation, the committee comprised Fernand Quinet (president of the jury), Paul Collaer (Belgian musicologist, pianist, and orchestra director), Léon Jongen (a composer and pianist), Henri Koch and Éric Feldbusch (members of the string quartet), Marcel Deprez, and Poulet.Footnote ¹⁷² The competition, focused solely on the genre of the string quartet, was designed with a three-part structural objective in mind, which would undoubtedly result in making Liège “the string quartet capital of the world”: emphasizing composition through its string quartet competition; focusing on the performance by hosting workshops and inviting quartet ensembles to play the new literature submitted to the competition; and highlighting instrument-making, which awarded new instruments to the winners of the competition.Footnote ¹⁷³ The competition ran for only twenty years, from 1951 through 1971, and the three components of the competition – composition, performance, and instrument-making – alternated each September. Thus, within those twenty years, the composition competition sessions occurred only eight times: in 1951, 1953, 1956, 1962, 1965, 1969, and 1972.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Out of those eight events, the first prize was awarded only five times, including Carter’s 1953 award, which was subsequently withdrawn. Therefore, there have been a total of four prizes awarded successfully during the competition’s short-lived history: to a Polish composer, Grażyna Bacewicz, in 1951; French composer, Manfred Kelkel, in 1956; Italian composer, Giorgio Ferrari, in 1962; and a Romanian composer, Wilhelm Georg Berger, in 1965.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The documents also show a significant decrease in the number of submissions following the competition’s early excitement: in 1953, there were 117 submissions and by 1959 only 25.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Thus, one may conclude that the Liège string quartet competition was hardly a success story or that it had a big impact on the new music scene. Perhaps, the most notable detail concerning the Liège competition is that in 1953, Carter beat Stanisław Skrowaczewski, who was awarded the second prize.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Carter’s victory in Liège, and we can certainly call it that despite his disqualification for there is hardly a discussion of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 without a mention of the Liège competition,Footnote ¹⁷⁸ did not put him on a musical map; rather, Carter’s victory put Liège on the map.

To return to the initial question – why was Carter intent on keeping the prize of a rather insignificant competition? It was likely about the prestige of winning an international prize, which would ensure Carter greater visibility. Also, Carter likely bought into the optimism shared by the organizers and sponsors in Liège that the competition would become an up-and-coming event; with 117 submissions in 1953, it did gain some notice in Europe and the United States, thus the notion of Liège becoming “the string quartet capital of the world,” while naïve, may have seemed momentarily plausible.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ But, for Carter, it was also about winning a prize for a piece that featured his new compositional ideas and would thus justify the composer’s drastic shift in his musical expression. Even though Carter had won some accolades before Liège – his Pocahontas was awarded the Juilliard Publication Award in 1940 and Holiday Overture the Independent Music Publishers Contest in 1945 – those were recognitions for his old-fashioned, neoclassical compositions. His String Quartet No. 1 was a direct statement on Carter distancing himself from the populist compositional trend; winning an award for his new, modern, and “advanced” composition would warrant him the necessary validation from critics, performers, and audiences.

Naturally, the notion of winning in itself also carried certain pride and appeal for Carter. For instance, while discussing his Holiday Overture at a lecture in 1965, Carter could not help but mention that he was awarded the first prize at the Music Publishers Contest over Schoenberg:

Making light of the situation, Carter reveals not only that he had beaten Schoenberg in a composition contest, but that he did so with a piece he had just ridiculed. Thus, we can assume that if even winning a competition with a mediocre piece brought Carter certain validation, then winning a competition with a “serious” composition would carry much more weight. Thus, for Carter, this is why winning in Liège mattered, even though ultimately, he did not win the award following his disqualification – it was about his reputation, visibility, and confirmation. However, for the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Nicolas Nabokov, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the United States government, Carter’s victory mattered in the context of politics and cultural diplomacy of the Cold War.

5 Political Ideals of Individualism and Freedom

On February 14, 1967, the New York Times published a front-page story in which the reporter, Neil Sheehan, uncovered that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been secretly supporting the nation’s largest student organization – the National Student Organization (Figure 7).Footnote ¹⁸¹ In the weeks that followed, the New York Times continued to publish a series of articles further exposing the CIA’s infiltration and financial support of journalists, academics, intellectuals, book and journal publishers, and arts organizations, all of whom were engaged in the diffusion of the Cold War propaganda at the height of the Cold War. Among them, notably stood out a British American magazine Encounter (which published an overtly glowing review of Carter’s Quartet by Glock in 1954, following the performance in Rome). Together with Encounter, which in 1953 became the official voice of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CCF itself was also identified as a beneficiary of the CIA’s secret funding. Frances Stonor Saunders claims that the CCF received around one million dollars per year in the early 1960s via the Ford Foundation to organize music festivals in Europe and run several magazines, including Encounter.Footnote ¹⁸²

Figure 7 New York Times, February 14, 1967 front-page report uncovering the CIA secret operations.

Used with permission.

The New York Times exposé created a scandal for the CIA, all of the foundations engaged with its secret plan, and the individuals who accepted its money.Footnote ¹⁸³ The US Congress urged an investigation and President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the CIA to immediately cease all its secret funding of student groups.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ The scandal reached its apex on May 8, 1967, when Tom Braden, the former chief of the CIA’s International Organization Division, confirmed that “the C.I.A. ‘placed’ an ‘agent’ in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization of leading European and American intellectuals,” and that “‘another agent became an editor of Encounter,’ a London-based intellectual monthly once supported by the [CCF].”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Braden further explained that these “agents” suggested programs and projects to the CIA and arranged for agency subsidies that were channeled through real or fake foundations.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Another article on the same New York Times front page reported that Stephen Spender, a British poet and a co-editor of Encounter, left his post following the disclosure of the CIA’s role with the journal (Figure 8).Footnote ¹⁸⁷ A week later, on May 13, 1967, during a board meeting of the CCF, Michael Josselson, the executive director of the organization and a CIA agent, resigned after admitting that he had been misleading the CCF for twenty years with obscured facts and that the CCF was part of a secret CIA operation.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Following these revelations, the Congress for Cultural Freedom continued to operate for about a decade under a new name, the International Association for Cultural Freedom. But, with an irreparably damaged reputation, it failed to gain any prominence or support, and the Congress fully dissolved in 1979.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Figure 8 New York Times, May 8, 1967, front-page headlines covering the CIA scandal.

Used with permission.

With the backing and financial support of the CIA and the American military government, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was initiated in West Berlin in 1950 (June 26–29) during a conference of more than one hundred American and European intellectuals, who espoused a notion that “culture can exist only in freedom and that freedom can lead to cultural progress.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ The key figures at this meeting and the subsequent formation of the CCF were Melvin Lasky (1920–2004), an American trade unionist serving as a cultural attaché with the Army of Occupation and founder of its German-language monthly Der Monat, who would soon become a co-editor of Encounter; Michael Josselson (1908–1978), a Jewish immigrant from Estonia, a former member of the Army’s Psychological Warfare Division, who had left the US army to work for the CIA; and Nicolas Nabokov (1903–1978), a Russian-born composer and writer, and a cousin of Vladimir Nabokov, who after exiling Russia became the director of Russian broadcasts of Voice for America and was later appointed CCF’s Secretary General.

Headquartered in Paris, the CCF was successfully spreading its mission across the globe, establishing chapters in 35 countries within the first ten years of its operation. As Tity de Vries argues, the CCF was the “cultural counterpart to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” because it was considered one of the most important organizations with which the United States conducted its “cultural Cold War.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ That is, economically, the United States came out on top after the Second World War. However, ideologically, it was still fighting the spread of communism in Western Europe and Asia, especially encountering challenges in countries like France and Italy, where the doctrine was gaining popularity. Thus, the US government was looking for ways to squash the support and sympathy of the communist ideology by winning the “hearts and minds” of the people in nonaligned countries, as Hugh Wilford notes. Hence, the CIA envisioned an organization that would enlist artists and intellectuals, among others, to actively engage in spreading their message of cultural freedom across the world.Footnote ¹⁹² The organization’s mission was to subsidize dozens of prominent magazines, hold music festivals, art exhibits, and international conferences on themes such as “science and freedom” and “the end of ideology,” which, as de Vries states, was guaranteed to attract the most notable speakers among Western intellectuals.Footnote ¹⁹³ Thus, at one of the secret meetings in London in 1951, the CIA and the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, convened to discuss the idea of forming an “Anglo-American left-of-center” publication, which led to the founding of Encounter. While the editors were “free to publish anything they wanted,” the articles were expected “not to adversely affect American interest.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ That is, financed and handled mostly by the CIA, the Encounter operated on the guidance of the CIA.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ In order to successfully execute this operation (dubbed QKOPERA), the CIA formed an alliance with “largely Jewish ex-Communists,” who had not only severed their relations with Moscow but had become “virulently anti-Communist.” Once the relationships were established, the CIA secretly funneled money out of the Marshall PlanFootnote ¹⁹⁶ into the hands of these individuals, either through the creation of fake philanthropies or through existing ones, such as the Ford Foundation and the CCF.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

There is no consensus among scholars on how successful the CIA really was in influencing the CCF, especially concerning the kind of music being programmed in its festivals. For instance, Saunders and Joel Whitney argue that the CIA had complete control over Congress in promoting “cutting edge” modernism and that the CCF’s many participants, either willingly or unknowingly, had successfully manipulated the Cold War culture to the detriment of the global left by actively engaging in propagating the pro-American and anti-Communist ideas. As Patrick Iber surmises, these scholars “understand the CIA as an instrument of the United States ruling class and the CCF as its representative on the international intellectual field.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Taruskin more explicitly suggests that there was an ideological connection between cultural freedom and specifically the avant-garde and serialism.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ However, other scholars question the actual impact of the CIA, arguing that the agency had no preference for promoting modern music; they also point to the individuals who resisted the US government’s demands, as Carter had. For instance, Greg Barnhisel, in his Cold War Modernists, without disputing the CCF’s “hegemonic intentions,” as Iber notes, found relatively little editorial interference by the CCF in the operations of its flagship English-language journal Encounter.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Similarly, Hugh Wilford in his The Mighty Wurlitzer argues that even when the CIA tried to “call the tune,” it did not always get what it wanted,Footnote ²⁰¹ while Ian Wellens, in his close study of Nabokov and his role in the CCF, concludes that there is no evidence to support the notion that the goal of the CCF was to promote atonal and modern works.Footnote ²⁰² Even more bluntly, Charles Rosen, stated that “there is no evidence at all that the CIA was interested in twelve-tone music or even simply in difficult and dissonant modernism.”Footnote ²⁰³ As his proof, Rosen points to the CCF 1954 Rome Music Festival program organized by Nabokov. However, Taruskin accused Rosen of his blind support for Elliott Carter and aptly notes that both Rosen and Carter have been “beneficiaries” of the Cold War “prestige machine” in which they were “willing participants.”Footnote ²⁰⁴ Carter was particularly well-positioned within this “machinery” – Nabokov was championing Carter’s music through rigorous programming of his works at international festivals, while Glock was writing favorable reviews in Encounter, all through the backing of the CCF, sponsored by the CIA.

In 1953–54, Elliott Carter (together with Yehudi Wyner) was selected as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome (AAR). As a Secretary General of the CCF and a composer in residence that year at the AAR, Nicolas Nabokov organized a festival, “Music of the XX Century” [La Musica nel XXº Secolo]. In addition to the concert, the ten-day festival also featured six discussions, thirteen concerts, two operas, and a composition competition.Footnote ²⁰⁵ That the festival was sponsored by several prominent corporations and foundations, such as the European Centre of Culture of Geneva, Italian radio-television (RAI), the Rockefeller Foundation, and various offices of several NATO countries,Footnote ²⁰⁶ speaks of Nabokov’s influence, reach, and power. And that the event was considered a crucial cultural diplomatic event is evident from the fact that the US government, other than financing the festival through the CCF, also sent Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson to join Carter, Wyner, and Nabokov at the Academy.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Wyner, in a conversation with Martin Brody, vividly describes how surreal the event was, with the attendance of the most prominent artists and intellectuals, and thus illustrating how well-connected and vital Nabokov was during this period:

The music programmed at the Rome Festival led scholars like Taruskin and Saunders to conclude that the CCF was particularly promoting avant-garde music as an effective tool to spread its message of artistic freedom, which stood in direct opposition to the restrictions imposed by the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism. Taruskin, for instance, suggests that the purpose of the festival was to “nominate, through showcase concerts and a series of prize competitions, a corps of standard-bearers for the Congress’s highly politicized notion of cultural freedom, which in reality boiled down to sponsorship of the avant-garde, the type of art most obviously uncongenial to totalitarian taste.”Footnote ²⁰⁹ Similarly, Saunders surmises that “with a heavy concentration on atonal, dodecaphonic compositions, the aesthetic direction of the event pointed very much to the progressive avant-garde of Alban Berg, Elliott Carter, Luigi Dallapiccola and Luigi Nono.” She continues, “amongst the ‘new’ composers were Peter Racine Fricker, Lou Harrison and Mario Peragallo, whose works were influenced in varying degrees by twelve-tone composition. […] A recent convert to twelve-tone music was Stravinsky.”Footnote ²¹⁰ However, Saunders conveniently leaves out a majority of composers programmed at the Rome Festival, whose music was a direct denunciation of the “progressive avant-garde”: Samuel Barber, Francis Poulenc, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Sergei Prokofiev, among many others.Footnote ²¹¹ One could easily argue that the music program at the 1954 Rome Festival was predominantly traditional, in comparison to a handful of “progressive,” “avant-garde,” or “serial” composers. For instance, Joseph Straus’s empirical study on the prevalence of serial and atonal music in North America in the 1950s and 1960s, which in part relied on his statistical analysis of concert programs during this period, confirms that these compositions were in the minority of programmed works.Footnote ²¹² Further, as Wellens notes, it would have been impossible and unrealistic to avoid serialist compositions at any music festival in the 1950s,Footnote ²¹³ as the trend was gaining popularity at US academic institutions and Darmstadt. Thus, by numbers, as Straus’s study would confirm, the Rome Festival program did not look any more progressive or “serialist” than any other new music event. However, as Shreffler points out in her critical response to Straus’s attempt at empirical historiography, although serial and atonal works may have been programmed more scarcely, their impact was, nonetheless, enormous.Footnote ²¹⁴

But, a position that all scholars can easily agree on is that Carter had much to gain from his friendship with Nabokov and by having his String Quartet No. 1 programmed at the Rome Festival. For one, Nabokov, Aaron Copland, and Walter Piston (Carter’s former composition teacher at Harvard) were on the Rome Prize selection committee the year Carter was awarded the fellowship.Footnote ²¹⁵ James Wierzbicki proposes that whether or not Carter’s success can be attributed to Nabokov’s influence, the documentary evidence shows that “the performance of Carter’s Frist String Quartet in the 1954 Rome Festival did require Nabokov to pull strings.” He further explains that “the correspondence between Nabokov, Fred Goldbeck (an administrator for the FCC), and the Parrenin Quartet indicated that Carter’s Quartet would not have been performed in Rome without Nabokov’s intervention,”Footnote ²¹⁶ because the Paris-based Parrenin Quartet, one of the most prestigious ensembles specializing in contemporary music at the time, found Carter’s quartet “trop difficile” – that is, impossible to play. Instead, a piece by Hans Werner Henze was proposed as an alternate.Footnote ²¹⁷

Even though the performance of Carter’s Quartet in Rome received mixed reviews from the critics, as noted earlier, both Carter and his quartet became an international hit. He gained a following and admiration among prominent Italian figures, including Enzo Restagno, Roman Vlad, Goffredo Petrassi, and Dallapiccola. However, I would argue that no other person contributed more to Carter’s success than Nicolas Nabokov, a man at the center of the American cultural Cold War. After all, Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 received a rather modest reception in the United States following the performances by the Walden Quartet. However, in Europe, the piece was a much bigger success, entirely thanks to Nabokov’s efforts. That is, after appointing Carter as a fellow at the Academy in Rome and fighting hard to keep Carter’s quartet at the festival in Rome, Nabokov programmed and promoted Carter’s quartet (and later his other pieces) at numerous festivals in Europe and Asia, including the performance of String Quartet No. 1 at the United States Information Service in Paris in 1957 and Warsaw Festival in 1960, the Cello Sonata at the Begegnungen Festival in Berlin in 1963, and String Quartet No. 2 at the East-West Festival in Tokyo in 1961.

In addition to Nabokov’s direct involvement in championing Carter’s music, he also introduced Carter to many prominent figures during his residency in Rome and helped him nurture those relationships, which would prove vital. For instance, in 1955, Goffredo Petrassi was elected international president of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), while Carter and Vlad were its vice presidents. Under Petrassi’s leadership, Carter enjoyed quite a few performances of his music, mostly in Italy. Further, Laurance Roberts, who was director of the AAR during Carter’s fellowship, appointed Carter three times as a composer in residence at the Academy – in 1963, 1969, and 1980. William Glock, who in 1959 became BBC Controller of Music, arranged for numerous broadcasts of Carter’s music, wrote supportive reviews, and in 1957 invited Carter to teach at the Dartington International Summer School (UK), which he founded in 1953, and also programmed Carter’s pieces in its festivals. Mario Labroca, who was director of the music program at the RAI during Carter’s residency in Rome, arranged performance series of AAR fellows by the RAI orchestra. Labroca later became the organizer of the Venice Biennale, where Carter’s String Quartet No. 2 was performed in 1960. Labroca became the president of the UNESCO International Music Council in 1959. Carter’s String Quartet No. 2 (composed in 1959) was awarded the first prize at the UNESCO competition a year later (in 1960).

Akin to Taruskin’s view, most of Carter’s accomplishments and prestige (if not all) were achieved as a consequence of Nabokov’s efforts (i.e., also by the CIA and the US State Department, by extension) to combat the Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. Even though Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 received much greater success in Europe, after his return to the United States, Carter enjoyed a boost in demand for his participation in various festivals and lectureships.Footnote ²¹⁸ For instance, Carter was appointed inaugural composer in a Ford Foundation Fellowship program in Berlin, once again with help from Nabokov, who was an advisor to the Foundation’s Berlin program. By 1960, Carter established himself as one of the most esteemed American composers, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his String Quartet No. 2.Footnote ²¹⁹

Carter’s knowledge of the extent of the US State Department’s and CIA’s cultural cold war is perhaps somewhat debatable. While it would be naive to think that he was unaware of Nabokov’s connections and what that meant for his own achievements – after all, he did reach out to his friend for help in sorting out the trouble in Liège – the documents show that Carter was a participant in the government’s diplomatic plans willingly and only when it suited him in the advancement of his career. Unlike Aaron Copland, who between the 1940s and the 1980s served as one of the most dedicated cultural ambassadors for the State Department and, as Emily Abrams Ansari observes, was truly concerned with helping the United States build peaceful relationships with other nations,Footnote ²²⁰ Carter was less diplomatic in his affairs with the government. For instance, following his surprising success in Liège, the US State Department offered Carter a one-year Fulbright residency in Belgium, hoping that Carter would stay and promote the ideals of American freedom that enabled him to pursue new ideas and compose complex modern music, as exemplified in his String Quartet No. 1. However, Carter refused their offer, citing that he would, personally, have very little to gain by living in Belgium for a year:

Carter’s lack of diplomatic skills is understandable. As Danielle Fosler-Lussier points out, the musicians who served as the State Department cultural ambassadors were not trained diplomats and were seldom sufficiently briefed or trained about diplomacy or politics before their trips abroad, topics in which they tended to have little interest. Fosler-Lussier thus concludes that given their “lack of concern with the political aspects of their mission,” these touring musicians “made unlikely diplomats.”Footnote ²²²

After Carter failed to persuade the State Department to grant him a Fulbright fellowship in Paris, London, or Munich instead, or as he noted in the same letter – “in an important musical center” – he returned to the United States in 1954, after only one year of residency in Rome. Four years later, an independently wealthy Carter reached out to the State Department directly to inquire about the possibility of financial support for his trip to Poland. Four years later, in 1958 Carter was invited to participate as an observer in the Warsaw Autumn Festival. However, Carter found himself once again at odds with the government in his attempt at cultural diplomacy after learning that the US government did not financially support activities in Poland and thus would not support his trip.Footnote ²²³ Consequently, Carter did not attend the festival.Footnote ²²⁴

In 1959, the US State Department reached out to Carter once again. This time, they were inviting him on a two-month tour of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as part of a newly established cultural exchange program, initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, between the US and USSR. That is, in 1958, the two countries signed an “Agreement … on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields.”Footnote ²²⁵ In its first tour, the US government sent Roy Harris, Ulysses Kay, Peter Mennin, and Roger Sessions.Footnote ²²⁶ In 1959, the Soviet delegation sent a group of its prominent composers, which included Shostakovich and Dmitry Kabalevsky. In its second tour, the United States wanted to send Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. However, Carter declined this invitation,Footnote ²²⁷ citing his disapproval of the lack of support American composers were receiving from the US government in comparison to the Soviet government’s support of theirs. More specifically, Carter was dissatisfied with the performance opportunities that American composers’ (i.e., his own) new works were afforded in their own country and did not see any personal benefit to the prospect of the US now granting performance to the Soviet composers instead. As Carter explained not-so-diplomatically in his response to Frederick Cowell, Chief of the State Department’s American Specialist Branch of the International Educational Exchange Program, “the leading Soviet composers have been played more widely in the United States than any American composers.” Further, Carter continued voicing his own frustration by noting that “no US performers or orchestras have ever played any work of mine on their trips to the Soviet Union,” before adding that “the Soviet orchestras visiting the US play Soviet music here, and when American composers go to Russia a lot more Soviet music is played for them there.”Footnote ²²⁸

Carter’s resentment toward the Soviet composers’ opportunities leads us to assume that Carter was unaware of the political conditions and restrictions under which they were living and composing. This notion was further supported by Carter’s reversal of his views by 1967 when he gave a series of talks at the Sarah Lawrence College about the oppression and censorship of the Soviet composers ahead of a concert dedicated to avant-garde Soviet music.Footnote ²²⁹ By this time, Carter must have been fully aware of the circumstances of his privilege and also why specifically his music, with all its extreme complexities and his freedom to explore new ideas, was a perfect counter to the Soviet government-controlled, moderated, and censored works. Carter further embraced this notion of American cultural freedom by adopting concepts such as “new virtuosity,” whose development the scholars have attributed to his music, pioneered in String Quartet No. 1.Footnote ²³⁰

Whether or not Carter was a knowing participant in the US government’s ploy to promote its anticommunist message during the Cold War, it cannot be disputed that he was an extraordinary and exemplary beneficiary. Nonetheless, understanding the context of Carter’s participation in the cultural Cold War, under the wing of Nicolas Nabokov, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the US State Department, and the CIA, explains Carter’s newly found success in Europe (and subsequently in the US) with his String Quartet No. 1. As Taruskin surmises, by playing a central role in the cultural Cold War, Carter was insulated from negative critique, rewarded with every prize, enjoyed a major career, and achieved true historical significance.Footnote ²³¹ This narrative alone tells us how powerful was the machinery that supported him and stood by him every step of the way. Without the context of Cold War politics, it is virtually impossible to imagine that Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 would have achieved such triumph during any other epoch; it was a piece that was needed, specifically at the time it was created. That is, in the early 1950s, Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 portrayed American values and artistic freedoms in a most exemplary way. As Martin Boykan effectively remarks, the quartet “spoke … for the America in the Fifties, in the same way that the Sacre spoke for the Europe of a half-century ago.”Footnote ²³²

Epilogue: The Paved Road to Success

At the 2011 Society for Music Theory meeting in Minneapolis, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis presented a talk on the topic of “Empirical Approaches to Repetition in Music.”Footnote ²³³ Unbeknownst to the audience members – a roomful of “PhD-holding music theorists” – she conducted an experiment on repetition in “challenging contemporary art music”; more specifically, the musical examples featured pieces by Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter.Footnote ²³⁴ What also the participants of the experiment did not know is that Margulis had manipulated the one-minute musical excerpts by extracting and reinserting segments of music to add repetition of some material. Repetitions were generated randomly by a computer and could occur immediately or after a delay. Without letting the audience know, the adapted versions created by “brute stimulus manipulation without regard to artistic quality” were mixed in with the original works by Berio and Carter, that is, the versions “crafted by internationally renowned composers.”Footnote ²³⁵

Margulis conducted the same experiment with nonspecialists in 2012. The results are fascinating: she concluded that the listeners preferred the adapted versions of these works over the original. That is, the nonexpert listeners rated the manipulated version with inserted repetitions “as reliably more enjoyable, more interesting, and more likely to have been composed by a human artist rather than generated randomly by a computer,” while the SMT audience, comprising experts and scholars of twentieth-century music, or as Margulis puts it, “an audience sympathetic to Berio and Carter if ever there were one,” admitted that the repetitive versions were “more likable on first pass.”Footnote ²³⁶ For Margulis, the notion that inserting simple repetition in music could raise the listener’s positive experience of music was stunning. However, what I find even more striking in this experiment is that no one in the SMT audience, comprising expert scholars of Elliott Carter’s music, knew that the music by Carter that they were listening to had been changed.

Margulis’s experiment, which took place after the 2008 centenary events celebrating Carter’s music, confirms that even after seven decades of scholarship, concerts, and recordings we really don’t know Carter’s music. This begs the question: How well did anyone know Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 in the 1950s? I would have to conclude not well, and certainly fewer people did than today. But just like today, early critics and scholars (and even the US government) ensured that we know about Carter’s quartet, even without actually knowing it.

From early on, the quartet was painted as the best work of music produced in recent history. In a seventeen-page article dating from 1953, the first article to detail Carter’s music and techniques, Abraham Skulsky, a Belgian composer and critic, proclaimed the quartet “a unique work,” before continuing that “it may be said to be not only Carter’s highest achievement to date but also one of the best works in this form to have appeared during recent years.”Footnote ²³⁷ However, despite these early efforts that highlighted Carter’s quartet and his new techniques in the most compelling terms, the audiences, performers, and some critics struggled to understand or even appreciate Carter’s quartet, let alone like it. Carter’s quartet was undeniably too complex to understand, too challenging to listen to, and too difficult to perform. Margulis explains that she specifically chose the excerpts by Carter for her experiment for these reasons: they are “atonal, rhythmically complex, and challenging, yet many committed and sophisticated listeners find them deeply rewarding aesthetically.”Footnote ²³⁸ Yet, all participants found the aurally “simplified” version of the piece – a computer-generated adaptation with inserted receptions – more aesthetically rewarding. That is, for most listeners, Carter’s music (including his String Quartet No. 1) is impenetrable. Early critics tended to downplay this exigent trait. For instance, Tere Pascone noted in his 1953 review: “But despite the fact that his music is considered difficult to perform and that only few serious-minded performers have been willing to play them, they have met with much success, judging from newspaper and magazine reviews.”Footnote ²³⁹

Carter Harmon in his New York Times review downright dismissed the need for enjoyment of Carter’s music, as the experience of listening to it is its own strength: “One of the C’s (Copland, Carter, Cowell) whose star is rising is Elliott Carter. Mr. Carter is not a derivative composer. His music seems not only entirely his own, but also uncompromisingly hewn from fresh timber. It gives little sensuous pleasure, but always speaks with strength and leaves the listener with the sense of an important experience.”Footnote ²⁴⁰

Skulsky praised the work, emphasizing its “different speeds” that resulted in “a new dimension of music” and that the quartet featured “a unique expressive quality” that created “a large array of different human feelings in a profound, logical and novel organization of ideas.”Footnote ²⁴¹ Similarly to Pascone, Skulsky also tried to justify the difficulty of the performance of the work in the context of its success: “In almost every case in recent years, his works have had considerable success as can be seen in the reviews printed elsewhere in this issue. Indeed in learning his works the performers have generally become enthusiastic about them and have played them frequently wherever they could.”Footnote ²⁴²

Of course, this is not entirely true. For one, Carter himself acknowledged that the performers tend to “grumble about” the difficulty of his music. When Jonathan Bernard asked Carter in a 1990 interview if he thinks that his music is easier to play now than it had been in the past, Carter responded by revealing that the Arditti Quartet had a hard time with his String Quartet No. 5, which they still found to be the most difficult one to play.Footnote ²⁴³ Allan Kozinn also confirmed this challenge nearly two decades later. In his review of the 2008 Carter Centenary celebration at Tanglewood, the critic first revealed James Levine’s plan to “transform the Boston Symphony Orchestra into a first-rate Carter ensemble, with all the composer’s major works in the repertory,” and then swiftly noted the orchestra’s reaction to this plan: “The word is that the orchestra grumbles about its new-music load.”Footnote ²⁴⁴ This hardly conveys the attitude of enthusiasm in performing Carter’s music, even decades later.

From the start, Carter’s music was criticized for being too difficult, a notion that would follow him for the rest of his life. This is precisely why Carter and his early supporters found it necessary to contextualize his String Quartet No. 1 within the European tradition of Schoenberg, Berg, Bartók, and Stravinsky, even if that meant acknowledging those influences and the assimilation of their styles in Carter’s music before recognizing his unique expression. For instance, Arthur Berger noted in 1953: “Carter is writing some of the most adult and substantial music that is being written anywhere nowadays. He achieves weight without grandiosity. His mind has been alert to all that is worthwhile in tradition, and he has created an original and impressive idiom out of sources as widely dissimilar as Copland, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.”Footnote ²⁴⁵

In the context of the Cold War, especially with the formation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and following Carter’s success in Liège and Rome, critics started to downplay or entirely exclude discussing Carter’s quartet in the context of its European tradition. Instead, they shifted the focus to Carter’s authentic American sound, even though there was hardly anything truly “American” in his quartet. This sense of nationalism and Carter’s “Americanness” is effectively conveyed in a letter Wolf wrote to Carter upon learning that an American had won the competition in Liège:

Yet, Wolf’s Reference Wolf1957 review of the quartet makes no mention of Carter’s “Americanness” in his discussion of the work’s musical language but rather focuses on the composer’s rhythmic, harmonic, and formal techniques, which are grounded on European traditions. After all, it would be rather difficult to talk about American sound in a piece that does not have any such characteristic traits. That is, the only time Carter had any “Americanness” in his music was during his neoclassical, populist period of the 1930s and 40s, which after the Second World War came to be associated with Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union, a concept from which Carter sought to distance himself with his String Quartet No. 1. Anne Shreffler rightly observes that especially when compared to the “‘typically American’ experimental tradition of Cage and Feldman, Carter seems to have more in common with his European contemporaries like Boulez.”Footnote ²⁴⁷ Even Boulez himself thought of Carter as a more European than American composer in his discussion with Marc Ponthus:

Ironically, like many other composers who eventually came to be recognized for their “Americanness,” perhaps most notably Copland, Carter, too, developed his “American sound” in Paris, before abandoning his studies upon his return to the United States. That is, after completing his degree at Harvard in 1932, Carter left New York for Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger and escape his disappointingly conservative education in Boston with Walter Piston. However, by that time, Carter notes, “this whole extravagant world of crazy modernism began to seem a little bit old” to Boulanger.Footnote ²⁴⁹ Thus, rather than writing modernist music, Carter honed in on his neoclassical and populist aesthetic during this period, as he explains: “It’s only after I studied with Nadia, that there was this whole, sort of, more socialist point of view about everything. We all thought that we should write for a larger public and not write this special music that only special people could understand.”Footnote ²⁵⁰

With his String Quartet No. 1, Carter returned to his earlier musical thinking, the ideas his teachers, Walter Piston and Nadia Boulanger, did not approve or encourage, or even like; as he sums up, “They couldn’t teach me what I wanted to learn.”Footnote ²⁵¹ In post–Second World War America, Carter succeeded in escaping his French-oriented neoclassicism but could not avoid using his traditional European training and techniques. But it was precisely his European sound that made String Quartet No. 1 a big success in Europe and less so in the United States. Even the techniques Carter “debuted” in quartet were not entirely new – he explored instrumental virtuosity in his Piano Sonata (1945–46) and in the Cello Sonata (1948), Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (1949–50), and Eight Pieces for Four Timpani (1949), he applied the concepts of the individualization of the instruments, polyrhythms, metric modulation, and chordal sonorities as a means of unifying a work. Perhaps, Skulsky summed it up most accurately when he wrote that Carter “devoted about a year to his String Quartet which is a gathering together of all the facets of his creative activity so far.”Footnote ²⁵² So, not quite a “rebirth” or a “conversion” during his not-so “monastic seclusion” in the Sonoran Desert.

What String Quartet No. 1 truly displayed was an effective statement Carter made on distancing himself from the influence of (Nadia Boulanger’s) populism, which was crucial in the context of the Cold War. In fact, upon his return to the United States in 1935, Carter composed prolifically in the neoclassical style, including two string quartets that predate the “first” Quartet of 1951. Although Carter intentionally destroyed most of these early works, one such piece, the String Quartet in C from 1937, survives in ink fair copy.Footnote ²⁵³ However, Carter never truly admitted that the work – found among his documents, bearing his handwriting, and written in his characteristic style of this period – was attributed to him. Simply, writing a string quartet in C major under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger did not fit the compelling narrative of the foremost modernist American composer. However, a piece born in the American Southwest, featuring tremendous complexities yet a total disregard for the audiences and performers in the composer’s selfish quest to satisfy his own artistic needs, was ideologically as American as it can get in the early years of the Cold War. This political context is exactly what made Carter one of the most recognizable American composers both at home and in Europe. To achieve this status and prestige, with a piece whose content did not have any distinctly “American” originality in it, Carter, with the help of his powerful friends, forged narratives of mythical proportions surrounding the quartet, starting with the desert myth, which Shreffler perfectly describes as “a gesture out of the oldest of American mythologies.”Footnote ²⁵⁴ The strategy was a success: it is these carefully crafted narratives that have shaped the success, reception, and legacy of Carter and his String Quartet No. 1 that we know and continue to perpetuate.

Ironically (and quite naively), Skulsky concludes that “recognition has come to Carter slowly and without his having made any particular effort to seek it out.”Footnote ²⁵⁵ As illustrated in this Element, it was the incredibly complex and powerful machinery that contributed to Carter’s accomplishment of his String Quartet No. 1. The truly surprising outcome would have been if Carter had not succeeded, for his triumph was meticulously paved.