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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 July 2013
In 2002 Elliott Carter marked Oliver Knussen's fiftieth birthday with a short piece – Au Quai – for viola and bassoon, accompanied by the following comments: ‘As modernism seemed headed for shipwreck, Olly Knussen, treasuring the wonderful works that that movement produced and still does, stepped into the breach and … not only brought these works to a vivid enthusiastic life which has long been concealed, but also added significant works of his own’. Knussen's time has clearly been Carter's time too. Yet placing aspects of Knussen's compositional thinking into an American context can highlight the kind of distinctive qualities that, while leading less sympathetic British critics to write of an ‘aesthetic of avoidance’, might be more usefully interpreted as an intensely personal response to European as well as American modernism in all their various phases.
1 See Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, ed. Meyer, Felix and Shreffler, Anne C. (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008) p. 236Google Scholar.
2 In German, the concept of ‘Das zweite Moderne’ is associated particularly with the composer and critic Klaus-Steffen Mahnkopf.
3 Holloway, Robin, ‘Memorial Piece’ [1977] in On Music. Essays and Diversions (Brinkworth: Claridge, 2003), p. 210Google Scholar. Holloway is evidently referring here to a letter he wrote to Britten in May 1976: see Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Vol. 6: 1966–1976, ed. Reed, Philip & Cooke, Mervyn (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), p. 728Google Scholar.
4 See Letters from a Life, p. 603.
5 Booklet notes with NMC DO26 (1995).
6 Anderson, Julian, ‘Harmonic Practices in Oliver Knussen's Music since 1988: Part I’, Tempo No. 221 (2002), pp. 2–13'CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Part II’, Tempo Vol. 57, No. 223 (2003), pp. 16–45Google Scholar.
7 Hewett, Ivan, Music. Healing the Rift (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 174Google Scholar.
8 Straus, Joseph N., Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 113Google Scholar.
9 See Knussen's ‘Preface’ to Perle, George, The Right Notes: Twenty-Three Selected Essays on Twentieth-Century Music (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1995), p. ixGoogle Scholar.
10 Benjamin, George, ‘Canonic Codes’ in Sing, Ariel: Essays and Thoughts for Alexander Goehr's Seventieth Birthday, ed. Latham, Alison (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 21–31Google Scholar.
11 Strauss, Twelve-Tone Music, p. 60.
12 For Carter's terminology, see Elliott Carter Harmony Book, ed. Hopkins, Nicholas and Link, John F. (New York: Carl Fischer, 2002)Google Scholar, and Schiff, David, The Music of Elliott Carter (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 36Google Scholar.
13 ‘A Letter from Oliver Knussen’ in Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait, pp. 236–7.
14 ‘A further step’ (1958), in Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937–1995, ed. Bernard, Jonathan W. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), p. 7Google Scholar.
15 ‘An interview at the Banff Centre (1984)’, in Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait, p. 253.
16 ‘To be a composer in America’ (1953/94), in Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, p. 207.
17 ‘A further step’, in Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, p. 6.
18 For this concept see Whittall, Arnold, ‘The Search for Order: Carter's Symphonia and Late-Modern Thematicism’ in Elliott Carter Studies, ed. Link, John and Boland, Marguerite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 57–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 See Perle, George, Serial Composition and Atonality, 4th ed., Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar, Chapter 2, ‘“Free” Atonality’ (pp. 9–39).
20 The interview, with Tom Service, is in The Guardian, 19 October 2006.
21 In 1971 Carter declared that ‘the whole conception of human nature underlying the neo-classic esthetic amounted to a sweeping under the rug of things that, [before the end of the Second World War] it seemed to me we had to deal with in a less oblique and resigned way’. (Edwards, Allen, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 61.Google Scholar)
22 ‘Igor Stravinsky: 1882–1971’, in Collected Essays, p.143.
23 Anderson, Julian, ‘Harmonic Practices in Oliver Knussen's Music since 1988: Part I’, Tempo 221 (2002), pp. 5–13Google Scholar.
24 Stravinsky, Igor, Poetics of Music in the From of Six Lessens, trans. Knodel, Arthur and Dahl, Ingolf (New York: Vintage, 1947), p. 39Google Scholar.
25 For some discussion of this term see Whittall, Arnold, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
26 See Griffiths, Paul, New Sounds, New Personalities. British Composers of the 1980s in Conversation (London: Faber, 1985), p. 18Google Scholar.
27 Anderson, Julian, ‘Harmonic Practices in Oliver Knussen's Music since 1988: Part II’, Tempo Vol. 57, No. 223 (2003), p. 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 In the interview with Service, Tom, The Guardian, 19 October 2006Google Scholar.
29 Tymoczko, Dmitri, A Geometry of music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
30 Nichols, Roger, The Life of Debussy (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 163–4Google Scholar.
31 Whittall, Arnold, Introduction to Serialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 141Google Scholar.