Elliott Carter Harmony Book

GREAT

It was Foucault who in a onetime interview with Pierre Boulez had remarked how music has kept pace with the innovations in technology;Spectral harmonics at IRCAM,Just Intonation in the USA and I'd imagine not only innovation but subversion of concept would be great spots to transcend Foucault.For I find this(for Foucault it is our loss that music was not a realm he ever pursued,only as a spot of culture,the radical aesthetic and the end of man, where is he/she) a double entendre/ side here to this for technology does create obscurity as well The most exciting composers have been those who have continually challenged the traditions of reigning ideologies(the 18th and 19th Centuries) or the circumventing the magnetic attractions of the cash box(our own age)after the eclipse of modernity.Those who simply conspire to write serious music masquerading as film music(minimalism included) will be forgotten. All the John Williams's,countless permutations now by 2002,Phil Glass Clones out there will join the 747s in the Mojave Desert standing baking in the sun, bleached for Road Warrior to one day find.I suppose Lacan would have or Zizek would find now something fascinating to say with the indulgences in today's new music,what is it, what does it represent, what incomplete dimension of your unconscious does it reside in.Perhaps music creativity existing within the realms of the modernist language,post-Ferneyhough is harboring an aesthetic in exile,afraid to come out of its embattled neglected shell, like the intimacy of a Dutch lens grinder,a forgotten art.Today it is actually more interesting, at least with new music, to discover the creative pathways of a work than the actual work itself,like an elaborate dinner setting where the food never comes(John Tilbury,pianist said that on radio) a new work for much of the time under-rehearsed,and played once,perhaps twice never to be heard again, and never recorded for consumption. And then there are primary new works which the citizens of a free democracy never get to hear at all. This the cause of cultural marginalization, we simply never hear some aspects of the creative spirit,even though the Silicon Valley has fashioned a saturation point of image,icon,aesthetic and place. Someone, some human body politically does decide who will get a Pulitzer,or what new premiere work the Chicago Symphony will play this year. In fact we seldom remember the Pulitzer winner's actual prize music,Can you name the work or even remember a moment from it??we listen more to the opaque cultural power a Prize represents, who cares about the music.Well Habermas said opacity"Undurchsichtlichkeit" is what this age is all about, New Age complaisance.Carter has received numerous prizes but for his body of work the prizes seem to be arbitrary and marginal, we forget them because he has so many of them,like Oscars,who ever has more than one we forget about. We go(should go) directly toward the creative vigours structural or otherwise to the music, its incessant shapes, and convoluted designs,its virtuosic displays and its long range topologies of poly rhythms and other global durational frames.The Harmony Book here, (actually Two Volumes sewed into one here)began as a fairly modest endeavor, a practical accounting means, a way to remember certain configurations of tones, or intervallic transformations. No one can remember everything, so Carter began making these large 14 inch long sheets of these tones. All of this creative odyssey is retold within the interview with scholar John F. Link, who has devoted his analytic work to Carter's polyrhythms,and also this Harmony Book.A wonderful interview here with Carter. Volume One is a Catalogue/Synthesis of three note, four note, five note etc chords, and their tranpostions. It seems easier to contemplate these chords here as 1+2=3, or 3+2=5, for one isolated tone then followed by 2 more tones can powerfully direct the best,evocative,crisis moments in music, anyones.. This becomes especially relevant when one needs to account for 55 six note chords distribute graciously over the durations of a work,or controlling the succession of 80 or 90 tones followed, staggered, accelerated as the work's discourse unfolds. Volume 2 then is Analysis, a means of looking more deeply into the relationships of all this stuff, the tones, the intervals, the chords. There are moments of pure illumination as in the discussion on Carter's provocative/evocative Night Fantasies or when for instance one learns as in Carter's Third String Quartet, a work shaped by the Duets,One Violin with Viola, One Violin then with Cello, One group more stationary reduced to Five tones, the other Duet ensemble is free to explore all interval rows. I can't help thinking this is how international capital functions,in Argentina, in South Korea in today's neo-liberal mileau.There are also elaborate yet functional means of simple symbols, as a four note chord represented with a box, four point, then five note pentagon, and six, then what is referred to as the Sigla controlling and defining the entire array of tones,220 intervals and chords with all their additions.... There is a Glossary to help one wade through this fascinating Naming of the Father- game.There are also nice excerpts from Carter's music that helps embellish a point,much like conceptual menus for creativity. Then there is the dimension as to who or what controls whom. Does one need this Harmony Book to decepher the structural complexity within Carter's oeuvre. Does Carter need his own Book? And the answer is sometimes! for Carter said that he did break the tyranny of these alloted configurations simply to make the music more interesting. I guess that is the last horizon, the music must be interesting, how one got there is also interesting,perhaps more so or less so, it may become part of what we may now think of musical philosophy and the creativity, the last bastion known.

'A Giant's Tool: Elliott Carter's Harmony BookEdited by Nicholas Hopkins and John F. Link Review by John de Clef PiñeiroWith the publication by Carl Fischer of Elliott Carter's Harmony Book, another remarkable document is now available for students and scholars of America's most continuously prolific composer. As one who has long been enthralled by the voluptuous complexity of Elliot Carter's aesthetic, it was with some trepidation that I undertook to examine an analytical tome that purports to be, in the words of one of its editors, "essentially a massive encyclopedia devoted to exploring harmonic relationships . . . . not truly a `harmony' book . . . . [that] was planned and developed to serve only as a tool for [Carter's] compositional work, rather than as a resource for public usage."Assembled by Carter himself over a period of more than 20 years, the chordal material contained in the Harmony Book represents one creative mind's mapping of the harmonic musical universe for practical application, which, in turn, has been supplemented and expanded over time by the procedures developed in practical application. In a project lasting two-and-one-half years, editors Nicholas Hopkins and John F. Link have made numerous refinements and clarifications in nomenclature, taxonomy and organization to Carter's manuscript of the Harmony Book, which the editors note was never intended by Carter for publication.It should also be noted that although this painstaking compilation and analysis of harmonic relationships can satisfy a Carter student's technical interest on one level, it certainly does not, and is clearly not intended to, readily sate the desire of a diverse music-listening public to comprehend the complicated creative process that has employed and continues to employ this comprehensive collection of harmonic materials as a tool. Indeed, after examining this truly scholarly achievement, one can conclude that it is possible to be fascinated by, and even love,Carter's music, without the benefit of this volume.Nevertheless, it is without question that Messrs. Hopkins and Link have performed an invaluable editorial feat by providing reader-friendly levels of organization and illuminating essays and original interview material that will assure the enduring academic significance and landmark status of this work for years to come. As has already been the case with other scholars who have consulted and relied upon earlier manuscript versions of the Harmony Book for their own commentaries, both musicologists and musical theorists alike will find in this volume essential materia prima in formulating their own understanding and conclusions about the oeuvre of this towering American master of post-tonal chromaticism in musical composition.

This is not a "harmony book" in the traditional sense - apart from a page of explication of one of Carter's guitar pieces, there is nothing here about how to write music. It is, however, an incredibly useful resource for composers working in a certain style.As Carter began to be interested in the combinatorial relations of groups of pitches, he compiled this catalogue and cross-reference for his own use so that he would not have to figure it all out again with each piece. So if you are using two 6-note sets and you need to know which 4-note sets they have in common, or, if you have a 4-note set and want to know all the different 6-note sets that can be formed by adding each different interval, this is the book for you. In that sense there is nothing like it.What we really need is a software version of this material - anybody listening?

If you are a listener of music, this book will not help you 'hear' the music of Carter. It will help you understand it. In effect, harmony in Carter's music, exploiting the full chromatic spectrum as it does, frees his poly-rhythmic structures and intricate counterpoint to function independently of harmony. In my opinion, the harmony in Carter's music is its weakest aspect. I don't really hear it in his music. What I found interesting in this book was seeing how Carter's use of harmony enables his long term poly-rhythmic structures to work, which in themselves are quite fascinating. But the lack of the sense of 'vertical' in his music makes the actual study of his harmony a moot point for this listener.

Ottimo.