... perhaps ... Mr Carter's following will evaporate as the in-crowd enthusiasm for his music and personality grows passé.
John Rockwell, "Carter Returns to Composers Series", New York Times, 8 February 1977.
There will be time to decide whether [Elliott Carter's] music ... is more like a brilliant taillight receding down an increasingly unpopulated road. ... His remoteness from the public may have helped music down a blind alley...
Bernard Holland, "Elliott Carter at 90: Young Music for a Young Audience," New York Times, 29 October 1998.
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I will never cease marveling at how a single sentence can sum up, with wit and elegance worthy of Oscar Wilde or Bertrand Russell, everything one needs to know about the epistemic shallowness of yapping about what will be:
It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future.*
Those who ignore this wisdom deserve no sympathy. Which is why I have none for Carter-hating critics at the New York Times who waited decade after decade for Carter's music to fade into obscurity. Long and frustrating decades they must have been. Like the Second Coming, the demise of Carter's music remains stuck in that murky realm known as 'the future'.
In calling the future murky I was trying to be charitable. Even in physics the concept future is not just murky (theoretically underdetermined), it is literally incoherent because its ontological import is described in logically incompatible ways by our best physical theories (general relativity and quantum mechanics). At least in physics this concepts can be useful if employed 'locally' in the domain of a given theory. In music criticism it is absolutely useless, and the only reason it keeps popping up in print is the critic's obscenely fraudulent habit of padding a review with empty speculations about the prospects of new music.
So fuck the future. It is hard enough to maintain a clear view of the past, one's own as well as that of humanity in general. (The mind excels at fabricating 'historical narratives' in both domains.) The recent past is pretty much all that can be surveyed with sufficient clarity and, as far as I can see, it shows no signs of diminishing interest in Carter's music. Having already visited this corner of Carteriana in an earlier post, here I simply add a few more recent performances of Carter's works.
