Fuck the future

 ... 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.
______________________________________________

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.

Last year the relatively conservative Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival featured Carter's Quintet for Piano and Strings immaculately (if somewhat coolly) performed by Stephen Gosling and the FLUX Quartet.  (In the summer of that year the work was also performed by members of the New York Philharmonic during their annual CONTACT! series of concerts featuring contemporary music.)

Also last year members of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie performed Carter's Oboe Quartet as part of a concert they gave in Saarbrucken.

In the final round of this year's ARD Music Competition, the French clarinetist Joë Christophe won first prize with his performance of Carter's Clarinet Concerto.  (This concerto was also played by the second prize winner Han Kim and the recording of Kim's performance is available in my earlier post.)

In November of this year, the opening concerts of the annual piano festival in Espoo (the second largest city in Finland) featured Jeremy Denk, an American pianist much admired for his performances of Bach's keyboard works.  Predictably, Denk (and the Tapiola Sinfonietta) opened the concert with a Bach keyboard concerto.  The next work on the program, however, was far from predictable: Carter's Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras, one of the more challenging works from Carter's early 'mature' period.  (Despite the regrettable compression of dynamic range applied by the Finnish radio, the performance still conveys the irresistible joie de vivre of Carter's music.)

Finally, also this past November, music lovers in New York could hear Carter's Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord performed by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as Carter's Two Thoughs About the Piano performed (barefoot!) by the prodigiously gifted American pianist Conrad Tao as part of his Carnegie Hall debut.  (So far there have been no broadcasts of these performances that I'm aware of.)

Of course Carter's audience is still relatively small.  But then the audience for art music in general is minuscule compared to the millions who crave endlessly recycled vapid clichés of pop music.  Which only proves that those who (like Richard Taruskin) evaluate a composer's style in terms of the size of his audience simply confuse art music with gay porn where size indeed matters...
_______________________________
*  According to the Quote Investigator website, the earliest verified appearance of this quip - often wrongly credited to Yogi Berra - was in the memoirs of the Danish politician Karl Kristian Steincke published in 1948.