Elliott Carter (born 1908) has brought the experimental atonal style he developed in the 1950s with him into a remarkably productive old age. This clarinet concerto, written when he was 88 years old, shows remarkable levels of clarity, drama, and communication and instantly established itself as a leading work in the clarinet concerto literature.

Although he began his career in the 1930s and 1940s writing music that was more or less in the Copland-Thompson-Harris tradition, Carter also had an early friendship with Charles E. Ives (1874 - 1954). Ives was a true pioneer, whose radical music explored the implications of different streams of music flowing simultaneously in loosely related or unrelated tempos.

When Carter began to adopt his version of the serial system invented by Arnold Schoenberg and further developed by Anton Webern, he added Ivesian layering and found that it energized the music. His output in the difficult personal style that resulted was at first slow and fastidious, but beginning around his 65th birthday his productivity suddenly accelerated; it continued at an increasing rate even past his 90th year.

Carter wrote this concerto at the request of Pierre Boulez, the French composer-conductor who has been a leader in post-Webernian new music since about the time Carter accepted the serial technique. Boulez was the President of Ensemble InterContemporain, a long-time European leader among small new-music ensembles, associated with the IRCAM musical facility in Paris. Carter wrote the piece for InterContemporain and its masterful clarinetist, Alain Damiens.

The concerto is really for clarinet and chamber orchestra. The orchestra is an unusual and hard-to-balance grouping of flute, two oboes (the second taking English horn), bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, harp, piano, two violins, viola, cello, and double bass, and a three-person percussion section playing glockenspiel, four bongos, three tom-toms, small and large suspended cymbals, wood drum, tam-tam, xylophone, metal blocks, temple blocks, snare drum, vibraphone, woodblocks, cencerros, and bass drum, in addition to the solo clarinet.

As he frequently does, Carter uses spatial separation (another Ivesian concept) to help clarify textures, splitting the ensemble into six fairly homogenous groups on stage: the five strings, the harp and piano, the three percussionists, the four brass, and the four woodwinds.

The concerto lasts 18 minutes and is in seven linked movements. At the beginning, the clarinetist stands near the percussion, harp, and piano, which provide the accompaniment for the opening Scherzando. This is linked to the next movement, "Deciso," by a brief passage for the whole ensemble, during which the clarinetist walks around to the unpitched percussion; the percussion group then takes over. Similarly, the soloist travels to the brass which, muted, play a Tranquilo section; then the action moves to the woodwind for a Presto, to the strings for a Largo, and from there back to the brass for a Giocoso where they play alone.

For the finale, Agitato, the clarinetist steps forward and the entire ensemble unites, with the increased density and rhythmic complexity propelling the music to a rapid-fire and unexpected conclusion.

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