The powerful intellectual control Elliott Carter (born 1908) exercises over his music and the deeply complex layers of sound this creates are the main fascination of these three orchestral movements. Most everyone would agree that even by early twenty first century standards, these have complicated, highly modernistic atonal music, appealing almost exclusively to experienced connoisseurs of this genre. Elliott Carter may have begun as a neo-Classical composer influenced by the great French teacher Nadia Boulanger. But his even earlier mentoring by Charles Ives (a pioneer of the idea of music that proceeds in layers at different speeds), when combined with the tight serial (twelve-tone) logic of Anton Webern and Pierre Boulez resulted in his mature style. This is the rare example in Carter's music of a composition that is not totally determined by a single, all-controlling plan. It is, in fact, a handy compilation of three different pieces that were independently written but grouped for convenience—the way Ives, in fact, arrived at his Orchestral Sets. The Three Occasions last about 13 minutes and the shortest is the first movement. It was commissioned by the Houston Symphony Orchestra as a fanfare to mark the observance of the 150th Anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Texas (March 2, 1836). Its title is "A Celebration of 100 x 150 Notes" and it is exactly 150 bars long. Its musical material is 11 fanfare patterns, each based on a different one of the 11 intervals contained in the chromatic octave. After British conductor Oliver Knussen conducted "A Celebration," he asked Carter for a companion work. Paul Fromm, a leading benefactor of modern music in the American northeast, had recently died. Fromm was a consistent support of Carter's music (having commissioned, among other works, the great Double Concerto in 1961). Accordingly, Carter wrote this movement, "Remembrance," as a memorial piece for Fromm. There are three main levels of the music. Over a misty succession of twelve-tone chords the trombone seems to speak a funeral oration. Meanwhile, faster fragments of musical ideas flit by in their own tempos, like fleeting memories. One of these is a drum/piano line from the Double Concerto. Knussen conducted the premiere of Remembrance at Tanglewood and he arranged a BBC commission for a third movement to create a complete triptych. The 50th anniversary of the anniversary of his own wedding to his wife, sculptor Helen Frost-Jones, was approaching and became the occasion for the finale, "Anniversary." It is the longest and most complex of the three movements. It is built on two main melodic lines, which unroll at their own constantly changing speeds. They produce a third line, on tuba, that arrives about halfway through. Ticking sounds suggest the running of time. Carter clearly sees the piece as celebrating a victory over time, as he headed it with these lines from John Donne's "The Anniversary": "Only our time hath no decay/this, no to morrow hath, nor yesterday/Running it never runs from us away...."

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.