Elliott Carter (Symphony No. 1)

[@irabraus9478]

What a sense of fun this man had! I met him once, wish I could have known him better.

[@richardhines8622]

This man was a true blessing to musical literature.

[@dfddwm]

Beautifully presented music and images

[@nostalgicmodernist1399]

Carter himself wrote that this symphony was supposed to evoke Cape Cod's "characteristic beauties and something of the extraordinary cultural background of New England." In that way, its goals are much more like Ives's or Piston's than the formal complexities of Carter's own later works. Thank you for posting it!

[@dfddwm]

beautiful images

[@OSIRIS1980WHS]

I applaud the Description of the work and it’s apt comparison to IVES’s Second Symphony. I mean no insult to the composer or his fans yet this is “accessible” to a wider audience compared with other compositions much less the symphonic work. I love this symphony. Wished the composer had created more work in this vein. I’m grateful he composed this muscular and magnificent work. Hear it when you’re bemoaning life.

[@hectorbarrionuevo6034]

Agree with many comments below: love the "Americana," sweet harmonic "populism" in this work !!! Love that fugue-like section in the last movement!

[@MegaCirse]

A difficult listening at first, he lends the orchestral direction of his flayed intelligence, until he draws you inevitably into his universe. Each listening reveals a little more of its mystery, its magic, and its joy, so this work becomes ineluctably timeless “Imperial"

[@stueystuey1962]

I do not know why both the composer and community do not realize what a great piece of Americana this is.

[@edfederenko2596]

Thank you all for one of the more thoughtful and illuminating series of comments on a KZbin video I've read this week.

[@perrystone879]

Fantastic, reminds me of Persichetti

[@gerardbegni2806]

This symphony of 1942 is by no ways typical of the avan-gradist who Carter was about to become, but it shows the obvious skills of the composr in the neoclassical line of many composers of that time. Compatriots like Copland can have shown him the way. Ives, so imporant in the following, did not leave any track here. In short, this is not Carter as he passed to posterity but it is a masterwork of American neoclassism.

[@MedievalRichard]

Splendid. MR

[@ethanhill9460]

Ives would admire this symphony.

[@giuseppedimarco8358]

Wonderful!

[@stueystuey1962]

To reiterate, one of the greatest composers in all of Western music. In 100 to 200 years many of his symphonic works, not to mention his chamber works, will be regularly performed. While much if not most of the compositions of composers post 1940 or so will not. Wish he had written more works that he dubbed symphony throughout his long composing career.

[@gerthenriksen8818]

Stuart Sagan, I doubt he will ever outrank Aaron Copland who has proven his own genius and to this day still is the most performed American composer all over the world!

[@zerois2801]

@@gerthenriksen8818 dude in terms of post modern influence carter is equally as important if not even nore

[@zerois2801]

More*

[@darrylschultz9395]

@zerois2801 Carter who?

[@brentmarquez4157]

Can anyone recommend a composer or pieces (other than those by Copland) that manage to evoke the rugged Beauty of the American West? I've tried Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite, but it's too "French" to my ear and doesn't quite capture it. John Williams is too pop as well. Some pieces by Ives come close (The Unanswered Question goes decently with the wide open desolate landscape of Utah for instance).

[@jazzstandardman]

Hello Brent. Give Don Gillis' Symphony No. 1 a try. It's available through my channel here (Mosaic Classics, that is.) Maybe you could check out Virgil Thomson's Cello Concerto or the symphonies of Randall Thompson.

[@brentmarquez4157]

@@jazzstandardman Thanks, Jerry - I like the Don Gillis as a piece in itself, though to my ear it sounds a little too statesman like or militaristic for the open West, but the Virgil Thompson is more like it and has a pioneering spirit that fits better. I'll check out the Randall Thompson symphonies as well - appreciate the suggestions.

[@darrylschultz6479]

@@jazzstandardman Ah yes the Thompson brothers-one of them(I forget which one)changed the spelling in his surname so that people didn't confuse his brother's music with his because he regarded it as vastly inferior(that's his brother's, not his!).

[@jazzstandardman]

@@darrylschultz6479 Luckily, I made that distinction above.

[@darrylschultz6479]

@@jazzstandardman Yep!👍Now for me to check those pieces out-always on the hunt for new and interesting gems.

[@ericnk58]

Very beautiful.

[@stephenjablonsky1941]

In this style of music Carter was only moderately successful so he switched to the modernity thing where standards of greatness are very hard to measure. This music is lyrical, attractive, and impressively competent but certainly not profound. Of course, that is only my opinion. To each his own!

[@josephcarlbreil5380]

There are 3 commercial recordings of this marvellous, beautifully crafted work. This recording fails to adhere to the composer's tempo markings. There are wrong notes here and there, not to mention sloppy playing and intonation. Compare the second movement with the recordings by Whitney and Schermerhorn to get an idea of what I am saying.

[@harryandruschak2843]

Well, I cannot stop Carter and his friends from writing "inaccessible" music, but neither can they stop many music lovers from walking away from it.

[@mosaicclassics]

+Harry Andruschak Did you like this one?

[@harryandruschak2843]

***** + This one, yes.

[@ethanhill9331]

This work is conservative for Carter. And many, me included, walk miles away from most of his work.

[@llanellboy]

I'm sure he is devastated at the loss.

[@ethanhill9460]

@@llanellboy I bet he wasn't. In the meantime I've developed a taste for Carter en toto. In the end the music isn't "difficult" but not everyone might enjoy. 4'33'' -- among my favs -- suffers a similiar fate.

[@charlottewhyte9804]

2 thumbs down what ,WHY??????????????????????????????????????????????

[@stueystuey1962]

I like lists. For the fun of it I read a list of greatest American composers. Carter didn't make the top 30.

[@mosaicclassics]

Why do you suppose that is?

[@Eorzat]

According to whom?

[@stueystuey1962]

@@mosaicclassics because great music like this is not often played and it is very challenging for audiences to grasp. In time carters music will become much more well known as younger generations of musical prodigies grow up listening, learning, and performing his music. This will be true of numerous other geniuses and the list makers of 100 years from now will look decidedly diffetent.

[@ethanhill9460]

What?

[@FleuveAlphee]

It may me good sometimes to dislike lists.

[@joshuasussman4020]

Give me Schoenberg, Webern, Krenek, Barraque, serial Stravinsky, Imbrie, Skalkotas, Sessions, Babbit; any of them before Carter. I tried him again with this piece. Still an arid desert devoid of the first whiff of human emotion or sentiment. Sandpaper.

[@andreaskurtkern5505]

Es war mir ein Vergnügen

[@sciencmath]

And here I thought Carter's greatest achievement was showing that Pulitzer is a meaningless prize. Turns out, there was time when he actually wrote music!

[@mosaicclassics]

I think the recent winner has proven the value of that prize. And I must agree with you. I grew weary of the noise a while back.

[@RichardASalisbury1]

There is a sweetness in this, as in much of Copland's music. The latter can be almost as radical as Carter's later music, but is always recognizably Copland, beautiful in a way different from his simpler "prairie-style" works, and often with that subtle sweetness. In Carter's later pieces of I find none of the sweetness of this work (composed the year I was born). Rather, to me, the little of it I've heard--no wish to hear more--is "brown" music: as if a painter were to mix together all the pigments on his palette before lifting brush to canvas, to guarantee the complexity of the finished painting before he started, with result that, whatever its formal complexity, the whole canvas is shades of brown. By contrast, there is little by Bartok or Stravinsky that daunts me, or by any other 20th-century composers except the serial composers (with exception of a few pieces). To me it is as if they all stopped up their ears while they composed. But I do like this piece.

[@yossipeles7864]

Richard Salisbury "stopped up their ears"? It seems that you have stopped up your ears, not all those magnificent pre-serial, serial and post-serial composers. And don't forget that what is really important in listening to art-music is the inner, spiritual, ear, not the external one with which stupid, ignorant and/or narrow-minded listeners listen to music. This applies also to Carter's later music although he remained some sort of neo-classical composer till the end. He had composed excellent music before the early fifties, including this fine and enjoyable symphony, but only with his first quartet did he achieve real artistic depth as well as a more original and personal idiom.

[@RichardASalisbury1]

I said ". . . as if they all stopped up their ears . . . ." First, this a counterfactual statement grammatically. Second, I am describing my impression. Third, even if you take it as an insult it was not directed at you. You have the right to your tastes as I have the right to mine; I don't see any reason for you to have insulted me. There are people who swear by the emotional depth, breadth of meaning, opening of new aesthetic vistas, and simply the importance of Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake." I hope they gain something valuable from the time and effort it takes to penetrate that work, but it would be a waste of my time. So you are entirely welcome to whatever value you can derive from this and from serial music.

[@rschaulis]

To me, it's awful, but I like it enough. Thank you. What a brown statement.

[@viniciodecheco3433]

Pues aunque traten esta notable obra como populista,yo inveterado adorador de la gran y bella Música, será la única composición que conservaré y escucharé de Elliot Carter,todo lo demás que hizo después es esperpento de loco,sin valor artístico:entartete musik...