Jimi Michiel

Posted: Sun Apr 09, 2007 6:53 pm From the Associated Press NEW
> >> YORK --- American composer Elliott Carter, an exemplar of the
> >> atonalist style of modernism and according to admirers the
> >> greatest living practitioner of his craft, apologized to music
> >> lovers around the world today for what he called "a half century
> >> of wasted time."
> >>
> >> "What was I thinking?" the venerable Mr. Carter, 99, said at
> >> his home in Manhattan. "Nobody likes this stuff. Why have I
> >> wasted my life?" Carter said he "went wrong" back in the 1940s
> >> and spent the next 60 years pursuing the musical dead-end of
> >> atonality. In the past seven decades, he has produced five string
> >> quartets, a half dozen song cycles, works for orchestra, solo
> >> concertos and innumerable chamber works for various combinations
> >> of instruments --- all in an advanced, complex style he now
> >> dismisses as "noise."
> >>
> >> Despite consistent encouragement of many mainstream musicians
> >> such as Boston Symphony Music Director James Levine, for Chicago
> >> Symphony conductor Daniel Barenboim, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma,
> >> Carter said his many admirers were "delusional."
> >>
> >> "The critics who said they were just congratulating
> >> themselves for being smarter than everybody else were right all
> >> along," he said. "We should all go back and get our heads on
> >> straight." Carter said he blamed his late wife, Helen, for
> >> turning him into an unrepentant modernist. "She liked this stuff,
> >> and I could never say no to her," he said. Mrs. Carter died in
> >> 2003 at age 95.
> >>
> >> Since then, Carter said, he has been reevaluating his
> >> aesthetic. "I'd like to write something pretty for a change ---
> >> maybe something based on an Irish folk tune," he said. He was
> >> uncertain whether he would withdraw his substantial catalogue from
> >> the repertoire, though one alternative would be to revise his
> >> works, ending each with a tonic triad, he said.
> >>
> >> "I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted from my
> >> shoulders," Carter said. "From now on, I promise to be good."

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