Carter, Sessions, and Wolpe

Interestingly, Carter achieved his compositional breakthrough as a result of his deciding "for once to write a work very interesting to myself, and so say to hell with the public and with the performers too." He had imposed a self-exile in the Sonoran desert to write to fully atonal string quartet and renounce his Copland-style populism. Here is a composer to decided to write for only himself and found his voice which turned out to be extremely successful with audiences and critics!

I am struck that a world, seemingly scarred by fascism, turned to a darker texture and deeper experience. In the 50s Stravinsky, Copland, Carter, and many composers began to give up neoclassical and populist styles, possibly as a way of dealing with the trauma of WWII. Carter wrote "Before the end of the second world war, it became clear to me, partly as a result of rereading Freud and others and thinking about psychoanalysis, that we were living in a world where this physical and intellectual violence would always be a problem and that the whole conception of human nature underlying the neoclassic esthetic amounted to a sweeping under the rug of things that, it seemed to me, we had to deal with in a less oblique and resigned way."


I think Carter's music is challenging and fascinating. I especially enjoy another breakthrough work, the cello sonata. There are long and beautiful lines of such mourning that contrast with busy, overlapping textures. I just find his music fascinating in an intellectual way.

Carter seems the head of a group of composers like Wople, Perle, Wourinen, and Kirchner, who were the uncompromising core of academia.

I am struck by Sessions' emphasis in Postwar Compositional Issues on holding "one's mind, ear, and heart open to whatever may reveal genuinely new vistas of musical expression and experience." This central philosophy is evident in Sessions' music which is, as Gann points out, always emphasizing the musical gesture, rather than the mathematical procedures of composition. Along these same lines, Sessions suggests that Beethoven's music was perfectly organized, but according to genuine musical ideas, rather than abstract rubrics.
  Sessions is also confronted by the panoply of options presented by the emerging electronic world. He views this crossroads as a member of the old guard would, as a paralysis, while it would take younger composers to realize possibilities of electronic media for their creative innovations. And he was certainly prophetic about the computer's assistance in exploring new possibilities of sound.