Elliott Carter 100th Birthday
Concert & Colloquium
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Colloquium on the |
The Wright State University Music Department welcomes musicians and music-lovers to the inaugural event of American Innovators, the first series of its kind in the greater Dayton area. American Innovators will present a series of annual or semi-annual mini-festivals, each featuring a living American composer recognized for original and substantial contributions to American culture. Each festival will include both a concert and a colloquium and/or series of lectures focusing on the featured composer.
This series could not begin with a more distinguished figure than Elliott Carter. Carter is not only the dean of American composers, with a compositional career stretching back to the 1920's. He is also recognized on an international level as one of the greatest living composers and one of the leading composers of the 20th century. Few composers in musical history have created as original, distinctive, and varied a body of work as Carter's. Over his lengthy career, Carter has explored an astonishing stylistic range without ever surrendering his distinctive voice or his primary concern with discovering new forms of musical expression.
On the weekend of Oct. 25-26, the WSU Music Department will host both a Colloquium on Carter's music and a 100th Birthday Concert.
The Oct. 25 Colloquium will feature presentations not only by established theorists and composers such as former Carter Students Joel Hoffman and Reynold Simpson and the renowned Carter scholar Andrew Mead, but also by younger scholars such as Peter Smucker, Jonathan Leathwood, Patrick Budelier, Jonathan Aylward, Mark Porcaro, and visiting scholar PyoungRyang Ko.
The Oct. 26 Concert at 1 p.m. will present a wide range of Carter's work over a span of seven decades. Guest performers Paul Bowman, Patrick Budelier, and Albert Mühlbock will join the WSU faculty and student performers for this concert.
For more information on the concert or the colloquium, contact Dr. Franklin Cox at (937)775-3495 or franklin.cox@wright.edu.
The following works are planned for the Sunday afternoon concert:
- Glock Birthday Fanfare, for three trumpets and vibraphone (1978) --WSU student ensemble
- Canonic Suite, for saxophone quartet (1939/1956) --WSU Saxophone Quartet
- Canaries and March, for solo tympani (1950/1966) --Luke Dull and Andy Miller
- Duo, for violin and piano (1973) --Thomas Sobieski and Albert Mühlböck
- Changes, for solo guitar (1983) --Paul Bowman
- Figment, for solo cello (1994) --Franklin Cox
- Fragment no. 1, for string quartet (1994) --WSU Faculty String Quartet
- Shard, for solo guitar (1997) --Paul Bowman
- Two Diversions, for solo piano (1999) --Franklin Cox
- Figment II, for solo cello (2001) --Franklin Cox
- Retrouvailles, for solo piano (2000) --Patrick Budelier
- Hiyoku, for two clarinets (2001) --Randall Paul and Herbert Dregalla
- Figment IV, for solo viola (2007) --Lucy Firlie, viola
- Fragment no. 2, for string quartet (1999) --WSU Faculty String Quartet
- Catènaires, for solo piano (2006) --Albert Mühlböck
Elliott Carter
December 11, 2008 will mark Carter’s 100th birthday
Carter Centenary site, http://www.carter100.com
Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, first composer to receive the United States National Medal of Arts, one of the few composers ever awarded Germany's Ernst Von Siemens Music Prize, and in 1988 made "Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" by the Government of France, Elliott Carter is internationally recognized as one of the leading American voices of the classical music tradition. He recently received the Prince Pierre Foundation Music Award, bestowed by the Principality of Monaco, and was one of a handful of living composers elected to the Classical Music Hall of Fame.
First encouraged toward a musical career by his friend and mentor Charles Ives, Carter was recognized by the Pulitzer Prize Committee for the first time in 1960 for his groundbreaking String Quartet No. 2. Stravinsky hailed Carter’s Double Concerto for harpsichord, piano, and two chamber orchestras (1961) and Piano Concerto (1967), as "masterpieces." While he spent much of the 1960s working on just two works, the Piano Concerto and Concerto for Orchestra (1969), the breakthroughs he achieved in those pieces led to an artistic resurgence that gathered momentum in the decades that followed. Indeed, one of the extraordinary features of Carter’s career is his astonishing productivity and creative vitality as he reaches the zenith of his tenth decade.
This astonishing late-career creative burst has resulted in a plethora of new works. The first few weeks of 2004 brought a pair of acclaimed new scores: Micomicon, a witty concert-opener for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the incisive Dialogues for piano and large ensemble, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta. France enjoyed the world premiere of Réflexions at Cité de la Musique in February of 2005 and celebrated Carter’s work with multiple ovations. In the United States, the Boston Symphony Orchestra brought Carter’s Three Illusions for Orchestra to life in October 2005, a piece which the Boston Globe called “surprising, inevitable, and vividly orchestrated.” In the same month Daniel Barenboim assumed the roles of conductor and pianist in the world premiere of Soundings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Carter continues to show his mastery in smaller forms as well. Along with a large number of brief solo and chamber works, his later years have brought major essays such as Quintet (piano and winds, 1991), String Quartet No.5 (1995), composed for the Arditti Quartet, and Asko Concerto (2000) for Holland’s ASKO Ensemble. Recent premieres of chamber works include the playfully humorous Mosaic, with the Nash Ensemble in 2005, as well as three premieres in 2006: Intermittences, a piano solo co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall Corporation and The Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and performed by Peter Serkin, In the Distances of Sleep, with Michelle DeYoung and the MET Chamber Ensemble under James Levine, and Caténaires, a solo piano piece performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Looking ahead, the composer’s Horn Concerto, written forJames Sommerville, is set to premiere in November of 2007 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under James Levine.
