there are very rare birds that become more beautiful, more audacious as they get older. they do not occur very often or very naturally but for all of us creeping towards our dotage, they represent a small victory over our last great nemesis:
hardy, yeats, stevens.
kurosawa, de oliveira, antonioni.
merce cunningham.
gehry, louise bourgeois, agnes martin.
it will take decades for the critics to get a handle on carter's accomplishments. his career spans so many decades itself. what's interesting for me is that while his later pieces(he's still composing)are not lacking in complexity, they seem to have a more spacious quality. it's as if he's found a way to make complexity comfortable, to make silence(or at least the space between notes)as much a part of the music as the music itself.
carter was the first modern composer of deep convolution i was able to "get." the great duos, the incredible double concerto, were all pieces i nearly wore out on my wildcat stereo. the contrasts & similarities, the attention to the physical nature of the specific instruments & what that meant to the composition, all characteristics of high modernism. who knew? not me back in 1976 in philip's cave there in p'cola. but those were the things i heard & what drew me into the music.
when i hear the later pieces i think of de kooning's late paintings...the ones he did after the alzheimer's had gotten him. those late paintings had an astonishing spaciousness too. perhaps the great gift of modernism is that spaciousness...amid all the clashing, swirling confusion. who knew?
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