Elliott Carter
Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi
for Solo Violin (1984)
Biography:
Program Notes:
Elliott Carter’s relationship with the Italian modernist composer Goffredo Petrassi (1904 – 2003) was a long and a fruitful one. It had its origins in the many years Carter spent as a visiting composer at the American Academy in Rome, where Petrassi and he were colleagues. Carter’s Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi (In Gratitude, Goffredo Petrassi) was written in 1984, in celebration of Petrassi’s 80th birthday.
Riconoscenza is a single-movement work for solo violin, and in keeping with the music of its dedicatee, the piece is non-tonal, and utilizes procedures made familiar to many in the music of the second Viennese school of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.
Riconoscenza—with its numerous successive registral leaps and rapidly-moving lines, its intricate rhythmic relationships from note to note and between groupings, its double, triple and quadruple stops, and challenging harmonics—is a virtuosic tour de force. It is also a work of great emotional breadth, comprising three radically distinct types of gestures: a poignant and expansive lyrical line; a discordant, constricted and agitated episode; and a gradually-changing, pensive, interlude. Each of the three gestures alternates throughout the movement, and often in the manner of an “intercut,” a technique common in film editing.
The work opens with the first gestural type, the lyrical line, marked dolce, legatissimo, scorrevole (expressive, as smoothly as possible, flowing/gliding), but gives over to the intrusion of the second gesture, marked giocosamente, furioso, martellato (cheerfully, furious, hammered)—all the more penetrating for the oxymoron in the marking. The mood of the opening returns, momentarily, only to be superceded by the third gesture, marked tranquillo, ben legato (tranquilly, quite smooth).
The recurring altered gestures, however, are neither equally spaced, nor predictable in terms of what will come next. And yet the whole of the piece is held together in many ways, and not the least, with respect to its pitch structure, for Carter severely restricts the types of intervallic moves from note to note, favoring minor and major seconds and thirds, the occasional tritone, and fewer perfect fourths. The intervallic connections are disguised by registral leaps as one note gives over to the next, and especially in the case of the lyrical line.
Elliott Carter (1908 – ). At 95, Elliott Carter continues to compose, furthering his reputation as one of the most influential of American composer. Honors and awards include two Pulitzer Prizes, the United States National Medal of Arts, and recognition by the governments of Germany, France, and the Principality of Monaco. As is true of Copland, Carter was a student of Nadia Boulanger. And though Copland’s and Carter’s styles differ radically, each in his own way was a master of polyphony. In the case of Carter, the rhythmic and melodic complexity of his music was never purchased at the expense of clarity or distinctiveness of line.
Program Notes by Gregory Marion
Assistant Professor of Music Theory
The University of Saskatchewan
