Twentieth-Century Ideologies of "Late Style" in the Reception of Elliott Carter’s Music

Authors

  • John Gabriel University of Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper analyses how 20th-century ideologies of late style shaped the reception of American composer Elliott Carter (1908-2012). Carter lived to nearly 104, but speculation about his late style began in the late 1970s. Thus, for roughly the last third of his life, Carter’s music was interpreted through 20th-century ideologies of late style. Carter defied two key expectations: that late style should become more complex and difficult, and that late style should reflect the disabling effects of aging on the composer. The former was linked to the ideology of postwar musical modernism, which was defined in terms of Beethoven’s late style. Carter’s music seemed to become more accessible, provoking anxieties about the fate of modernism in an increasingly postmodern world. The latter derived from ideologies of aging, retirement, and disability that arose after WWII. Carter’s seeming youthfulness and vitality were celebrated in what disability studies terms an “overcoming narrative.”

Author Biography

John Gabriel, University of Hong Kong

John Gabriel is a postdoctoral fellow in music in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, having completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2016. His research focuses on the role of music and sound in the cultural history of Central Europe and the United States in long twentieth century. He is currently writing a book on the opera and music theater of the New Objectivity in Weimar Republic Germany (1919-1933). Other publications have explored musical representations of state symbols in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, the historiography of music in Nazi Germany, the reception of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer in early twentieth-century Germany, and American-German cultural exchange in the 1920s.

Published

01-11-2018

How to Cite

Gabriel, J. (2018). Twentieth-Century Ideologies of "Late Style" in the Reception of Elliott Carter’s Music. Elephant & Castle, (18). Retrieved from https://elephantandcastle.unibg.it/index.php/eac/article/view/390