ABSTRACT
Though an intensely dramatic artist, Elliott Carter is concerned with the drama of the inner life; and experience with ostensibly theatrical techniques was merely a step towards treating an "abstract" musical argument in dramatic terms. Certainly there is a comparably "dramatic" release in the most of his vocal works, Emblems, for chorus and piano, to poems of Allen Tate. In the remarkable piece the music's extreme difficulty is justified by its dynamic power; and most significantly, it is the closest Carter had yet approached to the uncompromising immediacy of Charles Ives. It is Carter's most "American" piece—especially in its Ivesian use of rhythmic displacement; the poem deals with the American pioneers. UnlikeIves, however, he is not content to accept life's incompleteness, but would impose upon it something like Aaron Copland's disciplined order—without Copland's limitation of emotional range. Carter's First Quartet is a work of tremendous power and originality and stands among the handful of American masterpieces.
