Le 1er juillet 2017
de 11h30 à 12h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3209
Séance - Modern American Composers
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Laura Emmery
The circumstances surrounding Elliott Carter’s conception of his seminal First String Quartet (1951) are well-known: Carter exclaimed, “to hell with the audience” before retreating to the Lower Sonora Desert in Arizona to explore novel ideas about “musical themes, ways of development, textures and forms.” However, Carter’s writings, interviews, and text documents reveal that Carter was quite mindful of the audience while composing this quartet, evidenced by numerous narratives he devised in order to make the piece more approachable and understandable.
Building on the scholarship on musical narrative and metaphor (Zbikowski 1998, Maus 2003, Spitzer 2004, Mailman 2012, Almén 2008), and on musical ecology (Cook 2013, Clarke 2005), musical I aim to discuss Carter’s First String Quartet trough a lens of narrativity and semiotics. My study is informed by the analysis of the sketches (housed at the Library of Congress and the Paul Sacher Stiftung) and the score, as well as original text documents, correspondence, and Carter’s own writings on the piece.
