Tim Page: Listening to Elliott Carter

In most cases, a composer’s stock goes down after death, at least for a while (two exceptions that come to mind are Virgil Thomson and Morton Feldman). The works of Wallingford Riegger and Roger Sessions are rarely heard today, although both men were powerful and inventive modernist composers, occasionally grouped with Carter, and their deaths were deemed significant enough to be reported on the front page of the next day’s New York Times. Carter, who came into prominence in the 1950s alongside composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio, was never exactly a “popular” composer, but he was invariably a respected one—perhaps the respected one in the last quarter of the twentieth century—and those who loved his music found it like nothing else in the world. If I were to wager on posterity, he would seem a safe and honorable bet.


Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.