Elliott Carter and The Modern Meaning of Time

Elliott Carter and the Modern Meaning of Time
Author(s): Jonathan W. Bernard

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 644-682
Published by: Oxford University Press
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The Twentieth Century
Elliott Carter
and the Modern Meaning of Time
Jonathan W. Bernard
Ask a musician well versed in the music of the later twentieth century
what Elliott Carter is best known for-besides writing long, compli-
cated pieces that demand a lot from performer and listener-and one
might elicit the response: for his way with musical time. From the
level of intricate rhythmic detail to large-scale formal proportions;
from drastic changes in speed, density, and register that occur in the
blink of an eye to shifts so gradual and subtle that one sometimes
becomes aware that they are happening only when they are almost
over; from the monophony of his shorter solo works to complex
polyphonies of simultaneity with three, four, or more radically differ-
entiated things going on at once, all clearly perceivable-Carter has
demonstrated an ability to control the ebb and flow of time in his
music that is often breathtaking, even uncanny. Even more than his
harmonic practice, it is his temporal practice that seems to be the true
seat of his originality.
It wasn't always so. Well into his thirties, Carter favored a
patently conservative style of composition-pleasant enough, but
somewhat derivative and limited in the range of invention it permit-
ted in either the harmonic or the temporal domain. He seemed to be
treading the increasingly well-worn path, in the company of such
contemporaries as Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and
David Diamond, of the American neoclassical "school"--so many
members of which, including Carter, had studied with Nadia Bou-
langer. Perhaps not even Carter himself knew at the time that he was
following this path without sharing his peers' conviction that it was
leading in the right direction. But about 1944, as he has recollected,
something changed: "I suddenly realized that, at least in my own edu-
cation, people had always been consciously concerned only with this
or that peculiar local rhythmic combination or sound-texture or novel
harmony and had forgotten that the really interesting thing about
music is the time of it-the way it all goes along."r In retrospect, it is
644
Carter and the Meaning of Time 645
clear, Carter sees this realization as having proved crucial to his

unfolding compositional career. And critical opinion is in accord.
Most observers seem to believe that, had Carter never started to think
along these lines, he would likely never have reached the first stage of
his maturity, let alone achieved the international status he now
enjoys. All the more reason, then, to take a closer look at his 1944
statement, for it raises a few interesting questions. First, what is there
about this realization that is worthy of such an epiphany? What was so
earth shattering about the idea that time is "the really interesting
thing about music," when music is generally regarded as the quintes-
sentially temporal art? Second, why did this not dawn on him before
his thirty-sixth year? And third, what is there in his formation other
than musical study that might shed some light on the matter?
The matter of his formation provides perhaps the best place to
begin looking for answers to these questions. By 1944 Carter's formal
musical education had been over for nearly a decade. The quoted
statement amounts to a rather severe denigration, not only of the
instruction he had received at Harvard, but also of the experiences of
his years with Boulanger-along with, inescapably, everything he had
produced as an aspiring young composer up to that point. At the same
time, Carter seemed to be setting some rather lofty standards for him-
self, for the autobiographical recollection continues:
Moreover, it struck me that, despite the newness and variety of the

post-tonal musical vocabulary, most modern pieces generally "went
along" in an all-too-uniform way on their higher architectonic levels.
That is, it seemed to me that, while we had heard every imaginable
kind of harmonic and timbral combination, and while there had been
a degree of rhythmic innovation on the local level in the music of
Stravinsky, Bart6k, Varase, and Ives particularly, nonetheless the way
all this went together at the next higher and succeeding higher rhyth-
mic levels remained in the orbit of what had begun to seem to me the
rather limited rhythmic routine of previous Western music.2
Probably we do not need to interpret this as a wholesale dismissal of

these composers, for Carter continued, and continues today, to iden-
tify them as particularly important influences. But it is for just this
reason that the dissatisfaction he has expressed is so interesting. For if
one senses some massive upheaval in his sensibilities, sufficient even-
tually to work a complete metamorphosis in his musical style, one also
senses that it came from some unexpected source-or at least from
somewhere other than the places one usually looks for a developing
composer's influences. In this article, I propose that Carter's insight
646 The Musical Quarterly
into the true role of time in music had a long gestation, and that its
origins actually owed more to his general humanist education than to
his specifically musical training.
This is not so strange a circumstance as it may at first seem, for
Carter grew up in the age of modernism, at a time when many in the
arts, yearning for escape from what had begun to seem arbitrary limits,
were appropriating ideas that had originated somewhere other than in
the art that they practiced: poetry borrowed from painting, painting
from music, film from literature, and vice versa, and so on. What is
customarily called modernism in music criticism has never had any-
thing necessarily to do with such practices, but the question of
whether Carter's conception of time in the modern sense in particular
can be considered an indicator of his allegiance to modernist ideals in
general is very much bound up with them. Toward this end, it is
worth charting a course through some of the ideas about time that
Carter encountered as a young man through his exposure to the arts
other than music--ideas to which he has often alluded in articles,
lectures, and interviews without fleshing them out in detail, as if to
leave them to others to discover and explain. For the sake of keeping
the presentation as clear as possible--even while lending a certain
artificial quality to the exercise--these ideas are separated into three
categories, corresponding to the arts of literature (including philoso-
phy), dance, and film, and are treated in that order, which at least
does bear some correspondence to the chronology of Carter's own
development.
At about the same point as his signal "realization," Carter also came
across certain writings about time in music, which he has briefly sum-
marized in his essay "Music and the Time Screen" and in his unpub-
lished "Time Lecture" (1965).3 For him, they served as examples of
abstract thinking on the subject that might conceivably have some
relevance to practical matters of composition. For us they serve as a
useful point d'appui that will lead us back to earlier influences on Car-
ter's notions of the meaning of time in general.
The first of these writings is an essay by Charles Koechlin, "Le
temps et la musique" (1926), in which the author identifies four kinds
of time:
1. Pure duration, a fundamental of our deepest consciousness, and

apparently independent of the external world: life flows by...
2. Psychological time. This is the impression we have of this [pure] dura-

tion according to the events of our existence: minutes that seem centu-
ries, hours that go by too quickly . . . That is, duration relative to the
circumstances of life.
3. Time measured by mathematical means. All of these have recourse to
visual methods: hourglasses, clocks, chronometers...
4. Finally, musical time. To us musicians this fact does not present itself
as it does to scientists. Auditory time is without a doubt the kind that
comes closest to pure duration. However, it appears to have some con-
nection with space in that it seems measurable (by ear) and divisible.
The divisions embodied in musical note values (whole notes, half
notes, and so forth) lead to a spatialization of time very different from
the one considered by Bergson. Moreover, as concerns the measure of
this [musical] duration, the role of musical memory possesses an impor-
tance that seems to escape many.4
Musical time, then, is in Koechlin's view a special case, an amalgam

of the other three kinds of time he has identified: partly pure dura-
tion, partly psychological duration, and partly measured. The reader
should note in particular the phrase "a spatialization of time very
different from the one considered by Bergson," a reference to the
well-known work of Henri Bergson, who had held in writings pub-
lished some quarter century earlier that the true duration was psycho-
logical, hence basically subjective, and that there were therefore many
"private times." Bergson viewed the spatialization of time--that is,
public time in its objective, measured form, as displayed on clocks, for
example--as "a vice" and, even if necessary for the modern world,
pernicious in its influence.
Carter next came across Pierre Suvchinsky's article "La notion du
temps et la musique" (1939). Here, in place of Koechlin's four catego-
ries of time, we find two: real or "ontological" time-more or less
synonymous with Koechlin's "pure duration"- and "the many different
'psychological' times--expectation, anxiety, sorrow, suffering, fear,
contemplation, pleasure, none of which could be grasped if there were
not a primary sensation of 'real' time" (Carter's translation cum para-
phrase).5 Composers create musical time or khronos, according to
Suvchinsky, by combining the ontological and psychological in differ-
ent relative strengths: music by Haydn, Mozart, or Stravinsky, for
example, tends to emphasize real time and hence could be termed
"chronometric," because the sense of time is more or less equivalent
to musical process. Wagner, by contrast, tends more to emphasize
psychological time and hence is "chronoametric." The classification
is arranged along a different axis from Koechlin's, and the shift is
significant in that it explicitly acknowledges that there can be more

than one kind of musical time. In fact, there can be an infinitude of
varieties, arranged between the poles of chronometric and chrono-
ametric. Readers of Stravinsky's Poetics of Music will recognize
Suvchinsky's distinction, which Stravinsky discusses at length in his
second lecture, and will remember too that Stravinsky, confirming
Suvchinsky's estimation, identifies himself unambiguously as the chro-
nometric type of composer.
A third work on time and music that Carter found worth citing
is Gisdle Brelet's monumental two-volume study Le temps musical: essai
d'une estMitique nouvelle de la musique (1949)-which, as Carter notes,
develops Suvchinsky's ideas much further. In Brelet's scheme, time is
"the principal constituent of music" and has a threefold nature: empir-
ical, or objective; psychological (sometimes called, significantly,
"pathological"); and time lived or experienced. The third serves as a
kind of ideal toward which the composer must strive by striking a
happy medium between the first two, avoiding on the one hand the
"stiff and lifeless" results of abstract patterns that owe everything to
the empirical and nothing to the psychological, and on the other an
overindulgence in the psychological with a consequent loss of tempo-
ral order, as (in Brelet's view) Wagner was prone to. (Brelet echoed
Suvchinsky in finding Stravinsky's solution the most successful.6)
In his "Time Lecture" Carter distances himself somewhat from
all this, admitting, "To raise objections to these interesting but rather
too generalized notions is easy; to attempt to construct another kind
of pattern that is more valid is difficult, especially on such an abstract
level." Carter himself made no such attempt, neither here nor any-
where else; instead, meditating on Suvchinsky's (and Stravinsky's)
dichotomy of ontological and psychological time, he wrote music like
the first movement of the Sonata for Cello and Piano of 1948, which
can be taken either as a determined effort to push such ideas into new
compositional territory or as an ironic comment on the very devising
of such categories.' For what happens at the opening of this piece is
that the abstract distinction between chronometric and chronoametric
is concretized: the two do not appear as different aspects of the same
thing--as Suvchinsky clearly meant--but are deployed simultaneously
as distinct strands, as a function of instrumentation.
In the final analysis, none of these writings on musical time
appears to provide much fuel for the vast, inexorable transformation
of Carter's compositional practice over the dozen years following the
Cello Sonata. During this period, he turned ever more firmly away
from traditional, successive "development" of overtly "thematic"
materials toward deployment of mildly or violently contrasting

"strands" of continuity, in order to realize musical processes succes-
sively, simultaneously, or in some combination of the two.8 The idea
that there were different kinds of time, and that even different kinds
of musical time were possible, was of undeniable interest, but the
actual categories that Koechlin, Suvchinsky, and Brelet had proposed,
as well as the ways in which they might be manifested, must have
seemed on the whole rather rigid and impoverished. If such writings
did have some immediate relevance to Carter in the 1940s, we must
also recognize that the true origins of the ideas that began to come to
life in his music at that time lie elsewhere. Carter's anecdotal account
of the impetus for the Cello Sonata notwithstanding, the idea of
simultaneity does not come from Suvchinsky. Strictly speaking, it does
not really come from music at all.
Music was not much on Carter's mind as a prospective subject for

academic study in 1926, the year he matriculated at Harvard College,
though his devotion to music was nonetheless passionate for all that.
Indeed, as Carter has confirmed in an unpublished reminiscence,
music remained the focus of his "outside studies" throughout his col-
lege years. As an English major with secondary concentrations in
philosophy and classics, however, Carter was exposed to a certain
kind of intellectual training that is rarely encountered in a composer's
education. It was not long before he began to develop an appreciation
for the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead, then a member of the Har-
vard faculty and one of the preeminent philosophers of the day.
Whitehead's "principle of organism" was one of the more important
ideas that Carter took away from this encounter. This "organism" is
not a thing, but rather "a temporally bounded process which organizes
a variety of given elements into a new fact."9 Such unities, which
Whitehead called "events," arise from their environment; thus, for
example, "the characters of the events in the human body are not
entirely determined by any absolute properties of the components of
bodies in general (molecules), but are modified by the fact that the
molecules are in the total organism of the body."10 Whitehead was
convinced that "[i]t is a mistake for philosophers to begin with sub-
stances which appear solid or obvious to them . .. and then, almost
as if it were an afterthought, bring in transient experiences to provide
these with an adventitious historical filling. The transient experiences
are the ultimate realities.""11 So it is not the data provided by sense-

perception of individual or isolated moments or elements that inform
our understanding of how things work together, but rather the way in
which they "require each other," to use Whitehead's phrase: the
causal links that they form among themselves.
What does time have to do with any of this? A good deal, as it
turns out: whereas Isaac Newton had held that there were such things
as absolute space and absolute time, independent (contrary to the
"vulgar" view, as he called it) of any "relation they bear to sensible
objects,"12 Whitehead noted that "the philosophy of the organism is
an attempt, with the minimum of critical adjustment, to return to the
conceptions of the 'vulgar.' "13 In Whitehead's view, it is only with
the development of "enduring organisms" that "the importance of
space as against time, and of time as against space," can really be
gauged: each such enduring organism "discovers in nature and requires
from nature a principle discriminating space and time."14 The philoso-
phy of the organism seems further to have provided Whitehead with
the means of bridging the conceptual gap between the old Newtonian
laws and the new Einsteinian ideas of relativity. Here is what he said
in 1925: "Up till a few years ago, everyone unhesitatingly assumed
that there was only one . . . principle [of differentiation of space from
time] to be discovered," such that "in dealing with one object, time
would have exactly the same meaning in reference to endurance as in
dealing with the endurance of another object." But now there was
incontrovertible evidence that objects in relative motion could not be
said to use meanings of time (or space) that were necessarily identical.
And further: "It follows that, if we can conceive a body at one stage
of its life history as in motion relatively to itself at another stage, then
the body at these two stages is utilizing different meanings of space,
and correlatively diverse meanings of time."15
If all this seems rather abstract, one must recognize that Carter
had in a way been prepared to absorb such ideas before he even
arrived at college, not through reading philosophy, but through expo-
sure to some of the newest and most innovative literature of his day.
While still in his teens, Carter, on his family's frequent trips to
France, found some books to read that made a deep impression on
him, as of course they did on many others at the time: Marcel Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past and James Joyce's Ulysses. Proust's novel,
published eventually in seven volumes, had begun to appear in 1913
but was interrupted by the First World War and then further delayed
by Proust's extensive rewriting and expansion of the originally pro-
jected five hundred thousand words to something over a million and a
quarter. The final volumes, the last of which was published in 1927,
were still coming out when Carter discovered it. As for Ulysses, it was
of course banned in the United States until 1933 and was first pub-
lished in Paris in 1922; Carter first read it sometime during the follow-
ing few years. 16 Both of these massive works treat the whole matter of
time in ways that most readers of that era were probably unprepared
for but which eventually helped change literature completely.
The standard English translation of Proust's title actually con-
ceals its real significance; a more literal rendering would be "In Search
of Lost Time." Such a search is largely the work of memory, and the
time of memory is undeniably private, in the Bergsonian sense-which
means, of course, that it is also multiple. As Stephen Kern has
explained, the novel
takes place in a clearly identifiable public time from the Dreyfus affair
to World War I. But the private time of its narrator, Marcel, moves at
an irregular pace that is repeatedly out of phase with that of the other
characters and defies reckoning by any standard system. Marcel reflected
that his body kept its own time while he slept, "not on a dial superfi-
cially marked but by the steadily growing weight of all my replenished
forces which, like a powerful clockwork, it had allowed, notch by
notch, to descend from my brain into the rest of my body." In the
search for lost time, mechanical timepieces will be utterly useless as
Proust learns to listen for the faint stirrings of memories implanted in
his body long ago. 17
Bergson, as a matter of fact, exerted considerable influence on Proust,

as he did also on Whitehead. It is all the more useful, then, to find a
critic like Edmund Wilson interpreting Proust in terms of Whitehead.
Wilson notes that "as in the universe of Whitehead, the 'events,'
which may be taken arbitrarily as infinitely small or infinitely compre-
hensive, make up an organic structure, in which all are interdepen-
dent, each involving every other and the whole; so Proust's book is a
gigantic dense mesh of complicated relations: cross-references between
different groups of characters and a multiplication of metaphors and
similes connecting the phenomena of infinitely varied fields."18 Read-
ing this, one can see that Carter himself likely made the connection
between the philosopher and the novelist in similar terms. What fur-
ther could not have failed to fascinate him was the extent to which
musical time acted upon memory, even at times becoming synony-
mous with it. Throughout Remembrance of Things Past, the composi-
tions of the fictional composer Vinteuil play a crucial role in
awakening and directing memory. As Roger Shattuck puts it, Proust
insists "that music does not follow or obey established patterns but
creates a direction and a scale of happenings that is all its own. That
new time embodied in sound may then assert its hold over a portion
of our experience."19 It is in fact at this juncture where Proust parts
company with Bergson. Unlike Bergson, who viewed time as "indivisi-
ble flux" in which "we experience a continuous gnawing of the past
into the present," Proust "valued the shock and pleasure of being
suddenly immersed in time which has been experienced
discontinuously"--like steep cataracts, in other words, instead of a
steady stream. 20
In Ulysses, such discontinuities are made even more apparent by
their explicit relation to public time. As is well known, the events of
the novel all take place within a twenty-four-hour span beginning at 8
A.M. on 16 June 1904 and ending at some indefinite hour after mid-
night (but before dawn of the following day). The characters, and
therefore the readers too, are continually being reminded of what time
it is by the ringing of church bells, by tasks to be carried out at partic-
ular hours, by the fixed routine of daily life as it unfolds in the streets
of Dublin. By contrast, each character's internal, private time is differ-
ent: the device of the direct interior monologue, famously exploited
in this novel, provides access to each "complex and special" world
of the mind, which Edmund Wilson has compared to that of a sym-
bolist poet: "we are confronted with the same sort of confusion
between emotions, perceptions and reasonings, and we are likely to
be disconcerted by the same sort of hiatuses of thought, when certain
links in the association of ideas are dropped down into the uncon-
scious mind, so that we are obliged to divine them for ourselves."21 In
these monologues, past is linked with future in a "temporally thick-
ened" present.22 For instance, Molly Bloom's thoughts, as she fades to
sleep in the remarkable "soliloquy" that closes Ulysses, range all over
the temporal spectrum; "her memory," as Stephen Kern explains, "is
not a faculty for bringing fixed ideas out of the past" but "one that
enables her to transform them repeatedly in the endless creativity of
her present consciousness, where all is fluid without separate thoughts
or isolated moments of time."23
The heterogeneity of time is promoted in other ways as well.
First, the rhythm of each character's thoughts is different: Stephen
Dedalus's, for example, "a weaving of bright poetic images and frag-
mentary abstractions, of things remembered from books, on a rhythm
sober, melancholy and proud"; that of Leopold Bloom "a rapid stac-
cato notation, prosaic but vivid and alert, jetting out in all directions
in little ideas growing out of ideas."24 Second, the rhythm of each
episode is different too, as Stuart Gilbert's chart, compiled from infor-

mation supplied by Joyce himself, clearly attests (see Tab. 1).25 This
chart shows the implicit title of each episode (with reference to the
"original" story of Ulysses, Homer's Odyssey), its scene and hour, and
its associated organ of the body, art, color, symbol, and technique.
Third, the flow of conventional "narrative" time is constantly being
broken up. For example, "As Bloom approaches a brothel he steps
back to avoid a street cleaner and resumes his course forty pages and a
few seconds later. In those few seconds of his time the reader is led
through a long digression that involves dozens of characters and covers
a period of time far exceeding the few seconds that elapsed, public
time would have allowed."26 This has the effect of opening up vast
and previously unsuspected realms of time, all nominally contained
within the single day during which the twenty years of the original
Ulysses's wandering is played out.
The opposite side of the coin represented by temporal thickening
is the recourse to simultaneity, a device particularly prevalent in the
"Wandering Rocks" episode. Its nineteen scenes all "take place in the
streets of Dublin between the hours of 3 and 4 P.M., and their synchro-
nism is indicated by the insertion in each fragment of one or more
excerpts from other fragments, which serve to fix the correspondence
in time."'27 This episode, in turn, may be regarded as "the microcosm
of the universe of Ulysses, inspired by its creator with the breath of
life, yet fashioned by the practiced hand of an artificer . .. a living
labyrinth."28 It comes perhaps as no surprise after all this that Wilson
has found the philosophy of Whitehead to be of service in understand-
ing Joyce's world too, characterizing it as "an organism made up of
'events' " and "always changing as it is perceived by different observers
and by them at different times."29
Of all the passages in Carter's works that could be said to bear a
resemblance in their structure to that of this "Wandering Rocks" epi-
sode, one of the most striking is the introduction to the Double Con-
certo (1961). In this piece, a texture is assembled strand by strand,
each strand characterized and projected by a different "speed" (the
resultant of the number of beats consistently maintained between
accented pulses) until there are ten in all. Each has a different "fla-
vor," too, by virtue of its instrumentation and emphasized pitch inter-
val; each essentially drops into the background after making its
entrance but then resurfaces from time to time, in this fashion keep-
ing its coordination with the others clear. At the end of the introduc-
tion all the strands come together in two big pulses one measure
apart, which in the context of the comparison with Ulysses serves the
Table 1. Episodes of Ulysses. From Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's "Ulysses," 41.
TITLE SCENE HOUR ORGAN ART COLOUR SYM
1. Telemachus The Tower 8 a.m. Theology White, gold H

2. Nestor The School 10 a.m. History Brown Horse
3. Proteus The Strand 11 a.m. Philology Green Ti
4. Calypso The House 8 a.m. Kidney Economics Orange Nym
5. Lotus-eaters The Bath 10 a.m. Genitals Botany, Euch
Chemistry
6. Hades The Graveyard 11 a.m. Heart Religion White, black C
7. Aeolus The Newspaper 12 noon Lungs Rhetoric Red E
8. Lestrygonians The Lunch 1 p.m. Esophagus Architecture Co
9. Scylla and The Library 2 p.m. Brain Literature Stra
Charybdis Lond
10. Wandering The Streets 3 p.m. Blood Mechanics Cit
Rocks
11. Sirens The Concert 4 p.m. Ear Music Barmaid

Room
12. Cyclops The Tavern 5 p.m. Muscle Politics Fe

13. Nausicaa The Rocks 8 p.m. Eye, Nose Painting Grey, blue
14. Oxen of The Hospital 10 p.m. Womb Medicine White M

the Sun develop
15. Circe The Brothel 12 midnight Locomotor Magic W
Apparatus
16. Eumaeus The Shelter 1 a.m. Nerves Navigation Sai
17. Ithaca The House 2 a.m. Skeleton Science Com
18. Penelope The Bed Flesh Earth Mon
same function as does the viceregal cavalcade that ends the "Wander-
ing Rocks" episode, seen by nearly all the characters mentioned in the
first eighteen scenes or fragments as it progresses through the streets of
Dublin and thus in a sense coordinating them along one "vertical."30
In an interview, Carter responded to a request to characterize his
contrapuntal thinking in terms of his "feelings about time-continuity
and musical form" in the following way:
while it's obvious that the constant and over-all phenomenon of music
is one in which every "moment" is in the process of coming from some
previous moment and leading to some future moment-only thus con-
tributing to what is happening in the present--it seems to me that this
process can have a number of simultaneous dimensions such that, for
example, the moment, as it occurs, may consist of a number of simulta-
neously evolving event patterns or sub-continuities of more or less radi-
cally different musical character, which interreact with each other to
produce a "total" continuity and character-effect (which, as the dialec-
tical synthesis of the contributing sub-continuities and characters, is
irreducible to any one of these or to any "sum" of their qualities). It
seems to me that this is very much the way we think all the time and
that the feeling of experience is always the synthesis of our awareness of
half-a-dozen simultaneous different feelings and perceptions all interre-
acting together, with now one and now another coming into the main
focus while the others continue, more or less in the background, to
influence it and give it the intellectual and affective meaning it has.31
Carter, it is clear, has retained Whitehead's conception of actual enti-

ties, or events, as processes, while also--as others had done--
allowing, within such a conception, for the possibility of many strands
contributing simultaneously to this process. This is the kind of struc-
ture that literary critics seem fated to term "symphonic," when what
they really mean--if, in fact, they mean to be musically precise at
all-is contrapuntal or polyphonic.32 Carter, by commenting on such
structures in the context of a question about counterpoint, shows that
he understands very well the ramifications of these philosophical ideas
for the world of music. It is notable also that in Carter's interpreta-
tion, the idea of the present existing only on the way from the past to
the future is very much like the temporally thickened present noted
earlier in connection with Joyce's interior monologues. And of course
the idea of simultaneity provides a natural link from Ulysses to the
pieces Carter wrote after his great epiphany about time. He began to
work, somewhat tentatively at first and then with increasing confi-
dence, with various "simultaneous streams of different things going
on together" as well as closely interleaved, mutually interruptive

continuities. The resemblance between the novel and Carter's
concerto outlined above may be sufficiently convincing on its own
terms; but the Ulysses connection derives even greater power from
the interior resemblance between Carter's "heterogeneous character-
continuities"--in the Second Quartet, for example33-and the ways
which thought is registered, in Joyce's interior monologues, as a sys-
tem of simultaneities. The words of the French critic Auguste Bailly
quoted approvingly by Stuart Gilbert, help clarify this connection:
We do not think on one plane, but on many planes at once. It is

wrong to suppose that we follow only one train of thought at a time;
there are several trains of thought, one above another. We are gener-
ally more aware, more completely conscious, of thoughts which take
form on the higher plane; but we are also aware, more or less obscurely
of a stream of thoughts on the lower levels. We attend or own to one
series of reflexions or images; but we are all the time aware of other
series which are unrolling themselves on obscurer planes of conscious-
ness. Sometimes there are interferences, irruptions, unforeseen contacts
between these series. A stream of thought from a lower level suddenly
usurps the bed of the stream which flowed on the highest plane of con-
sciousness. By an effort of will-power we may be able to divert it; it
subsides but does not cease to exist. At every instant of conscious life
we are aware of such simultaneity and multiplicity of thought-streams.
Whatever Carter had seen of the world of ballet up until the 1930s
could only have been sporadic, confined to performances by touring
companies from abroad, since America at that time had no school and
company of its own. The Ballets 1933 and other productions of
George Balanchine which Carter attended while in Paris during his
three years of study (1932-35) with Boulanger thus represented his
first substantial encounter with the art of dance, and they made a
huge impression on him. This in itself, of course, is not particularly
surprising; many musicians are strongly affected by and drawn to
dance. Like music, it is a performing art in a nonverbal medium; fur-
thermore, it is inseparably allied with music in its realization. What is
striking is that Carter found some of the same things in Balanchine's
work that had seized his interest in philosophy and literature.
Balanchine was generally recognized almost from the first-even
before he struck out on his own after Diaghilev's death in 1929--as a
choreographer of unusual and original gifts. Nonetheless, he was obvi-

ously pursuing the continuance of a venerable artistic tradition, not
attempting the kind of complete revision contemplated by the advo-
cates of "modem dance." If he was innovative, then, he was so within
fairly severe constraints--in other words, in a neoclassic sense. This,
however, did not necessarily serve to brand him as conservative or
reactionary. Indeed, if contemporaneous musical developments are any
indication, modernism had begun to seem old-fashioned to many by
that time, while neoclassicism, as represented by Stravinsky's work
and by Schoenberg's emulation of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-
century forms in his twelve-tone pieces, was looking more and more
like the true standard-bearer of serious art. Neoclassicism seemed to be
drawing its strength from what had come to be thought of as the
healthier, older sources of tradition, skipping over the romantic and
hyperromantic excesses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries--in a way, that is, becoming the true modernism. Carter's
own sensibilities had already begun to migrate in this direction. He
had placed his continuing musical education in the hands of a notably
conservative (though brilliant) French pedagogue, after giving up on
American compositional training; he had begun to see his earlier fasci-
nation with the so-called American expressionists (Ives, Varkse, Rug-
gles, et al.) as youthfully misguided. Boulanger herself, after a decade
of deep involvement with the music of Bart6k and Berg, had turned
to championing the Stravinsky of the Symphony of Psalms, the Duo
Concertant, and (a little later) Pers phone. This kind of diet was
already helping Carter get over the disappointment he had felt in the
1920s when Stravinsky had not continued along the lines suggested by
his earlier successes in a more radical style, like The Rite and Les
Noces. 35
None of the Ballets 1933 used music by Stravinsky; the great
association between Balanchine and that composer was yet to develop.
By the 1940s, however, Lincoln Kirstein was able to look back and
say that in Apollo, Balanchine's first ballet to a new work by Stravin-
sky (done while he was still working for Diaghilev in 1928), "there
reappeared the significance of gesture in itself as a new potential for
classic dancing. Balanchine's sense of the creative act as responsible to
a continuous tradition, a tradition not abandoned in pique but sal-
vaged for use, became clear. It was clarified through Igor Stravin-
sky."36 It was not merely a casual turn of phrase that gave so much
credit for these developments to a composer. For Balanchine was not
"interested in producing ballets which have any interest other than
that inherent in music, or in the dancing that stems from this music";
he had "an extraordinary instinctive gift for finding the quality of

coherent gesture to fit the exact shade of quality in the chosen music.
His movement is a continual homage to music; the better the music
the more effective is his choreography."37
Balanchine drew criticism as well as praise for this approach. On
the one hand, Martha Graham compared watching him work to
"watching light pass through a prism," in that "the music passes
through him, and in the same natural yet marvelous way that a prism
refracts light, he refracts music into dance."'38 On the other, dance
critics sometimes seemed to suspect that Balanchine "subordinated
everything to an 'interpretation' of the music, as though he were a
demonstrator in the pay of musicians."39 The fact was, however, that
Balanchine had not only an intense interest in music but also the
requisite training to study it from a technical standpoint, which prac-
tically no other choreographer could have matched: "An analytical
study of a score at the piano, often culminating with a personal piano
transcription for rehearsal purposes, starts his choreographic analy-
sis."40 This intimate familiarity with music, this ability to be at ease
with it, actually helped him avoid relying on it in any obvious or
banal way. As Carter himself has observed, "Balanchine doesn't follow
the music exactly. What's interesting is that his choreography is basi-
cally a comment on the music and not a specific Mickey-Mousing
from one measure to another."41 He would never, for example, "suc-
cumb to the literal transcription of an entrance for a solo dancer to
correspond to the entrance of a solo instrument."42 Instead, as
Kirstein has elegantly put it, "Balanchine's musicianship is essentially,
not literally, poetic. He uses his music with the utmost tact as well as
with the utmost freedom . . . His patterns are not musical 'visualiza-
tions' but movement created in and from tonal cadence and harmony.
The dynamics of his broad movement are not correspondents but
equivalents to the dynamics of his orchestra."43
"Of course I have a logic," Balanchine once said, "but it is the
logic of movement."44 Static positions occupied by the dancers at any
particular moment, whether as imaginary snapshots or in actual photo-
graphs, can only be traces of the real content of choreography. Thus
the problem of talking about what happens in a dance is if anything
even more acute than it is in music, and what little talk we have from
Balanchine about the business of dance composition mainly empha-
sizes that movement is to be considered first and last.45 Two state-
ments are of special interest:
1. The dance proves that movement is important in itself, for though

the other visual arts, such as painting and architecture, are stationary,
dance is continually in motion and any single position of a ballet is

before the audience's eye for only a fleeting moment. Perhaps the eye
does not see motion, but only these stationary positions, like single
frames in a cinema film, but memory combines each new image with
the preceding image, and the ballet is created by the relation of each of
the positions, or movements, to those which precede and follow it.46
2. If movement is the main, possibly the only means of presenting the

art of dancing in its fullest significance, it is easy to understand the
importance of connecting movements to each other with subtle care,
yet at the same time emphasizing, by contrast, their continuity.47
The analogy to film will be worth recalling in the context of Carter's

response to Eisenstein's work, as will the remarks about contrast and
continuity. Carter's own observations on these matters show that he
understood very well this aspect of Balanchine's work: "every individ-
ual momentary tableau in the best of his ballets is something that the
viewer has seen interestingly evolved, yet is also only a stage of a
process that is going on to another point; and, while every moment is
a fascinating and beautiful thing in itself, still what's much more fasci-
nating is the continuity, the way each moment is being led up to and
away from--something you are not aware of in the ballets of most
other choreographers as being anything of interest or which has even
been thought about much."48 In Balanchine's work, movement was
more than a way of filling time: it created or realized time by being set
to a particular tempo. Balanchine spoke of "very brief and small
movements to a fast or slow tempo, in every angle or degree of angle,
S. . rapidly developed in relation to following broad, large movements
in the identical tempo, and increased from their use by one dancer to
their use by many dancers. A kaleidoscope of such movements lives
within the choreographer's brain, not yet, of course, set to any tempo.
They are as yet only abstract memories of form."49 It is fairly easy to
see, then, how Carter made the connection between Whitehead's
event as process and the movements that unfold in Balanchine's cho-
reography. Moreover, it would seem that ballet must have given him
an especially keen appreciation for the fact that events not only
become but also perish-since ballet productions, deprived of any
fixed or reliable system of notation, generally did perish once their
season was over. Carter recollected from his study of Whitehead that
"existence of any kind is a teleological process, in which various kinds
of concrescences attain and then later lose integrated patterns of feel-
ing."'5 (Of course, as Whitehead notes, even when occasions perish,
"that does not mean that they are nothing. They remain "stubborn
fact" . . . How the past perishes is how the future becomes."51)
In carrying on the classic traditions of dance, Balanchine actually

brought them to a new maturity. According to his most passionate
advocates, Balanchine, using music as a kind of model, established
dance as an independent language, "only incidentally expressive of
tangential elements," unlike many of his contemporaries, who "lean
on important decor, flashy personalities or literary attitudes for sup-
port."52 We might regard the ballets that Carter saw in 1933 as
among the first fruits of the lessons that Apollo had taught Balanchine:
dance as "three-dimensional movement measured by opulent rhythm
and sonority."53 It is interesting to reflect on the possibility that the
Ballets 1933 (and those of the 1932 Monte Carlo season as well) may
have caught Carter's attention just because of the way very new ideas
were being worked out in them, ideas not yet smoothed over or pol-
ished to a high gloss. Much of Balanchine's work in the 1930s evi-
dently had a quality to it quite different from the style he perfected in
the 1940s, which one critic of the time termed a clarification, a "new
interest in classic coherence, limpidity and grace" compared to the
more "modernist" profile of his earlier work.54 Cotillon, perhaps the
most famous ballet of the 1932 season, has been described as consist-
ing of various scenes that "butt together oddly, like a painted screen
that tells a jumpy story because some of the panels are folded and out
of view.""55 In an uncollected reminiscence of Balanchine, Carter
mentions the performances of Ballets 1933 at the Theatre des
Champs-Elysdes as "a most remarkable occasion . . . I never saw any-
thing quite as interesting as that again from Balanchine."56 What
Carter missed, at least during the first decade or so of Balanchine's
work in America, was an absence of the adventurous, perhaps even
rash quality of those early works; Balanchine, realizing that some mea-
sure of popular success would be needed to make his fledgling ballet
company viable at all, may not have taken the kind of artistic risks
that more reliable financial backing would have permitted. The real
point here, however, is that whether it was the external circumstances
of the move to America or the inner exigencies of Balanchine's fur-
ther stylistic refinements that caused this change, what did not change
was a certain consistent quality to his entire oeuvre that Carter
responded to, right through to the end of Balanchine's career. And
the sophisticated development of this quality through music was what
made it speak to him as a composer: "[Balanchine's ballets] have been
important as an example, in another art, of what one might do with
music: one wanted to have very vivid moments, but what was more
interesting was the process by which these moments came into being
and by which they disappeared and turned into other moments."
Cinematography is a much younger art than music, literature, or

dance, but many were convinced already by the 1920s that it was
destined to be important, perhaps even to the point eventually of
rivaling the others. There can be no doubt that Carter found certain
of its aspects, notably its dependence upon and manipulation of the
temporal dimension, highly suggestive for his own work. Indeed, the
title of his essay "Music and the Time Screen," although ostensibly
developed out of a remark passed by Edward Lowinsky comparing the
temporal canvas of music to the spatial one of painting, could allude
at least as plausibly to the silver screen-especially since, in the essay,
Lowinsky's analogy is at length set aside as problematic.
For Carter, the work of Sergei Eisenstein proved to be a powerful
stimulus to the imagination. The particular films he has mentioned-
Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World-he saw in the mid to
late 1920s, part of the influx of the Russian arts that New York in
particular experienced during the decade or so after the First World
War.5" He did not read the writings on film technique and philosophy
(in the volumes translated and edited by Jay Leyda) until the 1940s.
Under the circumstances, it would not be at all surprising if these
brilliantly persuasive books, The Film Sense and Film Form, served
to crystallize and particularize the general, somewhat fleeting notions
of timing that Carter might have formed from seeing the films
themselves-perhaps only once or twice each when they were first
released. In the next few pages, therefore, some of Eisenstein's princi-
pal ideas about time, continuity, and the building of structure in film
are abstracted and summarized, for the sake of exhibiting their reso-
nance in the ideas of musical composition that eventually formed the
basis of Carter's mature style.
Montage, or the splicing together of pieces of film that have been
shot from different angles and distances, or with different light values,
or that may even show different scenes and locations, all to form a
continuous whole, is not a technique that was invented by Eisenstein.
Nevertheless, he is widely regarded as the first cinematographer both
to have grasped the crucial importance of this approach to making
films and to have employed it in a truly virtuosic and compelling way.
Eisenstein displays nearly evangelical fervor for the subject in his writ-
ings, as he shows in many different ways that montage must form the
basis of film technique, that the scenes of a film must not be shot
statically, from one fixed camera position, as if they were simply
recordings of stage dramas.
"Montage is conflict," Eisenstein said,59 and this was meant to

signify his conviction that the individual shots could not be regarded
simply as elements of montage, to be assembled into a film. Shots
were no more than cells, or molecules;60 in order for any real meaning
to arise from their juxtaposition, they had to be arranged so that colli-
sion would occur.61 It was clear to Eisenstein that by working in this
way he was confirming the validity of modernism. He noted that
"[m]odern esthetics is built upon the disunion of elements, heighten-
ing the contrast of each other: repetition of identical elements, which
serves to strengthen the intensity of contrast."62 Further, if one sub-
scribed to the philosophy of dialectical synthesis (and Eisenstein, a
good son of the revolution, certainly did), then it would be clear that
each such collision resulted in a higher unity, and that the organic
quality of the result would depend on the skill with which the concat-
enations of thesis-antithesis-synthesis were arranged. The episodes of
the finished film must "all hang from the rod of a single ideological,
compositional, and stylistic whole. . . . The art [of cinematography] is
in every fragment of a film being an organic part of an organically
conceived whole."63
While it was true that "two film pieces of any kind, placed
together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality,"64
one obviously would not have much control over what that quality
turned out to be if the collisions were not rather exactingly engi-
neered. Eisenstein classified the kinds of montage he devised according
to various schemes. For a musician, the fivefold classification scheme
(metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual) is of particular
interest. A summary of these types appears in Table 2.
In the first type, metric montage, the absolute length of the film
pieces is the fundamental criterion, along with the proportions they
form with one another. Only simple proportions can have "physiologi-
cal" effects; otherwise they must be discovered through measurement.
"I do not mean to imply that the beat should be recognizable as part
of the perceived impression. On the contrary, though unrecognized, it
is nevertheless indispensable for the 'organization' of the sensual
impression."65 A compromise may be effected between simplicity and
complexity; for example, two film pieces might be alternated in
lengths that vary according to their respective kinds of content. But
in general, content is subordinate to absolute length: "Only the
broadly dominant content-character of the piece is regarded."66
In rhythmic montage, content becomes the equal of length in
considering how the film pieces are to be arranged. The absolute
scheme of lengths arrived at under metric considerations may be modi-
Table 2. Eisenstein's fivefold montage classification scheme.
Description
1. Metric Fundamental criterion: absolute length of film pieces

content is subordinate to absolute length
a "beat" is present even if not directly perceived
2. Rhythmic Content the equal of length as consideration
actual length of pieces may diverge from absolute lengths
(relationships made more flexible)
explicit violation of meter made possible through
acceleration or introduction of more intense material
at a different tempo
3. Tonal "General tone" defines the dominant
movement construed in wider sense: all affects taken
account
rhythm usually becomes a secondary element

4. Overtonal Distinguished from tonal by "collective calc
all the piece's appeals"
governed by dominant and secondary dominant
ultimate aim: directly physiological perception
5. Intellectual Concerns "accompanying intellectual affec
juxtaposition
distinct from physiological quality of overtonal
fled under the rhythmic method, such that their actual

onstrate more flexible relationships. Further, meter may
through acceleration, or through introduction of more
in a different tempo.
'Tonal montage, in turn, represents a stage beyond th
Whereas in rhythmic montage it is movement within th
impels movement from one shot to the next, in tonal m
affects are taken into account. The general tone becomes
factor; in fact, it becomes what Eisenstein called the dom
strongest characteristic of the montage pieces, and exclu
the montage process. And overtonal montage is organica
furthest point of development along the line of tonal m
distinguished from tonal montage by the synthesis of th
with the one or more secondary dominants that may als
the montage pieces.67
One may notice, in the enumeration of these types o
that each successive type absorbs the one preceding it. T
was entirely intentional on Eisenstein's part: these four types, he said,

are methods that become constructions "when they enter into rela-
tions of conflict with each other"--that is, according to the algorithm
thesis-antithesis-synthesis, exactly in the order discussed in his text.
This order serves to explain why each succeeding type seems more
abstract than its predecessor, and, further, why intellectual montage,
theoretically the highest synthesis of all, appears to have nothing
directly to do with the actual business of filmmaking.
Two other significant ways that Eisenstein had of describing
montage ought to be mentioned at this point. One is conflict not
between shots but within a single shot. Such conflict was called poten-
tial montage because it could be developed to a level of intensity that
would end by "shattering the quadrilateral cage of the shot and
exploding its conflict into montage impulses between the montage
pieces."68 The other method of montage is polyphonic, also called
vertical by Eisenstein in analogy to the vertical coordination enforced
by a musical score. In making Alexander Nevsky, for example, Eisen-
stein drew on his experience with silent film: "Shot is linked to shot
not merely through one indication-movement, or light values, or
stage in the exposition of the plot, or the like-but through a simulta-
neous advance of a multiple series of lines, each maintaining an inde-
pendent compositional course and each contributing to the total
compositional course of the sequence."69 Now, what is meant here is
obviously not any literal simultaneity, since this would involve either
some sort of split-screen technique (certainly problematic for sound
film, and in any case not technically feasible at that time) or double
exposure, superimposition of one image upon another. But a kind of
figurative or metaphorical simultaneity could be achieved by taking
advantage of the phenomenon known as persistence of vision, which, as
Eisenstein points out, is fundamental to the very nature of cinematic
perception (and which, according to Balanchine, it will be recalled, is
fundamental to perception of movement in dance). In other words,
the viewer's ability to retain the image of something just seen would
make the rapid alternation of pieces from two (or more) different
continuities seem as though they were really unfolding at the same
time. Something of the sort might be said to happen, for example, in
the seventh of Carter's Variations for Orchestra (1955), in which
three lines are simultaneously advanced by intercutting. Example 1
displays a sample page of this variation. (Readers with access to a
recording of this piece might find it useful at this point to listen to
this variation, paying special attention to the qualities of the three
lines. These will have a bearing on subsequent discussion.)
Variation 7
1Andante A = 72
in F
Hn
TI. I - ' -
1 1P
Vn 1C
Tubai Bnr r.co

Vn. Andante =.= 72
Aundne ( = 72
tuui., unis. (arco)
Vcc~
arco (aors
Vn. l
tut, ns(co fma.- "
tullf(aoro
Cb f- _ . .
ffare
Hmr
4)
Va.
"rn 2 _I
Thr 1i tranqutlo~
BT
Tuba
p tranquillo .
Vr)I
- f -
fcc
fcaa f.f mar

(b
Example 1. Elliott Carter, Variations for Orchestra (1955): excerpt from variation 7. V
for Orchestra by Elliott Carter. Copyright @ 1958 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publi
(BMI) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
Conflict within the shot and vertical montage do not, of course,

represent another system of montage classification, separate from the
fivefold scheme presented earlier. They are additional ideas about
montage that can be applied to the metric, rhythmic, tonal, and other
methods in various different ways. The idea of simultaneity, though,
does resonate strongly with developments in other arts of the time;
and throughout Eisenstein's prolific writings many analogies are drawn
between cinematic montage and similar procedures in music, architec-
ture, painting, and literature (including poetry and drama).70 For
example, about Joyce's late works, including Ulysses, Eisenstein wrote,
"Joyce's originality is expressed in his attempt to solve the task [of
reconstructing the reflection and refraction of reality in the conscious-
ness and feelings of man] with a special dual-level method of writing:
unfolding the display of events simultaneously with the particular
manner in which these events pass through the consciousness and
feelings, the associations and emotions of one of his chief charac-
ters."71 Music aroused Eisenstein's interest, especially during the last
decade of his life, as part of the challenge of working in the medium
of sound film. Quite apart from that experience, he recognized the
parallels between the time of silent montage and the time of music:
for him, they were both "fourth dimensional" in that they revealed
phenomena that could not otherwise emerge, such as overtones.72
This engagement with other arts is of course also a reflection of Eisen-
stein's basically modernist orientation and relates directly to his feeling
that the true aim of cinematography should be a synthesis of all the
arts. Cinematography was uniquely positioned to achieve this synthe-
sis:73 "Men, music, light, landscape, color, and motion brought into
one integral whole by a single piercing emotion, by a single theme
and idea-this is the aim of modern cinematography."74 As an epi-
graph to part 2 of The Film Sense ("Synchronization of Senses"), he
quoted E. M. Forster: "Indeed the more the arts develop the more
they depend on each other for definition. We will borrow from paint-
ing first and call it pattern. Later we will borrow from music and call
it rhythm.""75 Yet Eisenstein was dubious about the capacity of any
one of these older arts to achieve a meaningful synthesis working
simply from its own premises. For instance, "How frustrated have been
those efforts by composers--Richard Strauss in particular--to burden
music with the task of conveying specific images."76 Film, by contrast,
the newcomer among the arts, was in a more protean state, better
able to adapt itself to the exigencies of such a synthesis.
Carter's own interest in such ideas appears in somewhat disguised
form in his unpublished lecture "The Gesamtkunstwerk" (1966). The
title has a tongue-in-cheek quality to it, since Carter has no great

sympathy with Wagner's aesthetic goals, either as expressed in his
writings or as manifested in the operas, yet he does find the notion of
the "unified artwork" interesting insofar as it seems to embody the
modernist ideal of interconnection of the arts. Eisenstein is quoted at
some length. Since the focus of Carter's lecture is on combinations of
the arts involving music, the remarks on music-and-picture synchroni-
zation in the sound film receive especial attention-particularly those
concerning the need to avoid "narrowly representational" interpreta-
tions of music that lead to "visualizations of a most platitudinous
character," instead making the correspondence more general and
abstract.77 Carter obviously appreciated Eisenstein's caution that any
analogy between different art forms--say, between film and music--
must grow organically from the inner necessities of expression. One
should not simply and arbitrarily impose a formula, such as cutting a
film according to the three-beat meter of a waltz.78 But there is also a
clear focus on the function of innovative uses of time in promoting
continuity through contrast--such as in the simultaneity of poly-
phonic montage, which was originally developed for silent film. Carter
found telling Eisenstein's analogy between the interdependent lines in
such montage and "a ball of vari-colored yarn, with the lines running
through and binding together the entire sequence of shots."'79
This image of a unified time continuity assembled out of opposi-
tion and differentiation of materials, in which the materials retained
their individual identities in dynamic relation to the whole yet acqui-
esced to the particular order and arrangement in which they had been
placed, came clear eventually at the heart of Carter's mature style and
provided him with an aesthetic and philosophical bulwark against the
later vogue for aleatory and for discontinuity as an end in itself. Char-
acteristically, Carter used a literary example to shore up his argu-
ments: "Scholars' 'reshuffling' of the chapters of Kafka's The Trial and
The Castle (in connection with a dispute over Max Brod's editing of
these works) has not only rather radically altered their meaning and
effect but by the same token has vividly demonstrated just how impor-
tant time-continuity is, precisely in works that seem to depend on
'discontinuity' for their character."'8
, In discussing his interest in Eisenstein, Carter speaks of "cutting

and continuity."'81 And further evidence of the influence of Eisen-
stein's thinking upon his own lies in Carter's adoption of the language
of "dialectical synthesis" to express the way in which "a 'total' conti-
nuity and character-effect" is produced out of "contributing sub-
continuities and characters" in the long passage previously cited
(655). Beyond these explicitly acknowledged traces, is it possible to

identify aspects of Eisenstein's actual films that might have rubbed off
on the music of the mature Carter? Two excerpts from Potemkin sug-
gest that an answer cautiously in the affirmative is justified. The first
excerpt is the "fraternization" scene that opens part 4, in which the
populace of Odessa expresses its support for the sailors' mutiny by
bringing provisions to their battleship. Eisenstein himself provided a
lengthy analysis of this excerpt, showing how the two principal
themes are crosscut (the yawls speeding towards the battleship; the
people watching and waving) and then merged at the end of the
scene: "The composition is basically in two planes: depth and fore-
ground. Alternately, the themes take a dominant position, advancing
to the foreground, and thrusting each other by turns to the back-
ground."82 Eisenstein's explanation continues with an enumeration of
two constructive bases: the plastic interaction of both planes within
the frame and a shifting (by montage) of line and form in each plane
from frame to frame. The progress of the film, of course, does not
take the form of simple alternation between the two themes. Each,
whether in the foreground or the background, has a carefully main-
tained continuous presence. Moreover, there is a good deal of variety
in the trajectories of the two themes: one may come to the fore very
gradually, then subside quite suddenly, or vice versa.83
Among the compositions of Carter that work along similar lines,
the Double Concerto provides an especially apt comparison. The piece
is based on an essentially binary opposition (the two orchestras and
their emblematic solo instruments), out of which, however, Carter
weaves an especially complex fabric, with the piano and harpsichord
abruptly interrupting and gradually superseding each other at different
times, along with many other degrees in between:
each movement deals with one segment of the whole musical repertory
of the work, associating various expressive characters with each seg-
ment. One type of progression, then, consists of statements gradually
coming into focus, being picked out of the background, characterized,
and fading away as the "camera-eye" turns to another portion of the
material. In a way, all the material is being sounded in vestigial form
almost all the time in the background. The idea that there is always a
large world going on from which items are picked out, brought into
focus, and allowed to drop back, is one of the fundamental conceptions
of the piece.84
The allegro scherzando second movement provides a vivid illustration

of such process. The piano and its orchestra are firmly in control at
the outset; the harpsichord and its complement make occasional brief
inroads (such as at mm. 166-68; see Ex. 2) that lead to some more
substantial incursions (mm. 186-91) but, with their slower music,
have little overall effect on the dominating rapidity. As the move-
ment goes on, the two groups show a tendency to move out of their
more or less mutually exclusive "montage pieces" into overlap and
even briefly sustained simultaneity, although no true merging ever
takes place.
The second excerpt from Potemkin follows directly upon the first;
it is the famous "Odessa Steps" sequence, which Eisenstein has identi-
fied and discussed in detail as an example of rhythmic montage:
the rhythmic drum of the soldiers' feet as they descend the steps vio-
lates all metrical demands. Unsynchronized with the beat of the cutting,
this drumming comes in off-beat each time, and the shot itself is
entirely different in its solution with each of these appearances. The
final pull of tension is supplied by the transfer from the rhythm of
the descending feet to another rhythm--a new kind of downward
movement--the next intensity level of the same activity--the baby-
carriage rolling down the steps. The carriage functions as a directly
progressing accelerator of the advancing feet. The stepping descent
passes into a rolling descent.85
True to the definition of rhythmic montage already quoted, this

sequence derives a good deal of its force from the contradiction of
meter. But opposition in a more general sense is at work in the tem-
poral organization of the scene into an organic unity: "Down each
step gallops the action, propelled downward by an ascending leap from
quality to quality, to deeper intensity, to broader dimension." Of
particular note are "the caesurae in the action, 'leaping over' or 'trans-
ferring' to a new quality that was, in each case, the maximum of all
availables, and was, each time, a leap into opposition. "86 To these
insights might be added the sense one has of conflict within the
frame, Eisenstein's potential montage. Against the uniform calibration
of the steps, which could be taken to represent a temporal grid, vari-
ous kinds of movement take place, sometimes two or more simulta-
neously: the marching soldiers, the chaotically fleeing populace, the
feebly struggling figures of the wounded, the isolated individuals or
small groups who attempt to stem the tide and confront the soldiers.
The caesurae mentioned by Eisenstein are effectively a way of super-
imposing a dilation of time, particularly the young mother who falls
wounded and loses her grip on her baby carriage, whose rolling
descent then picks up the thread of the marching descent and,
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as Eisenstein has pointed out, carries it to a new level.87 Thus the

idea of simultaneous times, represented in both potential and actual
montage and juxtaposed with a "spatialized," public time (the grid of
the steps), seems clearly worked out here.
To form a general impression of how such thinking about time
might have found its way into Carter's compositions, one might con-
sider the ninth of the Variations for Orchestra. Not all the elements
of the "Odessa Steps" sequence can be assigned plausible analogs; it
would be best not to listen for such exact correspondences. Do notice
how the intercut lines of variation 7 are picked up here after the
"interruption" of variation 8 and are made literally simultaneous.
(Thus variation 8 represents an intercut of larger scale.) Notice also
that several measures into variation 9 (see Ex. 3), a new element is
added: a strict beat in the trumpets, which is not always plainly audi-
ble but which becomes steadily more menacing. A montagelike assem-
blage seems to resume soon after the trumpets' entrance as the rapidly
moving unisons and octaves of the strings begin to exchange with the
slower, two-beat-triplet material in the high woodwinds, eventually
resulting in a partial blurring of boundaries between the two textures.
It seems entirely possible that the exposure to Eisenstein's writings,

among other intellectual stimuli, rekindled Carter's response to the
modernist stance. The spirit of adventure and the sense of discoveries
waiting to be made may have served to remind Carter of what he had
been missing as he rather unsuccessfully tried to be a neoclassic com-
poser, tried to write "safe" music that he thought people would like.
As a kind of coda, these few last paragraphs pose, and attempt to
answer, the question of what it could mean for an artist to have
"rediscovered" modernism at mid-century. Does it even make sense to
describe anyone active in the arts at that time as a modernist--and if
so, on what terms?
Carter, speaking in 1968, noted: "I had my own sort of very
early 'Expressionist' or avant-garde period, against which I reacted at
the time of the depression, and to which I have since returned in a
certain sense."88 It is certainly true that in giving up on the attempt
to be popular, in saying "the hell with that whole point of view" and
writing instead "out of an effort to understand myself" (as he put it,
quoting Joseph Krutch), Carter was embarking on a quintessentially
modernist enterprise.89 Irving Howe, in his essay "The Idea of the
Modern," finds Hegel's Genius "an early individualistic precursor of
the avant-garde creative hero": if there is "a conflict between a genius

and his public, it must be the public that is to blame . . . the only
obligation the artist can have is to follow truth and his genius."90
However, the great success that attended the appearance of Carter's
first piece written in complete disregard for his public revealed that
public, or at least an influential segment of it, to be not necessarily
disposed to hostility. This might have put Carter in another sort of
danger: that of triumphing-which, according to Howe, modemrnism
must not achieve if it is to remain modernism and must actively strive
to avoid if necessary.91 As it turned out, though, Carter was in no
danger of succeeding too soon--in part because he hadn't yet finished
inventing himself. In this respect he seems like a latter-day counter-
part of the modemrnist "revolutionaries" identified by Herbert Read,
such as Picasso, Klee, and Joyce, who "had no new constitution in
their pockets: they did not know where they were going or what they
might discover . . . They were explorers, but they had no compass
bearings."92 In choosing the path he did, Carter had certainly not
made things easier for himself. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s,
his compositions were taking longer and longer to complete: the Piano
Concerto (1965) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1969) were each
the product of four years of effort.
Carter in the 1950s and 1960s looks like a modemrnist as well for
his individualism. At least in retrospect, his work does not seem par-
ticularly close in spirit or sound to anyone else's of the time--not
Babbitt, not Wolpe, not any of the "Darmstadt School" in Europe or
the neoclassicists-turned-dodecaphonists in America--and certainly
very far from the group centered around John Cage. Howe's depiction
of modernist writers as "isolated figures who share the burdens of
intransigence, estrangement, and dislocation; writers who are ready to
pay the costs of their choices"'93 may overstate Carter's condition, but
not by much. We see the modernist in Carter too in his rejection of
even the earlier twentieth-century treatments of musical time; the
dissatisfaction he began to feel in the mid-1940s is very much akin to
the modernist ideal of unending revolution. It seems to signal a recog-
nition that neoclassicism was doomed to fail because, as Stephen
Spender has put it, "to express the feeling for the past it is no good
using past conventions and forms. The hankering for the past is
merely archaic unless it can be expressed in a contemporary idiom.
The past has to be absorbed into the struggle that goes on within the
present, the sense of it re-invented."'94
As one might expect, there is not a lot of agreement among
those who have written on the subject as to just when modernism
came to an end, or even whether it has come to an end at all. While
455
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some see it continuing indefinitely, even to the present day, Spender

takes a very different view: "The modern movement arose from a
confusion of the aims of painting with poetry (and perhaps also with
music). It disintegrated as a result of the separation of the arts, per-
haps due to the reassertion of the difference intrinsic to each."95 Here
Spender sounds not a little like Irving Babbitt, who inveighed against
just this sort of "confusion of the arts" in books like The New Laokoon
and Rousseau and Romanticism-and who, moreover, did this a half
century before Spender published the essay cited above.96 Carter knew
Babbitt's books quite well from his undergraduate years onward, and it
is perhaps by virtue of this influence that his own modernistic tenden-
cies have always been tempered by a reluctance to take things "too
far," to go overboard in one's excitement at the prospect of finding
aspects of the arts other than music to emulate in music. Evidence of
such caution may be seen, for example, in the complete absence of
reference on his part to influences from the plastic arts of twentieth-
century sculpture and painting. Their temporal dimension seemed to
him only metaphorical, not real; to have borrowed from the ideas of
structure they embodied would therefore have constituted a tempta-
tion for him, as a composer, to cut himself off entirely from the tem-
poral dimension. There is nothing that disturbs Carter more about the
music of some of his contemporaries from the 1950s on than its denial
of time's flow or of its irreversibility. To him, such matters are unal-
terable premises, axiomatic. Irving Babbitt's quite pointed castigation
of program music, too, may account at least in part for Carter's patent
discomfort at the idea that any of his pieces rely on specific works of
literature for their coherence or meaning-even in cases where he has
invited comparison, such as in his mention of Hart Crane's The Bridge
in connection with his Symphony of Three Orchestras, or St.-John
Perse's Winds in connection with his Concerto for Orchestra. Further,
his unpublished essay on the last three sonatas of Debussy (1959)
argues cogently and at some length against associating the work of
that composer too intimately with either symbolist poetry or impres-
sionist painting; the "Gesamtkunstwerk" essay mentioned earlier
makes plain his skepticism about the feasibility of Wagner's ideal of
artistic synthesis and the durability of some of the attempts to realize
it that it has inspired in the twentieth century; and, in "Expressionism
and American Music," Carter marshals evidence in support of his
thesis that the music of the Second Viennese School and that of the
American "experimentalists" shared some significant common ground
with reference to the writings, not the paintings, of the blaue Reiter
group of artists.97
Indeed, in that last essay, Carter clearly hopes for a successful

"rehabilitation" of both the American and the German musical mod-
ernists from earlier in the century, focusing as he does on their pro-
gressive musical qualities, selectively illuminated by philosophy, and
divorcing them from the "histrionic" qualities of expressionist paint-
ing, which had become tainted (it seemed at the time irrevocably) by
association with the hysteria that had led to the rise of Hitler. And it
is clear that, in attempting such a rehabilitation, Carter is also reno-
vating modernism at the same time to suit his own purposes.
In a very recently completed (and very brief) essay, entitled "My
Neoclassicism," Carter has suggested that it was the experience of
living through the Second World War that impelled him (among
others) to confront the realities of human nature and human existence
once again and to take up the thread of modernism, recognizing the
neoclassic impulse as one born of a misguided and ultimately futile
attempt to take refuge in the past. Even if the truth of Carter's artistic
development is actually a little more complicated than that, one can
readily see that the potential of the early decades of the twentieth
century to shape subsequent events in the arts had never been prop-
erly fulfilled. German expressionism had seemed to come to a dead
end; the more adventurous American composers fell into unfair
neglect as the spirit of musical "populism" swept the 1930s. In short,
modernism had seemed to age prematurely, a victim of the economic
and political ills of the time. If Arnold Whittall is right in thinking
that Carter's "special openness to the form and content of non-
musical works of art," reflected in "his capacity for associating musical
with non-musical stimuli, may have made the finding of musical focus
and direction particularly difficult" for him (hence explaining the
notably long evolution that his compositional style underwent),98
then one must also recognize that those other arts eventually proved
his salvation. They enabled him to reestablish contact with that older
stratum of artistic development in which his own roots were really
embedded.
Notes
This essay was written during a period of sabbatical leave (1994-95) from the Univer-
sity of Washington, whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
1. Allen Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott
Carter (New York: Norton, 1971), 90.
2. Edwards, 90-91.
3. Elliott Carter, "Music and the Time Screen" (1976), in The Writings of Elliott
Carter, ed. Else Stone and Kurt Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977),
343-65. The "Time Lecture" and other unpublished texts by Carter referred to in this
article are housed in the Elliott Carter Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation in
Basel and will be included in Jonathan W. Bernard, ed., Elliott Carter: Collected
Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995 (Rochester, N.Y.: Rochester University Press, forth-
coming 1996).
4. Charles Koechlin, "Le temps et la musique," Revue Musicale 7, no. 3 (Jan. 1926):
45-62; quoted in Carter, "Music and the Time Screen," 344-45. The quotation
above appears in Carter's translation, adapted slightly by me.
5. Pierre Souvtchinsky [Suvchinsky], "La notion du temps et la musique," Revue

Musicale 20 (May-June 1939): 310-20; Carter, "Music and the Time Screen," 349.
6. Gishle Brelet, Le temps musical: essai d'une esthitique nouvelle de la musique, 2 vols.
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949).
7. In "Music and the Time Screen" (349), Carter, after summarizing Suvchinsky's
arguments, adds: "Such thinking (which I am not sure I agree with) led me to the
idea of the opening of the Cello Sonata of 1948, in which the piano, so to speak,
presents 'chronometric' time, while the cello simultaneously plays in 'chrono-ametric'
time." Elsewhere Carter has mentioned that the first movement of the piece "presents
the cello in its warm expressive character, playing a long melody in a rather free style,
while the piano percussively marks a regular clock-like ticking" ("Sonata for Cello
and Piano [1948]; Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord [1952]," in The
Writings of Elliott Carter, 271.)
8. See Jonathan W. Bernard, "The Evolution of Elliott Carter's Rhythmic Practice,"

Perspectives of New Music 26, no. 2 (summer 1988): 164-203.
9. Victor Lowe, Understanding Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962),

228.
10. Lowe, 228-29.
11. Lowe, 38.
12. Isaac Newton, Scholium; quoted by Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
(New York: Macmillan, 1929), 109.
13. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 111.
14. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; reprint, New York: Free Press,
1967), 119.
15. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 120.
16. Edwards, 61.
17. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 16.
18. Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), 158.
19. Roger Shattuck, "Making Time: A Study of Stravinsky, Proust, and Sartre,"
Kenyon Review 25 (1963):248-63; citation from 254.
20. Kern, 26, 58. In part, of course, this divergence from Bergson corresponds to
Koechlin's distinction of musical from other varieties of time (see above, 646-47).
21. Wilson, 205.
22. Kern, 86.
23. Kern, 28-29.
24. Wilson, 204.
25. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's "Ulysses": A Study, rev. ed. (London: Faber &
Faber, 1952), 41.
26. Kern, 31.
27. Gilbert, 225.
28. Gilbert, 232.
29. Wilson, 221-22.
30. For a technical discussion of this passage, see Bernard, "Carter's Rhythmic Prac-
tice," 188-96.
31. Edwards, 99-100.
32. For example, see Wilson on Proust, 132; Auguste Bailly on Joyce, quoted by
Gilbert, 28. As will become clear later in this article, Eisenstein understood the "con-
trapuntal" analogy, both to his own work in film and to literature, much more clearly
from a musical point of view.
33. Edwards, 101.
34. Auguste Bailly, quoted in Gilbert, 27-28.
35. This shift in attitude is borne out by Carter's unpublished reminiscence of Bou-
langer, "La musique en personne" (ca. 1985).
36. Lincoln Kirstein, "Balanchine Musagate," Theatre Arts 31, no. 11 (Nov. 1947):
37-41; citation from 39.
37. Kirstein, "Blast at Ballet" (1937), in Three Pamphlets Collected (Brooklyn, N.Y.:
Dance Horizons, 1967), 22.
38. Martha Graham, quoted in Bernard Taper, Balanchine (New York: Harper &
Row, 1963), 18.
39. Kirstein, "Balanchineand the Classic Revival," Theatre Arts 31, no. 12 (Dec.
1947): 37-40; citation from 39.
40. Kirstein, "What Ballet Is All About" (1959), in Three Pamphlets Collected,
48-49.
41. Carter, untitled contribution to I Remember Balanchine: Recollections of the Ballet

Master by Those Who Knew Him, ed. Francis Mason (New York: Doubleday, 1991),
163-69.
42. Kirstein, "Blast at Ballet," 23.

43. Kirstein, "Blast at Ballet," 24.
44. Quoted in Kirstein, "A Ballet Master's Belief," in By With To and From: A Lin-
coln Kirstein Reader, ed. Nicholas Jenkins (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991),
217.
45. Balanchine's brief article "The Dance Element in Stravinsky's Music," for exam-
ple, is mainly concerned with the various kinds of movement that Stravinsky's ballets
evoke and suggest to the choreographer (Dance Index 6, nos. 10-12 [1947]: 250-56;
reprinted in Ballet Review 10, no. 2 [1982]: 14-18).
46. George Balanchine,"Notes on Choreography," Dance Index 4, nos. 2-3 (Feb.-

Mar. 1945): 20-31; citation from 21-22.
47. Balanchine, "Notes on Choreography," 31.

48. Edwards, 99.
49. Balanchine, "Notes on Choreography," 31.

50. Edwards, 96-97n.
51. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 304-5.

52. Kirstein, "Balanchine and the Classic Revival," 37-38.
53. Kirstein, quoted in Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and
the Modernization of Ballet (London: Routledge, 1994), 103.
54. Edwin Denby, "A Note on Balanchine's Present Style," Dance Index 4, nos. 2-3
(Feb.-Mar. 1945): 36-38; citation from 37.
55. Laura Jacobs, "Cotillon Revived," Ballet Review 17, no. 4 (winter 1990): 80-84;
citation from 80.
56. Carter, in I Remember Balanchine, 164.
57. Edwards, 99.
58. Carter has recounted his experiences during this period in his unpublished lec-
ture "Soviet Music" (1967).
59. Sergei Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," in Film
Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1949), 38.
60. Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," 36; "A Dia-
lectic Approach to Film Form," in Film Form, 53.
61. Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," 37-38.
62. Eisenstein, quoting Guillerd, in The Film Sense, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942), 95.
63. Eisenstein, "A Course in Treatment," in Film Form, 92.

64. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 4.
65. Eisenstein, "Methods of Montage," in Film Form, 73.
66. Eisenstein, "Methods of Montage," 73.

68. Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," 38.
69. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 74-75. Carter shows particular interest in this quota-
tion in his "Gesamtkunstwerk" essay.
70. One finds analogies to architecture in "Problems of Composition," in Film Essays

and a Lecture, ed. Jay Leyda (1968; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1982), 179; also in "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form," 48; analogies to painting
(dynamism) in "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form," 50-51; to poetry in The Film
Sense, 49ff.; to theater (kabuki) in The Film Sense, 42-43; to language in "A Dialectic
Approach to Film Form," 60; to literature in "Problems of Composition," 164ff. and
The Film Sense, 19-21 (see also "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," in Film
Form, 195-255).
71. Eisenstein, "Achievement," in Film Form, 184-85.
72. Eisenstein, "The Filmic Fourth Dimension," in Film Form, 69.
73. Eisenstein, "Achievement," 184.
74. Eisenstein, "The Dynamic Square," in Film Essays and a Lecture, 85.
75. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Modern Novel (1927), quoted in The Film Sense, 68.
76. Eisenstein, "Achievement," 183.
78. Eisenstein, "Problems of Composition," 156-57.

80. Edwards, 93.
81. Edwards, 99.
82. Eisenstein, "Film Language," in Film Form, 116.
83. Among the recent secondary literature on Eisenstein, see the discussion of spa-
tial relations in the fraternization scene in James Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema, and
History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 67.
84. Benjamin Boretz, "Conversation with Elliott Carter," Perspectives of New Music
8, no. 2 (spring-summer 1970): 7-8.
86. Eisenstein, "The Structure of the Film," in Film Form, 171-72.
87. See Goodwin, 67-69, for further analysis of this temporal dilation.
88. Edwards, 61.
89. Jonathan W. Bernard, "An Interview with Elliott Carter," Perspectives of New
Music 28, no. 2 (summer 1990): 180-214; citation from 192; Carter, "String Quartets
Nos. 1 and 2," in The Writings of Elliott Carter, 275.
90. Irving Howe, "The Idea of the Modern," in Selected Writings, 1950-1990 (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 145.
91. Howe, 141.
92. Herbert Read, "The Situation of Art in Europe at the End of the Second World
War," in The Philosophy of Modern Art: Collected Essays (London: Faber & Faber,
1952), 46. Carter's own period of exploration, characterized by pieces that each
required the labor of several years to write, gradually gave way to consolidation-what
David Schiff has called the "new classicism" of the 1980s and, now, the 1990s. (See
"Carter's New Classicism," College Music Symposium 29 [1989]: 115-22.) This, too,
seems in keeping with the fate of the modernist as envisioned by Howe, who sug-
gested that the modernist stance was inherently an unstable one, perhaps eventually
impossible to maintain because it required perpetual commitment to the problematic.
It was too hard "to resist completely the invading powers of ideology and system"
(Howe, 155).
93. Howe, 152-53.
94. Stephen Spender, "The Modemrn Necessity," in The Struggle of the Modern
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 106.
95. Spender, "Dialogue with a Recognizer," in The Struggle of the Modern, 185.
96. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1910); Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919; reprinted with a
new introd. by Claes G. Ryn, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991).
97. Carter, "Expressionism in American Music" (1965; rev. 1972), in The Writings
of Elliott Carter, 230-43.
98. Arnold Whittall, "Elliott Carter," in First American Music Conference: Keele
University, England, April 18-21, 1975 (Keele: University of Keele, 1975), 82-98.

Elliott Carter and The Modern Meaning of Time

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Elliott Carter and the Modern Meaning of Time

Author(s): Jonathan W. Bernard

and the Modern Meaning of Time

clear, Carter sees this realization as having proved crucial to his

Moreover, it struck me that, despite the newness and variety of the

Probably we do not need to interpret this as a wholesale dismissal of

1. Pure duration, a fundamental of our deepest consciousness, and

2. Psychological time. This is the impression we have of this [pure] dura-

Musical time, then, is in Koechlin's view a special case, an amalgam

significant in that it explicitly acknowledges that there can be more

materials toward deployment of mildly or violently contrasting

Music was not much on Carter's mind as a prospective subject for

are the ultimate realities.""11 So it is not the data provided by sense-

Bergson, as a matter of fact, exerted considerable influence on Proust,

episode is different too, as Stuart Gilbert's chart, compiled from infor-

TITLE SCENE HOUR ORGAN ART COLOUR SYM

1. Telemachus The Tower 8 a.m. Theology White, gold H

11. Sirens The Concert 4 p.m. Ear Music Barmaid

12. Cyclops The Tavern 5 p.m. Muscle Politics Fe

14. Oxen of The Hospital 10 p.m. Womb Medicine White M

18. Penelope The Bed Flesh Earth Mon

Carter, it is clear, has retained Whitehead's conception of actual enti-

on together" as well as closely interleaved, mutually interruptive

We do not think on one plane, but on many planes at once. It is

choreographer of unusual and original gifts. Nonetheless, he was obvi-

he had "an extraordinary instinctive gift for finding the quality of

1. The dance proves that movement is important in itself, for though

dance is continually in motion and any single position of a ballet is

2. If movement is the main, possibly the only means of presenting the

The analogy to film will be worth recalling in the context of Carter's

In carrying on the classic traditions of dance, Balanchine actually

Cinematography is a much younger art than music, literature, or

"Montage is conflict," Eisenstein said,59 and this was meant to

Table 2. Eisenstein's fivefold montage classification scheme.

1. Metric Fundamental criterion: absolute length of film pieces

rhythm usually becomes a secondary element

fled under the rhythmic method, such that their actual

was entirely intentional on Eisenstein's part: these four types, he said,

Tubai Bnr r.co

tuui., unis. (arco)

fcaa f.f mar

Conflict within the shot and vertical montage do not, of course,

title has a tongue-in-cheek quality to it, since Carter has no great

, In discussing his interest in Eisenstein, Carter speaks of "cutting

(655). Beyond these explicitly acknowledged traces, is it possible to

The allegro scherzando second movement provides a vivid illustration

True to the definition of rhythmic montage already quoted, this

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Example 2. Carter, Double Co

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as Eisenstein has pointed out, carries it to a new level.87 Thus the

It seems entirely possible that the exposure to Eisenstein's writings,

the avant-garde creative hero": if there is "a conflict between a genius

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Example 3. Carter, Variations for Orchestra: e

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some see it continuing indefinitely, even to the present day, Spender

Indeed, in that last essay, Carter clearly hopes for a successful

5. Pierre Souvtchinsky [Suvchinsky], "La notion du temps et la musique," Revue

8. See Jonathan W. Bernard, "The Evolution of Elliott Carter's Rhythmic Practice,"