The Second String Quartet by American composer Elliott Carter was completed in 1959. This composition for string quartet was commissioned by the Stanley String Quartet of the University of Michigan, who decided not to play it upon seeing the score, and received its first performance in 1960 by the Juilliard String Quartet.
The quartet is considerably influenced by the music of European avant-garde composers who were gaining celebrity at this time, particularly Pierre Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître . This is a much more fragmentary piece than his earlier quartet (1951): the four instruments play very individual roles and unpredictably bounce off one another. Indeed, Carter has instructed the players to sit as far apart as possible so that they appear to be playing different pieces simultaneously. [1]
Each of the parts has its own different character:
Carter has distinguished each character not just by general style, but also by the rigorous assignment of musical materials. [2]
This work had brought Carter recognition in America comparable to what his First has given him back in Europe. This work was awarded three major prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize. [3]
The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted into a prize: "For a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year."
Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He was a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, recognized for his serial and electronic music.
Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York City at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music. She was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. Ran was a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 2015. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.
Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was an American modernist composer. One of the most respected composers of the second half of the 20th century, he combined elements of European modernism and American "ultra-modernism" into a distinctive style with a personal harmonic and rhythmic language, after an early neoclassical phase. His compositions are performed throughout the world, and include orchestral, chamber music, solo instrumental, and vocal works. The recipient of many awards, Carter was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his string quartets; he also wrote the large-scale orchestral triptych Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei.
Process music is music that arises from a process. It may make that process audible to the listener, or the process may be concealed.
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George Rochberg was an American composer of contemporary classical music. Long a serial composer, Rochberg abandoned the practice following the death of his teenage son in 1964; he claimed this compositional technique had proved inadequate to express his grief and had found it empty of expressive intent. By the 1970s, Rochberg's use of tonal passages in his music had provoked controversy among critics and fellow composers. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania until 1983, Rochberg also served as chairman of its music department until 1968. He became the first Annenberg Professor of the Humanities in 1978.
Roger Huntington Sessions was an American composer, teacher, and writer on music. He had initially started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved further towards more complex harmonies and postromanticism, and finally the twelve-tone serialism of the Second Viennese School. Sessions' friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced this, but he would modify the technique to develop a unique style involving rows to supply melodic thematic material, while composing the subsidiary parts in a free and dissonant manner.
William Quincy Porter was an American composer and teacher of classical music.
Richard Filler Taruskin was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as musical analysis that combines sociological, cultural, and political perspectives has incited much discussion, debate and controversy. He regularly wrote music criticism for newspapers including The New York Times. He researched a wide variety of areas, but a central topic was Russian music from the 18th century to the present day. Other subjects he engaged with include the theory of performance, 15th-century music, 20th-century classical music, nationalism in music, the theory of modernism, and analysis. He is best known for his monumental survey of Western classical music, the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. His awards include the first Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society in 1978 and the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2017.
Martin Boykan was an American composer known for his chamber music as well as music for larger ensembles.
The Composers String Quartet was a string quartet best known for performances of new works by contemporary composers, including quartets by Elliott Carter and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Carter's Fourth Quartet was dedicated to the Composers Quartet, who premiered the work in 1986. The group has performed quartets by more than 60 American composers, and has toured abroad extensively.
The String Quartet No. 1 by American composer Elliott Carter is a work for string quartet written during a year spent in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona from 1950–51. To some extent, it can be said that this was his first major breakthrough work as a composer. The piece was premiered on 26 February 1953 at Columbia University, performed by the Walden Quartet of the University of Illinois.
The Third String Quartet by American composer Elliott Carter was completed in 1971. It is dedicated to the Juilliard String Quartet, and it was premiered in 1973. This quartet earned Carter his second Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1973.
The Fourth String Quartet by American composer Elliott Carter was composed in 1985–86 in New York City and Rome, and completed in June 1986. It was premiered on September 17, 1986, at Festival Miami, University of Miami, Florida by the Composers String Quartet.
Roger Sessions' Violin Concerto was composed between 1927 and 1935, and is scored for violin and orchestra.