It’s interesting what you say about responding to Carter emotionally. I actually find that I respond to his music in this way much more than I do to that of dodecaphonic peers such as Babbitt. Is it, I wonder, because the structures Carter builds from his tetrachords feel, to me, more “instinctive”, and, yes, more lyrical on occasion, than structures built rigidly on units of a 12-note chromatic series? I’m not indicating that I think lyricism and dodecaphony are antithetical, incidentally, just that the one appears to be much harder to achieve with the other than with certain alternative compositional techniques.
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It’s interesting what you say about responding to Carter emotionally. I actually find that I respond to his music in this way much more than I do to that of dodecaphonic peers such as Babbitt. Is it, I wonder, because the structures Carter builds from his tetrachords feel, to me, more “instinctive”, and, yes, more lyrical on occasion, than structures built rigidly on units of a 12-note chromatic series? I’m not indicating that I think lyricism and dodecaphony are antithetical, incidentally, just that the one appears to be much harder to achieve with the other than with certain alternative compositional techniques.
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