Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1953, at New York's 92nd Street "Y," Walden String Quartet tackled the difficult First String Quartet of American composer Elliott Carter. In Carter's 45-minute Quartet, the four voices enter one by one, in the style of a fugue, but each voice pursues its own very individual pace and character. Carter's Quartet was as densely-packed with ideas as a page from James Joyce—an author the composer cited as an influence. But, writing for the Herald Tribune, composer Virgil Thomson gave the work a glowing review: "The piece is complex of texture, delicious in sound, richly expressive, and in every way grand—the audience loved it," wrote Thomson. That same year Carter's Quartet won First Prize in the International String Quartet competition in Belgium, a contest Carter entered almost as an afterthought. "My First Quartet was written largely for my own satisfaction and grew out of an effort to understand myself," he said. To escape from the distractions of New York, Carter had retreated to the desert near Tucson to write it. No one had commissioned the Quartet, and Carter initially feared its complexity would only baffle performers and audiences. His next quartet, equally challenging, won a Pulitzer Prize. Complexity would characterize Carter's music for the next 50 years—although the composer himself insists that fantasy and invention, rather than difficulty for its own sake, had always been his goal.