Details

Name
Eight Pieces for Four Timpani 
Composer Name
Carter, Elliott 
Publisher
Amp (HL) 
Number of players
1 
Comments
Metric modulation and rhythmic complexities throughout the eight movements. Not a lot of tuning demands, but that is made up for through the timbre requirements that the performer must endure. Movements II., V., VII., and VIII. performed the most. VII. most popular. Great timp book until the end of time. djr "Elliott Carter is one of America's most distinguished creative artists in any field." Aaron Copland nominating Elliott Carter for the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Eminence in Music (1971). Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, first composer to receive the United States National Medal of Arts, one of only four composers ever awarded Germany's Ernst Von Siemens Music Prize (together with Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen, and Pierre Boulez), and in 1988 made Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Government of France, Elliott Carter is internationally recognized as one of the leading American voices of the classical music tradition. Carter celebrated his 85th birthday on December 11, 1993, to the accompaniment of salutes from around the world. As the anniversary approached, festivals in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Switzerland featured his music. In the months surrounding the birthday itself, ensembles in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago presented all-Carter programs. New recordings of his music continue to appear, consolidating Carter's position as the most frequently recorded living American composer: at least eleven of his works are available in three or more recordings. First encouraged toward a musical career by his friend and mentor Charles Ives, Carter was recognized by the Pulitzer Prize Committee for the first time in 1960 for his groundbreaking compositions for the string quartet medium, and was soon thereafter hailed by Stravinsky for his Double Concerto for harpsichord, piano and two chamber orchestras (1961) and Piano Concerto (1967), both of which Stravinsky dubbed "masterpieces". Carter's subsequent orchestral essays include Three Occasions (1986-89) and his enormously successful Violin Concerto (1990). As a concert work, the Violin Concerto has already become one of Carter's most frequently heard orchestral pieces: to date, three soloists have performed it in more than a dozen countries. Its recording on Virgin Classics, with Oliver Knussen conducting the London Sinfonietta with soloist Ole Böhn, won Carter a Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition of 1994. Carter's most recent orchestral scores are Partita (1994), commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Adagio Tenebroso, commissioned by the BBC Symphony Orchestra for the 100th anniversary of the BBC Proms. Chicago Tribune critic John von Rhein wrote that Partita "attests to the extraordinary creative vitality of America's most famous living composer." Much of the composer's output since the early 1980's has been in the form of solo and chamber works. Carter's String Quartet No. 5 was given its premiere by the Arditti Quartet in Antwerp, Belgium in September 1995. According to Michel Debroq of Le Soir [Antwerp], the new quartet "offered us a moment of absolute musical bliss." 1995 also saw the premiere of a new song cycle, Of Challenge and Of Love, commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival. Wrote Paul Driver of The Sunday Times [U.K.], "[It] is likely to go on being heard for centuries, always sounding fresh..." A native of New York City, Carter has been compared as an artist to another New Yorker, Henry James, with whom he is seen to share multifaceted richness of vision and fastidiousness of craft based on intimate familiarity with Western (and in Carter's case, non-Western) artistic traditions. His affinity for literature in many languages has found creative musical outlet not only in settings of major texts of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashberry, and Robert Lowell, but in the musical development of imaginative suggestions and formal models that the Dialogues of Plato, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, Pope's Dunciad, Saint-John Perse's Vents, and Hart Crane's The Bridge, among many other literary sources, have provided for his purely instrumental compositions. Like Henry James, Carter and his work reflect a lasting and deeply felt relationship with Europe, a relationship dating from adolescent travels with his father, nourished by study of the fruits of European artistic and intellectual culture, and cemented by a 3-year course of musical training in Paris with Nadia Boulanger during the period 1932-1935. Enriched through wide acquaintance with European artists, including many, such as Bartók and Stravinsky, who came to America during World War II, Carter has seen his work as widely appreciated and as actively encouraged overseas as in his own country. Repeated showcasing of his work at the Warsaw Autumn festival, the South Bank Festival in London, the Bath Festival, the Holland Festival, the Venice Biennale, the Donaueschingen Festival, and at IRCAM have resulted in a European consensus of critical and professional appreciation that in 1987 moved the Paul Sacher Foundation to acquire all Carter's musical manuscripts, to be permanently maintained in a public archive in Basel alongside similarly comprehensive deposits of the manuscripts of Stravinsky, Boulez, Bartók, Hindemith, Strauss and other universally acknowledged 20th-century masters. April 1996  
Composer
Carter, Elliott 
Instrumentation
timp 
Library
Percussion Dept.--ASU 
Maximum players
1 
Minimum players
1 
Name and address
Hal Leonard Publishing Corp. 8112 W. Bluemound Road Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53212` 
Number of players
1 
Rec
1167 
Recital
* 
Type
Percussion 

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