PRACTICE: THE FIRST QUARTET
The first composition in which Carter implemented the new musical resources he had developed in the late 1940s at full strength, and over the sustained time span of a “major” work, was his First String Quartet, composed between the fall of 1950 and the spring of 1951 while living on a Guggenheim Fellowship in the lower Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona. That bare biographical fact has done much to encourage Carter's “hermetic” image—deserts, after all, are where hermits live. But Carter himself has knowingly contributed to the mythology surrounding the Quartet. Earlier, he confessed, he had allowed “the desire to remain within the realm of the performable and auditorily distinguishable divisions of time” to restrain his imaginative speculations. But now, “there were so many emotional and expressive experiences that I kept having, and so many notions of processes and continuities, especially musical ones—fragments I could find no ways to use in my compositions—that I decided to leave my usual New York activities to seek the undisturbed quiet to work these out.”22
- Citation (MLA):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 6 Standoff (II)." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2024. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-006004.xml>.
- Citation (APA):
- Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 6 Standoff (II). In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 12 Nov. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-006004.xml
- Citation (Chicago):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 6 Standoff (II)." In Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 12 Nov. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-006004.xml