Podcast #5: Thoughts on Late Style

By Erik Petersons on May 28, 2017.

The composer is forever learning, exploring, trying out and finding new ideas; new ways of getting there.  There—that place that is truth.  Some things may feel a break with the past.  But they would probably not be there this way if it were not for the past. You are never really there…but you are seeking it. I try to write music that will sound essential and urgent and as though it could only be this way.

It is everything that [Elliott Carter] had built up until that point that made it possible for him to write these later works.  They are, I would say, not so much a simplification, but rather a purification—a distilment of everything that he had done and learned internally.  All of this then gave further fruit with these great glowing works written in his 80s and 90s.

—Shulamit Ran