From an early review of Elliott Carter’s piano and cello sonatas:

Among artists, aware of the smothering nature of today’s mass audience, the temptation unquestionably exists, as strongly as ever before in history, to exploit cleverness as a defense or refuge, by emphasizing the separation of creativeness from mass-mindedness. [. . .] One may be sure that any composer whose music shows thought has at times explored the abstractions of disembodied sound, in the remotest detachment from expressiveness or even from considerations of utility. But he comes back, if he is a composer, to apply whatever gains he made in this flight, to the more prosaic, but also more human, problem of performable music sufficiently within a tradition to be understood.

There is every evidence in Carter’s music of something like this process as an underlying artistic and intellectual practice. There is a niceness of detail and a care for proportion, both serving a total plan always held in view, that bespeak thought more than intuition.¹

These words, quoted from a 1951 review of Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata (1945–46) and Cello Sonata (1948) by the critic Richard Franko Goldman, communicate the isolation felt by classically trained composers in the United States during the years after the Second World War. The advent of sound-recording technologies and long-playing records, along with the growth of television and radio networks, led many to question whether these innovations encouraged the general public to participate thoughtfully in the arts or if the nationwide proliferation of media primarily conditioned listeners to become consumers of a mass culture.² As public awareness of cultivated artistic traditions waned, a concomitant anxiety was felt by American composers of the 1940s, who increasingly relied upon universities and specialized performance venues that programmed new classical music to find audiences for their work. Goldman wrote specifically to that audience in his review, identifying Carter as an artist who recently had developed new musical ideas worth hearing. These new ideas were the fruit of intellectual effort, but they nonetheless communicated in human terms using a musical language “sufficiently within a tradition to be understood.”

Goldman’s review boosted Carter’s reputation in the early fifties, announcing to the musical community that a developing artist had achieved a newfound sense of maturity deserving of their attention. Looking back from a twenty-first century perspective, it is easy to credit Goldman for his insight: these sonatas did become a turning point for an important composing career was about to blossom.³ Elliott Carter lived another 61 years to write many more distinguished works! The resulting catalog of over a hundred compositions earned more than enough international recognition to position Carter among the most significant composers of modernity.

The arrival of this initial turning point in his career was long awaited by the composer. Already 40 years old at the time he published the Cello Sonata, Carter had invested many years into his education at the Horace Mann School and in graduate school at Harvard, followed by two years of private study overseas with Nadia Boulanger from 1932–1935. At the conclusion of these studies, Carter remained active as a composer but did not support himself solely through those means. He wrote reviews and articles for music journals, became music director of the Ballet Caravan dance company, taught for two years at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, and then served in the Office of War Information until the end of the Second World War. During these years, he actively volunteered with the League of Composers and the International Society for Contemporary Music to keep his professional networking going. By 1945, Carter had devoted such sustained effort to educate himself and to build his career that he was ready to make the most of any opportunity that might come his way. 

After his studies with Boulanger, Carter did more than just pursue career opportunities, his main focus during these years was to develop his own distinctive musical voice—a sophisticated and cosmopolitan style that expressed something genuinely American. 

A grant from the Guggenheim Foundation supported his composition of the Piano Sonata, and he used the time to work some of his newest ideas into its musical fabric.⁴ Some of these innovations were highlighted in Goldman’s review (quoted below):

Here we have a bar with sixteen 16^th notes (apparently equal to 4/4), divided into patterns of seven, four, and five: and a bar of twelve 16^ths (apparently equal to 3/4) divided seven and five. The divisions in the following bars are indicated with equal definiteness. Clearly the effect desired by Carter—emphasis on duration of note rather than pulse—is not new except in terms of 18^th- and 19^th-century thinking, but this realization of it is more rational than those one usually finds. The bars are not 4/4 or 3/4 and cannot be played as such without total distortion. The barring and grouping of the 16^ths in the rapid-running sections of the movement (marked legato scorrevole) show the attention to detail that is characteristic of Carter: each fragment of phrase seems carefully thought out, but continuity is thereby achieved rather than impeded, and the visual presentation is the most helpful possible to the player.⁵ 

In the absence of time signatures—a notational innovation of Carter’s score—Goldman observes five- and seven-note groups within the stream of 16^th notes played by the right hand. The five-note groups, marked by slurs in the second system, coalesce into repetitive two- and three-note contour shapes whose initial attack often is doubled in the left hand. The nearly constant stream of 16^th notes is grouped by contour and accent into irregular divisions.

Combining two- and three-note contour groupings into sequences thus becomes a key process in the formation of phrases.⁶ In most of the tempo scorrevole [flowing, gliding] passages heard in this sonata, repeated contour patterns emerge either at the midpoint or at the beginning of a phrase. This insight makes it possible to hear four levels of rhythm interacting between (1) the individual note to (2) the contour group to (3) the repeated contour patterns to (4) the formation of an entire phrase. Phrases end using one of two possible strategies. Either the musical organization of the phrase is interrupted by the unexpected intrusion of a different motive,⁷ or the melodic contour simplifies into repeated two-note contours (as shown at the end of the Goldman’s excerpt, above). 

Beyond the perception of the individual phrase, larger patterns of rhythmic organization occur between phrases. Lengths vary and the relative size of the component contour pattern also varies from phrase to phrase, producing an ebb and flow of contour sequences and phrases that unfolds over longer spans of time. For example, between the phrases of the second scorrevole section in this piece (mm. 33–70), repetitive contour patterns grow in size—creating an overall impression of gradually increasing organization. Meanwhile, larger contour groups of four and five notes emphasize important junctures in the form. Subtle but audible relations such as these provided Carter with contemporary means to recapture the scope and expression of 19^th-century pianism.⁸

Another innovation in this piece can be heard in the presentation of its main theme. Unlike the Symphony No. 1, the Holiday Overture, and other Carter compositions of the early 1940s in which the theme is presented at or near the beginning of the work, the main theme of the Piano Sonata does not occur until m. 36. The theme evolves from smaller motivic components projecting an associative path from the first ascending-step motif of the piece to the ascending fourths that begin the tempo scorrevole music, to the arrival of the syncopated ascending fourths that Carter (in lecture notes prepared for Varèse’s music class ⁹) labeled as the main theme.¹⁰ Thus, the music rewards a less-traditional listening strategy that attends to the gradual emergence of this theme from the momentum of its own rhythmic and motivic processes set into motion at the beginning of the piece. 

In conclusion, Carter’s Piano Sonata has acquired an enduring status in the repertoire of musical modernism, not only for its pivotal role in the career of a pre-eminent composer, but also—as pianist Paul Jacobs described it—as “one of the strongest pieces of American music of the forties.”¹¹ Stephen Soderberg reckoned the sonata as “unquestionably one of the landmark piano works of the twentieth century.”¹² With more than 20 recorded versions and countless concert performances to its credit,¹³ this piece continues to inspire pianists from many different parts of the world, for despite its age, the music retains enough of its original vitality to challenge the twenty-first century listener.