Harmony in Elliott Carter’s Late Music

Abstract

From around 1995 until his death in 2012, Elliott Carter retooled his harmonic practice in order to make his composing both more efficient and more flexible. That the two all-interval tetrachords (AITs) and the all-trichord hexachord (ATH) were Carter’s primary harmonic focus in these years is well known. But, as many analysts have discovered, the rich and varied harmonic relationships that strike so many listeners in this body of work are not always easy to relate to these three “core harmonies.” In this paper, I propose a way of doing so via a secondary category—“derived core harmonies”—formed by aggregating the three core harmonies with and without common tones. The result is a compact yet comprehensive harmonic vocabulary of five-, six-, seven-, and eight-element set classes that readily accounts for passages in Carter’s late music in which the core harmonies are not easily inferable, and integrates seamlessly with the work of other authors, including Jonathan Bernard, Marguerite Boland, Guy Capuzzo, Adrian P. Childs, Laura Emmery, David I. H. Harvey, J. Daniel Jenkins, Tiina Koivisto, Joshua B. Mailman, Andrew W. Mead, and John Roeder. Classifying Carter’s harmonies as “core,” “derived core,” and “non-core” provides a means of distinguishing between referential and non-referential harmonies, and thus a basis for identifying harmonic tension, ambiguity, and the expectation of return. It also facilitates multi-layered harmonic analyses of Carter’s late compositions, transpiring across multiple time scales.