Elliott Carter

I am woefully undereducated in music. I know what I like, but don't necessarily know why. Last night, I bought several CD's, and because there was a sale on classical music--buy two, get one free--I picked up Elliott Carter: A Nonesuch Retrospective. I knew the composer by name, but not his music--it was an attractive box and an opportunity to take a chance and learn something new.

Anyway it is very interesting music, well worth repeated listening. Not "dissonant," but not traditionally melodious, either. His work reminds me a bit of Aaron Copeland. I did not previously know this, but Carter has written music for poems by Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost. The Lowell poems--and Carter's music, of course--are included in the four-disk Nonesuch collection.

So I am getting a "free" and very welcome education in the music of Elliott Carter.

Carter is 100 years old--he was born on December 11, 1908--and lives in Greenwich Village. He has twice received the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

__________________________

Question: Are there any literary journals reading in the summer that might be receptive to somewhat more narrative work? I have a manuscript full of Martin Johnson Heade-hummingbird poems, many of which are still looking for good homes.

So many editors seem baffled by what I am up to in this manuscript. On the most obvious level, however, the work seems both straightforward and yes, interesting. But I also believe that so much beyond what is easy and received is happening in these poems. I am grateful when someone, somewhere, seems to "get" both the larger project and its disparate parts.