Symphony No. 1 (1942) | Compositions | Elliott Carter, composer

Instrumentation

2.2.2(Ebcl).2-2.2.1.0-timp-strings

Dedication

To my wife [Helen Carter]

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Associated Music Publishers

Manuscripts

Library of Congress
Paul Sacher Stiftung

Premiere: Apr 27, 1944/ Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra / Howard Hanson / Rochester, NY

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Symphony No. 1 clip

Carter’s Symphony No. 1 was written “in a deliberately restricted idiom- that is, in an effort to produce [a work] that meant something to me as music and yet might, I hoped, be understandable to the general music public I was trying to reach…”

The first of the three movements has themes that sound Coplandesque, but the organization of phrases into irregularly patterned three-, four-, and five-bar groupings, the disorientation of the lilting waltz figure with off-the-beat accents, and the ductile manipulation of the meter from triple into duple are surely Carter’s own tricks. A solo trumpet carries the hymnlike second movement for much of its expansive way, and one realizes here, as in the clarinet writing from the first movement, what Carter means by “orchestrally thought textures.” The rambunctious third movement theme dates from Pocahontas, where Carter had discarded it as too diatonic. Rapidly shifting dynamics reveal precisely conceived levels of activity, especially in passages of deceptively simple texture. And again the sounds of individual instruments remain at the end, as the E-f1at clarinet and an obscenely high piccolo bring the Symphony to its giddy close.

– Susan Feder

Recordings (4)

Elliott Carter: Symphony No.1; Piano Concerto
Naxos 8.559151 (2004)
Mark Wait, piano | Nashville Symphony Orchestra | Kenneth Schermerhorn, conductor
American Composers Orchestra
CRI CD 552 (1988)
American Composers Orchestra, Paul Dunkel
Elliott Carter: The Early Music
CRI SD 475; ACS 6003 (1982)
American Composers Orchestra, Paul Dunkel
First Edition: Elliott Carter: Symphony No. 1; Alexei Haieff: Divertimento
The Louisville Orchestra first edition records LOU 611 (1961)
Louisville Orchestra, Robert Whitney