The Order Of Time And Space In E.Carter's Music

Elliott Carter (1908- ), born in New York, was one of the most prominent American composers in the mid-20th century. Due to his great contributions in composition, Carter became a figure you cannot ignore when it comes to the musical life of that period. He favored traditional forms such as concerto, symphony, string quartet, and sonata, all featuring abstract vocabulary, rigorous logic, and complicated rhythm, but with new contents. His music, a challenge to audiences and performers alike, boasts of its shocking power, which can be perceived only after repeated hearings. We enjoy not only a brand-new pleasure from his music, but more importantly, we admire his courage and persistence in art as reflected in his writing.The thinking of time and space is found throughout his music writing, a major source especially after his middle period. Considering this, the dissertation puts Carter's techniques into the framework of the order of time and space to abstract, on a higher level, the principles of time and space separating and combining, a nature in his music from the viewpoint of text. Then Carter's music is tackled in the American context of his time, uplifted from the multi-dimensions.The dissertation consists of five chapters. The Introduction is followed by Chapter One, treating the context for Carter's order of time and space. Chapter Two is an analysis of the time's quality as reflected in his rhythm, structure and tempo, while Chapter Three is for the space's quality through his pitch structure, texture space and timbre arrangement. Chapter Four tackles in details his principles of the order of time and space separating and combining. Chapter Five is a comparison between Carter's music and other American composers', either free from or mixed with each other. In Conclusion; a further abstract and outline is made in the order of time and space, i.e. "Guided by a philosophical thinking, Carter's rigorous concept of the order of time and space for music control proves itself as a musical fluid, continuous in the order of time and space, related with and distinguished from those of his contemporaries in America."...