Thoughts on the Elliot Carter Brass Quintet

 On Monday we listened to the Elliot Carter Brass Quintet in class, and had a pretty involved discussion about it, and I thought it would apply to so of the themes of my blog. 

Recording: https://youtu.be/av3dL90UEYY?si=XgQtMTREfLPEnA4x 

The general feeling was that a more abstract piece like this made the class uncomfortable. I personally think it's a good thing that a piece of music can evoke such feelings, and I think there's a conversation to be had about art like this. 

My blog so far has largely advocated for musicians getting out of the concert hall and trying to be more visible to the public eye, and unfortunately, that mostly entails playing pretty safe and crowd pleasing music. So the question that needs to be asked is how do we perform pieces like this in a manner that the public could actually engage with it? I'm not qualified to give a definitive answer, but I can at least share my opinions.    

I think with any more abstract piece of music like this, a lot of appreciation can be found in trying to understand it's intent and the context for when it was created. I think as performers who would want to present this piece to the public, it's important to tell them about the intent behind the piece of music. This could be giving them program notes or telling the audience about the piece before you play it. I think it's important to give the audience something to engage with before presenting a piece of music that has a lot to grapple with. 

I firmly believe that art shouldn't exist just to make us happy. Art should exist to challenge our emotions and give meaning to feelings that we can't put into words. It will always be a difficult challenge to make the average person care about such complex music as this, but I also think we as musicians fail if we don't try to get the average person to engage with it. 


Again, I'm no authority and I can't give definitive answers on how we as performers must deal with this subject. But I do think it's a conversation that we need to have more often. 

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