Elliott Carter: Night Fantasies - Florence Millet

Eliott Carter  (Photo by J.S.Altman )

It has been reported that American composer Eliott Carter died on November 5, 2012, just a month shy of his 104th birthday. He wrote a huge variety of music, from large orchestral works, to vocal music, to real classics of the modern chamber music repertoire. While in some ways he was a quintessential American modernist, his music had a liveliness that exploded out of its hard edges. K.L. 

Elliott Carter - Night Fantasies - Florence Millet, piano, 1998, CD

Elliott Carter - Night Fantasies - Charles Rosen, 1982, Video with a score, mp4 

Elliott Carter - Night Fantasies - Score, pdf 

The Composition of Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies by John F.Link, article, pdf 

Elliott Carter composed Night Fantasies for solo piano, one of his most fascinating and important compositions, between November, 1978 and April, 1980.

In his preface to the score, Carter describes Night Fantasies as "a piano piece of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night."3 In order to realize this conception, Carter decided to write a piece made up of many short, contrasting episodes. The large-scale rhythmic development is guided by a polyrhythm consisting of two streams of slow periodic pulsations. In the faster stream pulsations occur once about every five and one-half seconds; in the slower stream there is a pulsation about every seven seconds. The two streams coincide only on the downbeat of m. 3, and again on the last notes of the piece, twenty minutes later, forming a polyrhythm of 216:175 which is present throughout, renotated in a variety of different meters and tempi. The polyrhythm serves as a kind of formal and rhythmic skeleton, marking important moments of transition or arrival, and generating a wide variety of faster rhythmic patterns that occupy the musical surface. Harmonically, Night Fantasies is based on a collection of twelve-note "all-interval" chords, in which each of the twelve pitch classes and, between consecutive notes, each of the eleven intervals occurs exactly once.5 Carter treats these chords — each of which spans five and one-half octaves — as a repertoire of harmonic possibilities. Each one contributes to a variety of different harmonic events, while maintaining its own unique spatial arrangement of pitches distributed across the entire range of the keyboard. 

The Composition of Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies by John F. Link