Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents. By Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Paul Sacher Foundation and Boydell Press, 2008.

摘要

Amid the wealth of new materials made available to the scholarly community in connection with Elliott Carter's centenary year is Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, by Felix Meyer, director of the Paul Sacher Foundation, and Anne C. Shreffler, Professor of Music at Harvard University.1 The stated purpose of this elegant volume is to survey Carter's career and working methods. The publication of this collection of documents will also certainly serve to alleviate (rather than “remedy,” as the authors propose in their introduction) the lack of accessibility to Carter's autograph materials, the bulk of which have been held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, which does not have a published catalog of its holdings. Thus, this book will provide scholars and students with a highly valuable resource in preparing for the study of archival materials and might also encourage others to take advantage of several hundred pages of sketches for fifteen works, from Pocahontas (1939?) to the Double Concerto (1961), recently made available online by the Library of Congress.2