Elliott Books

Dedicated to the children of men and women in uniform, Solita and the Purple Moon is a flat-spined, bilingual English/Spanish children's picturebook about a young girl whose mother is deployed for military service. The lonely little girl strikes up an imaginary friendship with a purple moon. Simple, two-color artwork by the author's husband illustrate this poet, wistful, and comforting story. "Tired from her travels with her best friend, / over the sea and across the land, / the little girl slept and slept, / day and night, night and day, / holding her favorite book close to her chest."`

Books that combine beautifully written prose with wonderful characterisation, atmosphere and a story that wont let you go, are rare indeed. This is just such a book. If you read nothing else this year, you should read this.

Any collection strong in African history and ethnicity will want to make SOUTH AFRICA'S DIVERSE PEOPLES: A REFERENCE SOURCEBOOK a primary acquisition. It will appeal to both high school and college-level holdings with its history, which moves from pre-segregation to post-segregation and which considers the evolving, changing roles of many different peoples and cultures under the South African umbrella. From the hardening of ethnic divisions within the country to apartheid's policies and rules, SOUTH AFRICA'S DIVERSE PEOPLES is a 'must' for any with more than a passing interest in the country.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

This book was recommended to me to read and though I honestly didn't think I would like it... I was pleasantly surprised. It's actually an enjoyable book that I think many people would have fun reading both old and young alike.

I look forward to the sequel!

I just received my copy of this book, and it looks great! If I were teaching a research methods class, I'd adopt this as a required text. In fact, I used the book today when one of my college students asked how to report the results of a test in an academic paper. I quickly turned to the right section and consulted the "How to report..." section. Excellent!

Diane Elliott has so completely captured the experience of settling Montana in the 1860s as seen through the eyes of Electa that it is hard to believe this is fiction, and not a true diary. She reminds us of the incredible hardships families endured, the fear and deprivations experienced by these pioneers, and the everyday threat of violence under which they lived. All this is twined around the short and intense romance and marriage of Henry and Electa. The book leave you wanting more of Electa, and lets you draw your own conclusions about the mysterious and complex Plumer--misunderstood hero, notorious road agent, brilliant sociopath, or something of each. I couldn't put this down until I finished it.

These are Elliott Carter's Five String Quartets in the originally published score engravings; although here presented under one single hardback bound gray covers with silver lettering engraving volume.Quite handy for travel,jogging or supermarket shopping for a quick analysis while waiting at a stoplight. Associated Music Publishers, Hendon Music, Boosey & Hawkes, ISMN M-051-21341-2. The typset is from whomever originally published the quartet. You also get an Introduction by Robert Mann of the Juillard Quartet, and an Analysis by Carter as Program Notes. There is also information on the very first performance of each quartet and a Discography.

Do these Quartets need anything more said about them?, they really redefined the genre, the context of expressionism in music if we speak in relativistic terms, but the context of each quartet was different,and Carter was influenced by the times in which he lived; there was for example some eight years between the First(innovative) Quartet (1951) and the Second Quartet (1959). Do you remember the ambience of 1959?,or reading about it? the time prior to the Kennedy Years, the early Sixties if you recall had a "newness" about it within avant-garde contexts, and the value of abstractions in and for-itself,La Monte Young and minimalism, multiphonics of William O. Smith was just discovered; The Beat poetry, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and then Elvis hits the scene.I know what does this have to do with Carter's music? and yes if you want a sterile academic reading devoid of social cultural reference,, you can wallow in your own ignorance.I like to find the cultural contexts of works it gives them more maning and you can weigh their importance. Contemporary Music was however still too cloistered, too still self-referential, to absorbed with itself to reach toward culture dimensions. Charles Ives was just being discovered, and no one knew who Ruggles or Harry Partch was, or John Cage, not yet,just insiders and other marginal artists.

The Third Quartet then was premiered in 1973, a very different place, the rebellions on the streets in Europe, in New York City and Chicago, the Third Quartet certainly has this violence/turbulence,like the music desired to be "numbed" into submission within itself. Carter hid behind the elaborate structural plan he devised, a situation he had no answers for.Shaped/structured throughout in Two Duos,(Violin/Viola; Violin/Cello) fighting and resolving itself amongst itself. One duo reduced to five pitches while the other allowed the full 12 Tones to portray its discourse. There is an aesthetic, Carter reduced the tone in one of the Duos for the overall resonant stability this would give the Quartet, a resonant anchor.

The Fourth and Fifth then are wholly in the latter years,more playful,accessible and threadbare.The Fifth dedicated to The Arditti Quartet has high largesse(living large)in degrees of abstraction as if the time has run out, no more to say, innovation now has come to refine itself, we need a new context. Although the typical Carter-ian characterizations are here until the end(I don't think there will be a Sixth?)"personas" embodied in each particular string instrument is still here. The First Violin, quite distant and "third person", the Second Violin, a bit more lyrical, the violist clamoring for attention,yet fully supportive of his brethren's music materials, and the cellists allowed free realms to explore yet mindful of the situation it is in. Carter said to Charles Rosen that he thought today's music wasn't new enough, today's music he thinks took on then chariterizations and roles/functions quite moribund and old.

there are certain works within modernist repertoire that represent a new departure, a break, or rupture as the French like to expound. Alain Badiou looks at the history,or trajectories of concept is a better term of the aesthetic as those places,those works where we can say represent an "event", a work that in many ways summed up a language, the beginning of an end; and holds within its four pages some creative possibility for continuation for development,for years,not as now a speeded in Virilio-ian droma; the work, the elegant canons and mirror repetitions of Webern certainly held that for the post-war generation of composers, and on this side of the Atlantic, the works of John Cage, threw a large influential net to catch many emerging genres,and cadre of performance artists, new instruments,graphic notation and live electronics.Carter's "First String Quartet" was equally one such work, an "event", call it American neo-expressionism/or romanticism, it sounds quite odious today to utilize such jargon, Carter had left his rather facile music of the previous 20 years for a stint into the language and challenges of dodecaphonic handlings, along his own quite original trajectories, although every movement shall we say is merely different "readings" of the same differing sets of ground rules,shapes,images, and emotive content, be it Cubism, serialism, minimalism,or expressionism, now all quite useless terms ready for the scraps of history/ / / if you situate this "First Quartet" you can see where things, materials, approaches presented themselves in fairly formative dimensions,the language of the new, must be learned,by the artist;but the outwardness of this quartet was quite exciting for its time,the submission of characters and roles for each part, the cello for the most part more pronounced,lumbering along arrogant at times,to the more threadbare viola, less arduous less spontaneous so,imprisoned at times in predictable triple shapes, 3 rhythms for the most part, the first violin then sustaining pencil thin tones,and harboring its own "character" / / / the second violin interrupting all that exists with contrary rhythms,also subservient as traditional speaks to it. There are also "enclosures" of intervallic content, one sequestered limited to one particular part, only the cello is allowed expansion, this is something developed vigorously some 20 years later in the "Third String Quartet". Two duets contrast each other;the buzz of the term "metric modulation" is also here is budding forms/ / / of interjecting slowly the change of a common pulse,then accelerated but within a definable proportion. You may recall the first time you had heard this quartet, and it truly sounded like music from another place, a music of exile,not a music that belonged anywhere,until now,50 years it does take these works to become partially understood, as Adorno said Beethoven we think is better understood than Webern, but that is not true,it never was true/ / /Carter's quartets now grace untold genres, now a safe music, fully acceptable into the neo-liberal order.

with the Second Quartet 1959, you sense a greater undulating freedom of choice of materials,more compact,yet expansive for solo moments, texture is not as vigorusly pursued, of timbre, greater blends together, as if a common language has been now discovered/ / /the rhythmic conception is somewhat more static in nature,although you have incessant ties to identical tones over the barlines,something you might be torn asunder at a composition lesson as suggesting a course in music without meaning;at least Ralph Shapey would have told you so/ / / and you only see these dimensions within the maze of study of the First Quartet. There is greater diversity of everyone contributing toward an emotive center,more soloist lines exposed, the brilliant cello returns again , as in the First Quartet each part leading into the next player,interruptions only occur when new materials are needed to prod things along, like electric charges, or a new light added to the rhythmic maze pursued herein' each player entering fully conscious of the purpose of the phrase and direction of the proceedings herein, even if the materials are purely accompanimental and marginal to the quartets agenda. When characters emerge, they have longer declamations and come to dominate larger swabs of durational frames, as the First Violin attibuting a modest cadenza toward the latter parts of the third movement 'Andante espressivo'. Overall there seems to be greater assertiveness of purpose here, shorter time length half the time of the 40 minute First Quartet. This Second Quartet, seems to relish in the relative brevity of its existence,with cleaner threadbare lines, keeping less independence, yet not entirely so. The emotive thorny questioning state(from the First Quartet) is pulled in as well, there is far less ground to tread here, and the beauty comes through all the more. There are also a larger pallette(s) of extended sounds, three different pizz items with,Left-hand pizz, arco-pizz-arco, and the violent Bartok pizz, snapped against the fingerboard, and a fair amount of glissandi/ / / Carter advises in his introductory notes that tempi and polyrhythmic textures must be adhered to faithfully so to clearly experience the complexity sought after.This work won all sorts of prizes including the Pulitzer,but don't let that skew your view,music should be examined as it stands, and as it was written not what it has won, unless it is a race horse, and I imagine many composers today would like their music to take on such thorough-bred 'Seebisket"dimensions.

a long arduous gestation period some 20 years, separates the evocative, relatively gentle Second Quartet of brevity and classic shape to the more intensely extreme dimensions of the Third Quartet of 1971, I cannot help but think that the uncertainty of world events had been an integral formative part of this period,and fines its way into the strings herein/ the deeply stated penumbral "Piano Concerto" was behind Carter's creativity now,I always like to think that pieces, a composer's oeuvre influences the burden of future works, that things, the working out of the music becomes more arduous, and filled with irresolution as time passes, what will come, and in this light this Third Quartet has that dimension. Of course you can also say that this work is an intense celebration, a fullfillment of strong brutal ideas for their own sake, not for anyone,unadorned,unencumbered by any narrative,relishing in deeply virtuosic timbres, revealing a content of extroversion,one not afraid(within the aesthetic) of anything anymore. This Quartets dimensions it seems knows no boundary markers with its duel forces pitted against each other, like a palace rebellion strictly of aristocrats had occurred without the outside populace knowing about it. So here the DUO I is Violin and Cello,cloistered together where pitches and tone configuration seem to be boundless,more rhapsodic in playing (as Carter advises in his notes "quasi rubato") to the more imprisoned DUO II, Violin and Viola,(stricter rhythm(s) throughout) taking on here more an accompanimental role,equally with Carter's affinity for the sustained string sound, this un-freedom functions nonetheless and makes the music stop,halts the flow of itself and/or create a magnificent tension so the work wants to proceed,but cannot, wants to fulfill itself it does so with a large array of durational indication, expanding and contracted in surface in register,very liberal utilizations of double stops as well, as if one single voice along never quite fits the emotive agenda here there is also a :dialectic:( a bad word) of emotive content at work with often times contradictory indications between the two DUO, as the opening exhibits simultaneously "Maestoso" in DUO II, and "Furioso" (quasi rubato,)in DUO I,this suggested hostility continues quite to the end.
The modern British painter Francis Bacon had said that longevity within this language, (meaning expressionisms of sorts,equal to Carter's musical substance)that tension remains forever in art where it may exist,as even the private pastoral tensions in the continuous tonal movements of trees and mountain surfaces in Poussin's massive landscapes,geometrically pure,but unknown at dirst So to Carter I beleive in some array of poly-rhythmic durational scheme takes this work's strength from under its rhythmic surface passive perhaps on the surface, but look closer for the tension. Here passive acceptance in Carter is by degrees,and within his affinity for establishing characters within the genres,resolution simply goes away forgotten as unimportant.
In Carter's introductory notes, he advises that the :sustained sound:, and the fast tones will tend to get "covered by notes of medium speed", so an interpretive problem exists in the clarity of this duel of virtuosity, of dodecaphonic remorse. The work has a dryness to me, never seductive, or in a way suggestive of Lucien Freud's work, equally dry yet not devoid of emotion, below the surface. Here the surface brutality usually foments, throws our listening into the work, deeply engaging without an agenda.The work has no resolution,or it implodes upon itself really and as it progresses it deeply exposes its content, what it has been about,that the violence sought after in the beginning becomes tamer to a degree in its totality beaming,projecting itself in fragements,like incomplete thoughts, "fugitives"(as Pierre Aimard might say) where it becomes like a flame-furioso, given less oxygen for its existence snuffed out, stepped on for a time.