Review of Guy Capuzzo, Elliott Carter’s What Next?: Communication, Cooperation, and Separation (University of Rochester Press, 2012)

[1] When Elliott Carter completed an opera in 1997 with the title What Next?, little were we to know that the answer to this rhetorical question would be "so much more." It is amazing to think that Carter, at that point nearly a nonagenarian, would continue to compose for another 15 years, producing pieces with astonishing frequency (Watkin 2008). Of these works, What Next?, Carter's only surviving opera, emerges as a considerable achievement. In his insightful book-length analytical study of this opus, Guy Capuzzo has contributed an invaluable resource to Carter studies, as well as to post-tonal music theory.[2] Capuzzo has organized his study in two parts, consisting of two and four chapters, respectively. Part One, "Genesis and Context," includes chapters titled "Preliminaries" and "An Analytical Approach to What Next?" In Chapter One, "Preliminaries," Capuzzo provides background information on the opera, placing it in the context of those works that are contemporaneous with it, and also within the long, yet intermittent, history of Carter's vocal music. Although Carter composed the comic opera Tom and Lily in 1934, he destroyed it, and his vocal writing between 1936 and 1947 consisted of songs and choral works including Tarantella (1936), Three Poems by Robert Frost (1942), and Emblems (1947). He did not write another vocal work until 1975, when he composed the song cycle A Mirror on Which to Dwell, followed by the cycles Syringa (1978) and In Sleep, In Thunder (1981). After another hiatus, Carter wrote Of Challenge and of Love (1994) for voice and piano, followed by What Next? (1997), and works such as Tempo e Tempi (1999), La Musique (2007), and Three Explorations (2011).[3] Inspired by Jacques Tati's 1971 film Trafic, Paul Griffiths' libretto for What Next? revolves around five adults and one child in the aftermath of an automobile accident. "In choosing a librettist who possessed an intimate knowledge of his music, Carter ensured that the libretto would contain the sorts of imagery and multiple perspectives that characterize the poetry he chose for his song cycles" (48). Structurally, the opera comprises 38 continuous episodes that feature solos and vocal ensembles of various sizes, and lasts about 47 minutes.(1) The only episode in which no singer takes part is Episode 19, a solo for English horn. Since this episode comes midway through the opera, some scholars have cast the work into two symmetrical halves, but Capuzzo does not subscribe to this view (15). His analytical focus is also not comprehensive, but rather zeros in on selected dramatic moments.[4] The five adult characters of What Next? are "Mama," "Harry or Larry," "Rose," "Zen," and "Stella"; the child is simply named "Kid." Capuzzo's Figure 1.1 summarizes the familial and romantic relationships among the adults: Mama and Zen are the divorced parents of Harry or Larry, who, while engaged to Rose, a singer, still flirts with Stella, an astronomer who is also Zen's (his father's) girlfriend. It is not clear how, or even if, Kid relates to any of the adults (10-12). To distinguish the characters from one another musically, Carter adopted a strategy he had employed in instrumental works by assigning each character a preferred collection of intervals and some preferred speeds.(2) Unlike in works such as the Fifth String Quartet, where the instruments rarely play intervals other than those Carter predetermined for them, the intervals and speeds Carter favored for each character in What Next? are not fixed throughout the opera (13-14).(3) Additionally, he associated five of the characters "with a specific instrument or family of instruments: Mama with harp, Rose with piano, Stella with vibraphone and marimba, Harry or Larry with woodwinds and brass, and Kid with English horn" (13). Zen does not have a specific association with an instrument. Carter often utilized the percussion section to refer to the accident itself. …