FINANCIAL TIMES Elliott Carter quartets The Hub, Edinburgh August 29, 2003 By David Murray American composer Elliott Carter, who turns 95 in December, must be unique among western composers for his incessantly original, creative longevity. He flew to London only weeks ago for the Prom premiere of his Boston Concerto. Now the Edinburgh Festival, refusing to be outdone, has had the young Pacifica Quartet in to play all five of his string quartets in a truly mind-blowing single concert. Few composers have affected other composers so much. After some big American-modern pieces in the 1940s, more or less tonal but magisterially well-wrought, he took a year off from 1950 to write his First String Quartet. It is almost an hour long, and as time went by it made contemporary musicians prick up their ears. Carter never looked back. Many of us musical oldsters remember the salutary shock of that quartet (then only on LPs - hardly anybody could play it). Far from being a tightly organised, faceless team, his "quartet" was to be made up of fractious individuals, sometimes collaborating and sometimes in violent dispute. It represented a benign form of "American individualism". The slow movement finds the violins serenely dreaming, high above the angry interaction of viola and cello. What kept them together was Carter's device of metrical modulation, where instruments play equal note-lengths, but hive off intermittently by stressing different beats until a new pulse is established. A recipe for anarchy - or for a new level of co-operation; nothing quite like it had been heard before. For Carter, metrical modulation soon became old hat. The Second Quartet rang many changes on the device, and the Fourth and Fifth Quartets ascended to still higher levels. The Third Quartet remained the odd one out, for it divides the quartet into irreconcilable duos (the "outer" instruments, high and low, against the "inner" middle pair), each playing two or three "movement-types" twice or thrice against the opposing duos, in different juxtapositions, always with different results. An intellectual exercise, perhaps, but fascinating and even thrilling. This body of work is at the core of Carter's music, and hearing it from first to last was a resonantly mind-boggling experience. After it, one hears any straightforward classical quartet with different ears. What used to seem natural and consonant is revealed as deliberate and contrived, no less of a conscious choice than Carter's own procedures: a subversive revelation. The Pacifica team rendered Carter's music most lyrically (he doesn't write "tunes", but his thematic lines are wonderfully graceful), sounding as if they'd never thought any of it difficult at all - just music.