‘Postmodern Hyperspace’ in Elliott Carter’s String Quartet no. 4

gam.35 This creates a series of sound objects that must be simultaneously perceived as both individual and constituent, essentially issuing the same challenge to the listener as Jameson finds in his analysis. This layering of simultaneous streams of information occurs similarly at a formal level. The uneasy question of String Quartet no. 4’s overlay of a classical form from a composer who so decidedly shunned his early neoclassicism can be better understood in the context of a culture that delights in dehistoricised reproductions of the past, and, therefore, as an invocation of «the spatial logic of the simulacrum» rather than an unmediated communion with past forms.36 The classical structure’s complex relation to the work’s meaning is emphasised by its specific inaudibility: all of the sections (b. 118, b. 214 and b. 388) begin mid-note, making it impossible for the listener to tell their precise parameters. The perception of linearity that is fundamental to developmental classicism is thus undermined

by Carter’s making its immediate processive function inaudible and therefore negligible to meaning in this regard. A final layer is found in the figuration of the work as a rewriting of String Quartet no. 2 through many instances of selfreferential play.37 The situating of the quartet within these personal and traditional canons gives a paradoxically nonlinear appropriation of classical form and subjective history, which become silhouetted simulacra that we hear separately and simultaneously alongside the music’s unique formal structure, in a fashion similar to how we approach the polyrhythmic structure of the work.

Such instances of Jamesonian ‘radical difference’ are further developed through Carter’s engagement with aesthetic developments from the popular medium of film. In arguing the cinematic nature of the work, Schiff highlights a particular block of material that appears in each movement «where the instruments form eight-note harmonies out of their constituent intervals» functioning as a force for interruption as statement of basic materials;38 if we understand that the different effects of this material are produced by its contextualisation within the various dramatic juxtapositions that Carter creates, we can understand how Carter uses cinematic block form to play with the relationship between form and audibility. For instance, this material’s appearance in the Lento (bb. 244-246) appears to function, at least audibly, as developmental material as the Lento, too, operates through a similar reduction of the instruments to their basic harmonic characterisation;39 however, Carter’s 35] See Bernard, Elliott Carter, p. 667.

36] Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 18.

37] See Schiff, The music, p. 88.

38] See Ivi, p. 90.

39] See Ivi, p. 89. ‘postmodern hyperspace’ in elliott carter’s string quartet no. 4 > 349