Life and career
Gamer was born in Chicago on February 13, 1929. He grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where his father taught at the University of Illinois. At the age of eight he began to study piano with Tanya Kessler and composition with her husband Hubert Kessler.[2]
From 1942 to 1946, Gamer attended University High School in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois.[2] Simultaneously, he studied piano with two faculty members of Illinois Wesleyan University, first Stefan Bardas and then Chester Barris. In 1946, he graduated as valedictorian.[2]
Gamer studied at Northwestern University,[2] (achieving a bachelor of music in 1950), theory and composition with Frank Cookson and Anthony Donato, and piano with Louis Crowder and Pauline Manchester Lindsey. He obtained his Master's degree in music at Boston University[2] in 1951, after studies of composition with Gardner Read and of musicology with Karl Geiringer. He then worked there as a graduate assistant, teaching a course in orchestration, and served as research assistant for Read's Thesaurus of Orchestral Devices.[3]
In New York City, from 1951 to 1953, Gamer founded a workshop of composer-performers ("The Seven")[2] who met regularly at his home to read through and critique each other's music; they occasionally performed in public.[2] The members were Sheldon Harnick, violin; Gerard Jaffe, viola; Juliette White, cello; Robert Dorough, recorder, flute, and piano; Eric Katz, recorder, Noel Stevens, clarinet, and himself, piano.[4] He was also the pianist, composer, and music director for dancer and choreographer Ilka Suarez and her company.[2][5]
Teacher
Gamer taught music at Colorado College from 1954.[2] In 1954 and 1955, he was the accompanist for Hanya Holm's summer dance workshops there.[2][6] After studying composition privately with Roger Sessions in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1957, Gamer was invited to be a fellow at the Princeton Seminars in Advanced Musical Studies in 1959 and 1960.[2][7] His recollection of these seminars is found in his article, "Milton at the Princeton Seminars". On leave from Colorado College, Gamer was an Asia Society Fellow at the University of California and in Kyoto, Japan, in 1962–63.[2]
Gamer taught at Princeton University as a visiting lecturer in music in 1974, then as a visiting professor of music in 1976 and 1981. In 1976 he was appointed a Senior Fellow of the Council of Humanities at Princeton. The same year, Gamer received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship.[2]
In 1979 Gamer taught at the Salzburg Global Seminar,[2] in the Musical Ideas and Musical Institutions, in Austria,[8] In 1982, he was visiting professor of Music, teaching a graduate seminar, at the University of Michigan.
Gamer retired from teaching full-time in 1994.[2]
Composer
Performances
Gamer's music has been performed in halls including Carnegie Recital Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,[2][9] organized by the International Society of Contemporary Music, the Society of Composers, the Current and Modern Consort of the University of Michigan School of Music, and the College Music Society.[2] Works were played at conferences including the San Diego International Computer Music Conference, Southwestern Composers Conference, Colorado College New Music Symposium, and at festivals such as WNYC American Music Festival, the Grand Teton Music Festival, Colorado Contemporary Music Festival, and the Colorado College Summer Music Festival.[2][5] Abroad, his music has been played in London, Oxford, Rome, Guadalajara, Salzburg, Warsaw,[2] Calcutta,[10] and Sydney.[2]
Compositional style
Glenn Giffin in The Denver Post described Gamer as proposing in Arkhê
a grand program – creation and evolution...The composer uses various means to present this:...by bands of sound and much shifting back and forth between sections in orchestral drones with now one section and then another receiving prominence...[and] through musical cells that get manipulated and expanded to form a large structure.[11]
According to the American Record Guide "Carlton Gamer's Arkhê freely moves between the poles of tonality and atonality...[its] harmonies [are] often dense to the point of clusters."[12] Fanfare remarked that,
[This] work opens with a long crescendo on the note A (for Alpha, ...) and soon erupts into a Big Bang of fascinating noises. The composer himself describes this piece as using "an externally imposed scheme to derive the duration of each section of the work, [based] upon the miniaturization of a geological time-scale formulated by recent scientific research."[13]
An evolutionary idea also informed Gamer's Choros, as described by Mark Arnest in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph: In Part 1 of this work, Bios, the underlying program deals with the evolution of life; in Part 2, Choros, the evolution of humankind. Bios employs phonemic choral Sprechstimme; Choros instantiates stages in the evolution of vocal polyphony from the Mediaeval era to the present.[14]
Nicholas Kenyon in The New Yorker characterized Quietly, with feeling as "a diatonic piece of neo-Mendelssohnian rhapsody. It managed to sound fresh and new; an old language was used, for once, not with purely nostalgic intent."[15]
Music critic Gilbert Johns, quoted in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph lauded Gamer's innovative approach to composition, which embraces atonalism and its 12-tone variation, known as serial music:
His technique is to rearrange ingeniously what he calls "little pitch cells" into melodic and harmonic entities. He thinks of himself as a composer who has internalized serial technique and given it his own voice... [Thus] he tries to create tonal-sounding music that is serially structured and that gives a richness to the listener's experience.[16]
Edward Rothstein in The New York Times found in Gamer's Piano Râga Music "wit merged with severity".[17] Reviewing a later performance of the same work, Paul Griffiths in The New York Times described it as "hesitating between the worlds of its two dedicatees, Ravi Shankar and Milton Babbitt, before plunging into an immense, flamboyant mix."[18]
Gamer himself, in his article "ET Setera" (p. 60), wrote of his "interests as a composer of music in ETS 12"—i.e., the twelve-tone equal-tempered system:
In recent years these interests have centered more and more upon the attainment in the pitch domain of a sense of "less-than-twelveness" embedded in "twelveness". I have become increasingly preoccupied with the properties of certain subcollections of pitches or pitch classes chosen from the universe of pitches within our system and the relationship of such subcollections to that system.
In his Notes on the Structure of Piano Râga Music (p. 218), for example, Gamer showed how that work employs a 24-tone set generated from a single trichord. In Lieder to texts by Rainer Maria Rilke he employs all-trichord sets, each containing an all-interval tetrad, enabling him to embed quotations from tonal music into the serial texture.[19]
Gamer composed music in equal-tempered systems other than ETS 12. Robin Wilson, in his Gresham College lecture on music and mathematics, discussed Gamer's use of the 31-tone equal-tempered system in ORGANUM and of the seven-point projective plane in Fanovar.[20]
In the rhythmic domain, Gamer sometimes employed serialization or the use of recursive sequences—e.g., in Quietly, with feeling or Duetude.
Music theorist
As a music theorist, Gamer published articles in a number of journals and books on such topics as electronic music, microtonality, the properties of equal-tempered systems containing more or less than twelve tones per octave, and the definition and elaboration of the deep scale property as it applies to such equal-tempered systems; definitions of the concepts of difference set, block design, and projective plane and applications of these to such equal-tempered systems, Musical block designs, and Microtones and projective planes; the relationship between geometrical duality and musical inversion; invariance matrices and their application to musical composition; and musical metatheory, with emphasis on the notion of syntactic models and the prescriptive and postdictive relevance of these to a theory of composition.
Gamer's wrote music-theoretical sections for dictionaries and encyclopedias, including the Dictionary of Contemporary Music, Encyclopædia Britannica, Grove Music Online, and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.[2]
Gamer's work has been cited in books and dissertations by Robert Morris,[21] Andrew Mead,[22] Timothy A. Johnson,[23] Jack Douthett et al.,[24] and Robert Tyler Kelley,[25] among others, and in numerous articles in a variety of journals, including Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Perspectives of New Music, Music Analysis, Intégral, Music & Letters, Music Theory Online, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and College Music Symposium.
Gamer has been credited with early contributions to diatonic set theory. Morris, in his article on "Mathematics and the twelve-tone system", wrote:
While the twelve-tone system is no longer isolated from other aspects of music theory, there are many research projects that can be identified to carry on previous work. One obvious direction is to ask what happens when we change the '12' in 'twelve-tone system'? Carlton Gamer [in "Some combinational resources" (1967) and "Deep scales and difference sets" (1967)] was one of the first theorists to raise such issues. He showed that equal tempered systems of other moduli not only have different structures, they allow different types of combinatorial entities to be built within them.[26]
Johnson termed Gamer a "precursor" in this area:
Students who wish to trace the historical development of diatonic set theory might begin with Milton Babbitt, an important American composer and theorist...Later, Carlton Gamer explored some fundamental aspects of the structure and nature of the diatonic collection – in particular, the notion of deep scales...[27]
Douthett, Martha M. Hyde, and Charles J. Smith, in their introduction to Music Theory and Mathematics, also observed that "Milton Babbitt and Carlton Gamer, among others, had noticed intriguing structural properties of the diatonic system when considered as a subset of the equal-tempered chromatic scale."[28]
Gamer sometimes illustrated his theoretical ideas with short compositions, as in "Fanfare for the common tone" or "ET Setera". Wilson Coker, in his review of the latter, wrote: "Gamer's article might almost a be a model for theorists in its subtle blend of the most abstract inquiry along with indications of useful application."[29]
