Biography

Elliott Carter at age ten, 1918

Photographer unknown. Courtesy Elliott Carter.

Elliott Carter, born in 1908, remembers riding his bicycle the length of Manhattan without ever seeing an automobile. Born the year the Wright Brothers demonstrated their flying machine to the US Army, Carter has now outlived the Concorde, and the enormous changes he has witnessed during his lifetime are reflected in his own embrace of change as the only constant in his work.

Groomed to take over his family’s successful lace importing business, Carter instead sought out the bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village in the 1920s, associating himself with artists and writers, and with the new ideas of modernism then taking hold of the arts. Hearing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring made Carter want to be a composer, and for a time he was mentored by Charles Ives, from whom his family bought insurance. (When Carter announced his plan to become a composer, his parents canceled their policy!)

As a student at Harvard, Carter was dissatisfied with the conservatism of the music department and instead majored in English literature; he also attended lectures on philosophy by Alfred North Whitehead and earned a master’s degree in music in 1932. Like so many aspiring American composers, Carter then traveled to Paris to study with the great musician and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. When he returned to the US in 1935, Carter became the music director of Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan (a forerunner of the New York City Ballet) and wrote criticism for the journal Modern Music before taking academic positions at Saint John’s College and the Peabody Conservatory.

Carter achieved modest success in the 1940s, winning a number of composition prizes, but the turning point in his career came in 1953 when his String Quartet No. 1 was awarded first prize in a competition in Liège, Belgium. Although Carter later had to renounce the prize because the first performance had already been given, his quartet received a number of performances in Europe that established his international reputation. The same year he was awarded the Prix de Rome.

Carter’s stature grew steadily in the following decades, a time when the modernist revival that followed the Second World War was attracting considerable attention and financial support. His Second String Quartet won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 (and the third was similarly honored in 1973), commissions from the Fromm and Ford foundations supported the composition of his Double Concerto (1961) and Piano Concerto (1965), and the New York Philharmonic commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra (1969). For 20 years (1964–84) Carter taught composition at Juilliard, and he has also held teaching positions at Columbia, MIT, and Cornell.

By the early 1980s, newer trends were competing with modernism in the US, and Carter increasingly found support and commissions from Europe. Though he continued to live in New York City, Carter changed publishers in 1981 to the British firm Boosey & Hawkes, and sold his manuscripts to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Switzerland in 1987. In recent years, Carter’s increased productivity and a new-found dramatic economy have led to a surge in popularity throughout the world. The support of conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Oliver Knussen, and James Levine, as well as the support of an international array of soloists and ensembles, has led to frequent performances and commissions, introducing Carter’s music to a new generation of concertgoers. With his 100th birthday upon us, Carter has become an audience favorite–and one of the most celebrated composers of our time.

—John Link