18 Facts About Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter's compositions are performed throughout the world, and include orchestral, chamber music, solo instrumental, and vocal works.

Elliott Carter was later introduced to Charles Ives, and he soon came to appreciate the American ultra-modernists.

Elliott Carter was productive in his later years, publishing more than 40 works between the ages of 90 and 100, and over 20 more after he turned 100 in 2008.

Elliott Carter completed his last work, Epigrams for piano trio, on August 13, 2012.

In 1924, a 15-year-old Elliott Carter was in the audience and "galvanized" when Pierre Monteux conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the New York premiere of The Rite of Spring.

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Elliott Carter later came to appreciate the American ultra-modernists—namely Henry Cowell, Edgard Varese, Ruth Crawford and, later, Conlon Nancarrow.

Elliott Carter earned a master's degree in music from Harvard in 1932, but the course did not help make much progress in his compositional skills.

The founder of the Ballet Caravan Lincoln Kirstein commissioned Elliott Carter to compose two ballets, Pocahontas and The Minotaur, which would be among his longest works he composed during his Neo-classicist phase, though neither of them was greatly successful.

Elliott Carter lived with his wife in the same apartment in Greenwich Village from the time they bought it in 1945 to her death in 2003.

Elliott Carter worked for the Office of War Information during World War II.

Meanwhile, in the 1950s, Elliott Carter, having edited Ives' music, turned back to his interest in the experimentalists.

Elliott Carter wrote music every morning until his death, of natural causes, on November 5, 2012 at his home in New York City, at age 103.

Elliott Carter was present at the 2009 Aldeburgh Festival to hear the world premiere of his song cycle On Conversing with Paradise, based on Ezra Pound's Canto 81 and one of Pound's 'Notes' intended for later Cantos, and usually published at the end of the Cantos.

The last premiere of Elliott Carter's lifetime was Dialogues II, written for Barenboim's 70th birthday and conducted in Milan in October 2012 by Gustavo Dudamel.

Elliott Carter had strict training in counterpoint, from medieval polyphony to Stravinsky, and this shows in his earliest music, such as the ballet Pocahontas.

Elliott Carter said, "I certainly have never used a twelve-tone row as the basis of a composition, in the way described in Schoenberg's Style and Idea, nor are my compositions a constant rotation of various permutations of twelve-tone rows".

Elliott Carter composed five string quartets, of which the second and third won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1960 and 1973 respectively.

Elliott Carter set poems by Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery (Syringa and Mad Regales), Robert Lowell (In Sleep, in Thunder), William Carlos Williams (Of Rewaking), Wallace Stevens (In the Distances of Sleep and The American Sublime), Ezra Pound (On Conversing with Paradise), and Marianne Moore (What Are Years).