Avant-garde composer Elliott Carter, who won the Pulitzer Prize twice in a career spanning nearly eight decades, has died in New York at the age of 103, a music publisher said on Nov 6.
Carter had composed 158 works, from early pieces like Symphony No. 1 (1942) and Holiday Overture (1944) to this year’s Dialogues II, which premiered last month in Italy, and Instances, which is set to debut in February.
Carter was described by the great 20th century American composer Aaron Copland as one of the most eminent artists in all domains of creation.
His double concerto for harpsichord, piano and two chamber orchestras in 1961 and his piano concerto in 1967 were described as “masterpieces” by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
Born in New York City on December 11, 1908, Carter first pursued classical music under friend and mentor Charles Ives.
In a 1992 Associated Press interview, Carter described his works as “music that asks to be listened to in a concentrated way and listened to with a great deal of attention.”
“It’s not music that makes an overt theatrical effect,” he said then, “but it assumes the listener is listening to sounds and making some sense out of them.”
The complex way the instruments interact in his compositions created drama for listeners who made the effort to understand them, but it made them difficult for orchestras to learn. He said he tried to give each of the musicians individuality within the context of a comprehensible whole.
“This seems to me a very dramatic thing in a democratic society,” he said.
While little known to the general public, he was long respected by an inner circle of critics and musicians. In 2002, The New York Times said his string quartets were among “the most difficult music ever conceived,” and it hailed their “volatile emotions, delicacy and even, in places, plucky humor.”
