Elliott Carter's Late Music

Book excerpt: "Elliott Carter was born four months after Orville Wright demonstrated the Wright Brothers' Flyer to the U.S. Army, and he died two months after the Voyager 1 spacecraft left the heliosphere at the threshold of interstellar space. Carter's remarkable longevity, and the unusual trajectory of his life and work through more than a century of disruptive change, has affected the reception history of his music in ways that we are only beginning to acknowledge. Over the course of a nearly eighty-year-long career, Carter leveraged his advantages and turned obstacles into opportunities with admirable persistence. He chose projects that not only interested him but also fit into the plans for artistic and professional development that he cultivated assiduously over decades. And he paid close attention to how his artistic objectives could be presented most effectively to the performers, listeners, and patrons on whom his career depended. Together with his wife Helen Frost-Jones Carter, he skillfully steered a course through the turbulent waters of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with steadily increasing success. The story of Carter's artistic life, as he told it and as it was promoted by several generations of advocates, is one of independence, uncompromising vision, and technical progress. It was astutely tailored to the beliefs and values of its intended audience and, as autobiography, it reports selectively and glosses over or omits events and attitudes deemed unhelpful in building Carter's reputation and authority, and promoting his music"--