Elliott Carter

Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was an American Modernist composer whose rhythmic complexity and dense polyphonic textures made him one of the leading figures of mid-twentieth-century concert music. His output spanned more than seven decades and earned him two Pulitzer Prizes.

He was born on December 11, 1908, in New York City, the son of a wealthy lace importer, James Carter, and Florence Chambers. Encouraged by composer Charles Ives, who was a family friend, the young Carter studied at the Horace Mann School and went on to Harvard, where he read English and philosophy before pursuing music. In 1932 he traveled to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique, completing the customary mastery of counterpoint and species writing.

Returning to the United States in 1935, he wrote in a neoclassical idiom before turning toward a more chromatic and rhythmically intricate language. The First String Quartet of 1951 marked his arrival as a major voice, introducing his technique of metric modulation. His Second String Quartet won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1960, and his Third Quartet won a second Pulitzer in 1973.

Carter went on to compose concertos, orchestral works, vocal cycles, and an opera, What Next?, premiered in 1999. He remained extraordinarily productive into his second century, completing works such as Dialogues II in his final months. He died in New York on November 5, 2012, aged 103, leaving a catalog of more than 150 published compositions.

The masculine name Elliott is an English surname-turned-given-name derived from a medieval diminutive of Elias, itself a form of the Hebrew name Eliyahu, meaning "my God is Yahweh." His career bears out the steadfast devotion to craft that the etymology suggests.