Beyond age in arrangement

There are many reasons to feel intimidated at the prospect of meeting Elliott Carter.

He is America's most senior composer, the longest-lived active composer in the history of the world, winner of Pulitzer prizes and medals of every kind, creator of a music of unprecedented intellectual density and a witness to almost the entire 20th century.

But the living legend, when he opens the door of his apartment in New York, turns out to be a diminutive, white-haired, unscary man in shorts and braces.

He has surprisingly sturdy legs for someone just a few months short of his 100th birthday.

As he ushers me in, he waves his walking stick ostentatiously to show he doesn't really need it.

The living room is filled with books and papers and an open copy of The New York Times.

“Helen and I moved in here in 1945,'' he says, referring to his wife of 64 years who died in 2003, “and I've been here ever since. We could see the Empire State Building then.''

Does he remember the Empire State being built? He thinks about this for a while and says: “No, but I can remember when it wasn't there.''

Carter has been a New Yorker all his life and can remember the time when milk was delivered on horse-drawn wagons. “I used to hitch a lift to school on them,'' he says.

Composer by sheer will

Carter became fascinated by the latest trends in modern music.

“I sat next to George Gershwin at the American premiere of Berg's opera Wozzeck,'' he says, “And when I heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, I knew I had to be a composer.''

But there were no signs of early genius and one gets the sense of a man who made himself a composer by sheer will.

“There wasn't much music in the house,'' he says.

“My father was dead against me going into music. He thought there was no money in it and he was right.'' He gives a laugh that is really just an intensification of his amused, ironic smile, something I see a lot of during our conversation.

After studying English and then music at Harvard, Carter followed in the footsteps of other Americans such as Aaron Copland by studying with the great French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

“She taught me the value of weighing the effect of every small detail, and that is something I have never forgotten. I get the sense that is not so much in fashion these days.'' Again I get a flash of that amused smile.

Back in the US at the height of the Depression, Carter scraped a living by writing theatre music and music criticism while teaching ancient Greek and mathematics. Meanwhile he was feeling his way towards a new kind of music.

“I wasn't happy with the ideas I had in my head,'' he says, “and so I had to experiment on paper. I used to cover thousands of pages in sketches.

'' What emerged through the late 1940s and 1950s was a music of amazing fluidity, where each line follows its own tempo and projects its distinct personality.

It is like a portrayal in sound of the bewildering multiplicity of daily life.

It is a stance that has condemned Carter to creative loneliness. Aaron Copland, creator of the populist face of American art music, was cool about his younger colleague's music.

“He didn't mention me in his book about American music, which hurt a little,'' Carter says. “Later he came round to my music but only after Leonard Bernstein recorded it.''

But what is wrong with Copland's idea that music should be comprehensible to a broad public? “Well, I did believe that for a while and wrote several pieces in that style.

But then I realised the public stayed indifferent whatever I did, so that gave me the freedom to say, ‘To hell with them', and do what I really wanted to do.''

Having pushed open the door into a new world in the late 1940s, Carter explored it in three massively complex works of the 1960s, which took years to write.

Since then the works have emerged faster and faster, in an Indian summer of creativity that has lasted longer than Mozart's entire life.

At the age of 85, Carter completed his biggest orchestral piece, and in 1999, when he was 91, his first opera, What Next?, was premiered in Berlin.

So what is he working on now? “I'm setting some poems of Ezra Pound and it's hard going. Setting words is very challenging.

Last year I set a Baudelaire poem and I think I got the word-stresses wrong. I'll have to do better next time,'' he laughs.
So what keeps him going? Without pausing he says: “It's figuring out a new challenge.

Every piece has to be an adventure, it has to be a new answer to the question of how you make a convincing musical form.''