Elliott Carter

The hundredth birthday of Elliott Carter on December 11th, 2008, led to the a large number of concerts in his honour around the world (such as a three day festival in Amsterdam). Yet, the composer never became truly popular among the wider public. And it doesn't matter: in more than way the orthodoc composer had time on his side. He did non find his own style until the 1940s, in works such as his Sonata for Cello and Piano and his First String Quartet: compositions in which the various instrumenten seem to follow different paths from each other. It was the start of a body of works that paid tribute to both the Europe of Schoenberg, Debussy and Stravinsky, and the American Modernism of Ives and Varèse.