Music: Centenarian Of the Hour

ELLIOTT CARTER, the American composer, turns 100 this month-and the music world is duly celebrating. There are Carter-centered concerts, there are boxes of retrospective CDs. Carter is surely the senior composer in the world, and he is steadily working. But he is not the longest-lived composer we’ve had. That distinction probably goes to Leo Ornstein, who lived from 1893 to 2002-to the age of 108. The musicologist David Dubal once told me that Ornstein must be the only person to have written music in three different centuries.

When Carter was born in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt was president. Mahler and Debussy were still working. Rimsky-Korsakov had died a few months before. Richard Strauss was only in his mid-40s. Rachmaninoff was merely in his mid30s. As Carter himself points out, he has seen tremendous changes, in music and elsewhere.

About the Author

Jay Nordlinger

Jay Nordlinger was a senior editor of National Review and a book fellow at National Review Institute.

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ELLIOTT CARTER, the American composer, turns 100 this month-and the music world is duly celebrating. There are Carter-centered concerts, there are boxes of retrospective CDs. Carter is surely the senior composer in the world, and he is steadily working. But he is not the longest-lived composer we’ve had. That distinction probably goes to Leo Ornstein, who lived from 1893 to 2002-to the age of 108. The musicologist David Dubal once told me that Ornstein must be the only person to have written music in three different centuries.

When Carter was born in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt was president. Mahler and Debussy were still working. Rimsky-Korsakov had died a few months before. Richard Strauss was only in his mid-40s. Rachmaninoff was merely in his mid30s. As Carter himself points out, he has seen tremendous changes, in music and elsewhere.