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Article: Centenarian of the hour.(MUSIC)(Elliot Carter)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- December 29, 2008
- Author:
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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. RimskyKorsakov had died a few ...