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Carter’s formative years in New York, Harvard, and Paris brought him into contact with a broad range of contending and often contradictory aesthetic ideas and musical movements, including primitivism, expressionism, ultra-modernism, and neo-classicism. While in high school he encountered the ideas and music of American ultra-modernists and European modernists, often of an experimental or mystical nature, but at Harvard he was taught the classicist ideas of T.S. Eliot and sang with the Harvard Glee Club in the American premiere of Stravinsky’s neo-classical opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. While Carter’s neo-classical leanings were encouraged by Walter Piston and Nadia Boulanger, the visionary romantic poetry of Hart Crane presented a different model for an artist’s life and work.

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