The first comprehensive study of the late music of one of the most influential composers of the last half century, this book places Elliott Carter's music from 1995 to 2012 in the broader context of post-war contemporary concert music, including his own earlier work. It addresses Carter's reception history, his aesthetics, and his harmonic and rhythmic practice, and includes detailed essays on all of Carter's major works after 1995. Special emphasis is placed on Carter's settings of contemporary modernist poetry from John Ashbery to Louis Zukofsky. In readable and engaging prose, Elliott Carter's Late Music illuminates a body of late work that stands at the forefront of the composer's achievements.

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As we celebrate his centennial year, perhaps it is now reasonable to speak of Elliott Carter's ‘late music’, but I doubt it. The Double Concerto – written more than 45 years ago – was once described as the culmination of Carter's mature style. And who could have predicted that the Concerto for Orchestra – completed in 1969, when Carter was sixty – would eventually join his Depression-era ballet Pocahontas in the first quarter of his total output. Every piece that once seemed to be the capstone of Carter's illustrious career has turned out instead to be a milestone that marks the beginning of another new path. Since he completed his first opera What Next? ten years ago, Carter has composed more than three dozen new pieces, comprising nearly a third of his life's work to date, all of it composed since his 90th birthday!

Over the course of an astonishingly long career, Elliott Carter has engaged with many musical developments of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries - from his early neo-classic music of the interwar period, to his modernist works of conflict and opposition in the 1960s and 1970s, to the reshaping of a modernist aesthetic in his latest compositions. Elliott Carter Studies throws new light on these many facets of Carter's extensive musical oeuvre. This collection of essays presents historic, philosophic, philological and theoretical points of departure for in-depth investigations of individual compositions, stylistic periods in Carter's output and his contributions to a variety of genres, including vocal music, the string quartet and the concerto. The first multi-authored book to appear on Carter's music, it brings together new research from a distinguished team of leading international Carter scholars, providing the reader with a wide range of perspectives on an extraordinary musical life.

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