Elliott Carter (1908- ), American composer, who expanded the twelve-tone system of composition to include serialization not only of pitch but also of rhythm, harmony, and timbre (tone colour), paralleling developments made in Europe by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Born Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. on December 11, 1908 in New York, he was initially encouraged in his ambition to be a composer, while still in high school, by his mentor Charles Ives. In the late 1920s and 1930s, he studied with the American composer Walter Piston, the British composer Gustav Holst, and the influential French teacher Nadia Boulanger. Carter taught music at Columbia and Yale universities.

After works in the 1940s that ranged from the populist Holiday Overture (1944) to the Neo-Classical Cello Sonata (1948), Carter’s first major breakthrough into a distinctive personal style came in the String Quartet no. 1 (1951), in which he began using a technique he called “metric modulation”, in which a new metre is established out of a cross-rhythm in the old metre. He was awarded Pulitzer prizes for his String Quartets no. 2 (1959) and no. 3 (1971). He concentrated on large-scale orchestral works in the 1960s and 1970s, ranging from the Double Concerto (1961, for piano, harpsichord, and two orchestras), hailed by Stravinsky as “the first true American masterpiece” and the Concerto for Orchestra (1969), a dramatic single-movement work in which instruments are grouped together by their pitch rather than by families.

In the 1980s Elliot Carter turned more to music for smaller ensembles, emphasizing the abstract balance of instrumental forces in works such as the Triple Duo (1983, for six players), Penthode (1985, for twenty players, in five groups of four), and the String Quartet no. 4 (1986). He has continued writing orchestral works, however, including an Oboe Concerto (1987), the Three Occasions for Orchestra (1986-1989), a Violin Concerto (1990), and a Clarinet Concerto (1996). His Partita (1993), a substantial orchestral movement commissioned for Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was eventually joined with two other pieces, Adagio Tenebroso (1994) and Allegro Scorrevole (1996), to form the three movement Symphonia (first performed in 1998), his most important orchestral score for some three decades. Chamber works of the 1990s include the Quintet (1991) for piano and wind, the String Quartet no. 5 (1995), and the Piano Quintet (1998). All five string quartets were published in 1998 as part of his 90th birthday celebrations. Carter wrote his first opera at the age of 90. Titled What Next?, its premiere was given in Berlin in September 1999. Two further works, his Asko Concerto for mixed ensemble and Tempo e Tempi, a song cycle for soprano and ensemble, were premiered in 2000.