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One of America's greatest classical composers is still going strong at age 100! Elliott Carter is being celebrated all week long, including today, at Lincoln Center. The New York Times ran a great article on this American treasure:

Classical music tends to lionize the great composer cut down in youth, but Elliott Carter made a mockery of that trope on Thursday. Mr. Carter, the dean of American composers, celebrated his 100th birthday, on the day, with a concert at Carnegie Hall.

He had a piece on the program, of course, but not some chestnut written when he was a student in Paris in the 1930s or an avant-gardist in New York in the 1950s or a Pulitzer Prize winner in the 1960s or a setter of American poetry in the 1970s or a begetter of chamber music and concertos in the 1980s.

Mr. Carter wrote the 17-minute piece, for piano and orchestra, just last year, at 98. In fact, since he turned 90, Mr. Carter has poured out more than 40 published works, an extraordinary burst of creativity at a stage when most people would be making peace with mortality.

How fantastic is that?!

And how old is Carter, really?

Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" came next on the program; Mr. Carter said that hearing a performance of that piece at Carnegie 85 years ago had helped inspire him to become a composer.

Mr. Carter is a phenomenon. To paraphrase the musical satirist Tom Lehrer, when Mozart was Mr. Carter's age, he had been dead for 65 years.

He has lived more than three times as long as Schubert did. Some composers, like Verdi and Richard Strauss, produced until the end of long lives -- but that was merely their 80s.

And what does this great composer - who got into Harvard with the help of a recommendation from Charles Ives - have in mind for the next few years?

He wakes every day at 7 a.m., composes for two and a half hours, goes out for a constitutional with an aide, rests after lunch, composes again or receives visitors in the afternoon, and watches French satellite television in the evening, if he does not have a concert to attend.

He said he has gone back to reading the classics, including "Hamlet." After starting a third bout with Proust in the original French, "I got a little sick of it two months ago," he said. "That's why I turned to Shakespeare."

"There are all these pieces I want to write," he said, "and I can't get to them because there are all these things getting in the way. But on the other hand one does enjoy appearing, having especially wonderful performances, which is fascinating to me."

"I'd rather hear them play good contemporary music than old music," he said of the performers devoted to his work. He was bored, he said, with scores from the age of "gaslights and horses," although he admits to exceptions: Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven symphonies. But 20th-century composers "have a spark" and convey "what it is like to be living now," he said.

Inspiring, indeed...

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