He combined elements of European modernism and American "ultra-modernism" into a distinctive style with a personal harmonic and rhythmic language, after an early neoclassical phase.
While a student at the Horace Mann School in 1922, he wrote an admiring letter to Ives, who responded and urged him to pursue his interest in music.
[1] In 1924, the 15-year-old Carter was in the audience and "galvanized" when Pierre Monteux conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) in the New York première of The Rite of Spring.
[8] Carter later came to appreciate the American ultra-modernists: Henry Cowell, Edgard Varèse, Ruth Crawford and, later, Conlon Nancarrow.
[1] Carter wrote music every morning until his death,[10] of natural causes, on November 5, 2012, at his home in New York City, at age 103.
The work premiered in Berlin in 1999 and had its first staging in the United States at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2006, conducted by James Levine.
[10] Interventions for Piano and Orchestra received its premiere on December 5, 2008, by the BSO, conducted by James Levine and featuring the pianist Daniel Barenboim at Symphony Hall, Boston.
[14] The premiere was given on June 20, 2009, by the baritone Leigh Melrose and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Oliver Knussen.
[15][16] Figment V for marimba was premiered in New York on May 2, 2009, by Simon Boyar, and Poems of Louis Zukofsky for soprano and clarinet had its first performance by Lucy Shelton and Thomas Martin at the Tanglewood Festival on August 9, 2009.
The US premiere of the Flute Concerto took place on February 4, 2010, with the flutist Elizabeth Rowe and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Levine.
The last premiere of Carter's lifetime was Dialogues II, written for Barenboim's 70th birthday and conducted in Milan in October 2012 by Gustavo Dudamel.
[18] Carter's earlier works were influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and Paul Hindemith, and are mainly neoclassical.
[21] Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei (1993–96) is his largest orchestral work, complex in structure and featuring contrasting layers of instrumental textures, from delicate wind solos to crashing brass and percussion outbursts.
His music after Night Fantasies has been termed his late period and his tonal language became less systematized and more intuitive, but retains the basic characteristics of his earlier works.
[31] This use of rhythm was part of his expansion of the notion of counterpoint to encompass simultaneous different characters, even entire movements, rather than just individual lines.
He set poems by Elizabeth Bishop (A Mirror on Which to Dwell), John Ashbery (Syringa and Mad Regales), Robert Lowell (In Sleep, in Thunder and Mad Regales), John Hollander (Of Challenge and of Love), William Carlos Williams (Of Rewaking), Wallace Stevens (In the Distances of Sleep and The American Sublime), Ezra Pound (On Conversing with Paradise), E. E. Cummings (A Sunbeam's Architecture), Marianne Moore (What Are Years) and T. S. Eliot (Three Explorations).