New York

Ask a typical American to nominate this country's greatest living composer, and you'll likely get a blank stare. Most classical musicians, however, would not hesitate for a moment before choosing Elliott Carter for the honor.

And as the composer's centenary approaches this week, big celebrations are being planned around the world, from New York (on his actual birthday, Dec. 11, with James Levine leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim as piano soloist at Carnegie Hall) to London, Italy, Spain and Austria. Much of the music will be new. The Carnegie Hall concert will feature "Interventions," a recent piano concerto. Mr. Carter produced nine new pieces in 2007 alone; indeed, from his entire output of just over 100 works, he wrote 40 as a nonagenarian.

Ismael Roldan

Visiting the composer in his Greenwich Village apartment, one is struck by how little the years have changed him. With his trademark tousled gray hair and bright blue eyes, he remains imp-like, perpetually cheerful, and astoundingly productive. Something else is also unchanged: The odds remain tiny that listeners will leave a concert of his music humming any tunes, and that accounts in part for his relative anonymity. Simply put, his works are steeped in complexity. In some of his most renowned compositions -- like the 1961 Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano With Two Chamber Orchestras, which Igor Stravinsky declared the first true American masterpiece -- the swirl of sounds is so dense and furious that the music might best be likened to an orchestral traffic jam.

Yet there is a method -- rigorous and systematic -- behind every written note and a grand aesthetic scheme that governs it all. "I've always been very interested in the combination of different characters, either simultaneously or in succession," he explains. That is, his restless and ever-changing musical textures arise through a kind of emotional counterpoint: Within the whole, each instrument represents a particular character with its own psychological state. These personalities move through a wide range of rhythms and sonorities -- sometimes at different speeds and at cross-purposes -- as they make their individual cases.

The inconstancies and surprises that result from this approach are a particularly American trait, argues Mr. Carter in the book "Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds" (W.W. Norton & Co., 1972) by Allen Edwards. This country's national style, he asserts, is one that savors the "adventurous interrelation between the materials used and the unexpectedness of their general development." Or, as he said more recently to this interviewer, "My music doesn't beat away on one thing for very long -- I don't like to do that."

There are historical precedents for these ideas. Incredibly complex ways of handling rhythm can be found in the 15th century, when Josquin des Prez wrote exquisite canons in which the same melody appears simultaneously in three different voices, each moving at its own speed. An early example of character juxtaposition can be found in the Cavatina of Beethoven's Opus 130 String Quartet, where a lone violin -- sounding like a man in the depths of despair -- seems to lose its way and play out of sync with the other instruments. Of course, the musical language used by these earlier composers is easier to grasp than that used by Mr. Carter.

Given his schooling, which included a rigorous tutelage under the legendary French teacher Nadia Boulanger, he had every expectation of success. "Traditional harmony and counterpoint are ways of fitting into the expectations of the public," he says. "It was important in my life to break away from these things. But the training I had -- which included eight-part counterpoint, something akin to creating a crossword puzzle -- put a certain focus on music, and on the great care it takes to make things all fit together. That concern is a habit I've always had, and there was an assumption that this training would connect me with the public."

It didn't quite work out that way. But if the public doesn't respond, it matters very little. Think of other complex works that had difficulty finding an audience, he explains, like those of James Joyce. "'Finnegan's Wake' is hard for anybody, I think," he states. "But if you make an effort you can find places in it that are quite wonderful." Another factor that shaped his decisions is that the monetary rewards of art music are negligible, whether one finds an audience or not.

There are parts in my pieces where you can't tell what's going on. You also can't tell what's going on when a painter makes a big splash on a canvas. It's just a sound.

—Elliott Carter

'It's important to remember that this profession, unlike painting, doesn't pay very much (although I do get some commissions these days)," he says. "As a result, you're not encouraged to write for an audience -- there's no financial benefit. So you have to stick to what you believe in. Of course, I've written with the idea that there would be people who would want to play my music. Many are friends of mine -- Charles Rosen, Ursula Oppens, Daniel Barenboim -- musicians who are willing to spend the money to have extra rehearsals because of the level of difficulty."

Still, I ask, doesn't a composer have some responsibility, as Mozart seemed to believe, to reach an audience? Consider the case of the late Jacob Druckman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral composition, "Windows." He ultimately reached the conclusion that the work had been a failure because there was so much going on in it at one time that listeners couldn't possibly hear it all.

"There are parts in my pieces where you can't tell what's going on," he says with a glint in his eye. "You also can't tell what's going on when a painter makes a big splash on a canvas. It's just a sound." One is reminded of a response given by the maverick early-20th-century composer Charles Ives -- a mentor to the young Elliott Carter -- when someone complained about the cacophony in his work: "What does sound have to do with music?" he asked.

Yet, critics have detected a "late Carter style," marked by greater transparency and simplicity. Does the composer agree with that assessment? In a word, no. "Look, the only change that has happened to me is that I'm more and more impatient," he explains. "I want to get the piece finished. When I think of pieces like the Double Concerto -- well, that's a year of work. I couldn't do that now." The chamber music he is writing at the moment is, by its very nature, more transparent. "It doesn't take as much effort," he says with a grin.

But don't let that fool you. On any given day, you'll find him poring over manuscript paper, busily writing works of all kinds. There is no time to waste, and Elliott Carter has a lot to say.

Mr. Isacoff, a composer and pianist, is the author of "Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization" (Alfred A. Knopf) and editor of the journal Piano Today.