Elliott Carter was born 11 December 1908 in New York City to a wealthy family with no deep ties to the arts. He began studying piano at the age of six, learning to play the classical and Romantic repertoire with no particular pleasure. Far more interested in other forms of art and culture, Carter drew inspiration from the intellectual and artistic activity all around him in Greenwich Village. From 1920 to 1926, he studied at New York’s Horace Mann High School. In 1924, he met Charles Ives, who would go on to become his friend, mentor, and role model. Ives introduced him to the musical avant-garde, and in his company Carter discovered Ruggles, Varèse, Bartók, the Viennese composers, and Stravinsky. Hearing Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps was a watershed moment for Carter, helping to set him on his career as a composer. In 1925, Carter’s father brought him to Europe, where he became aware of the immense destruction of the Great War. In 1926, he enrolled in Harvard College, where, disappointed in the conservatism of its music department, he turned to other fields, studying literature, mathematics, and philosophy. In parallel, he continued his studies at the Longy School of Music, where he learned oboe and consolidated his theoretical knowledge. During this time, he also sang with the Harvard Glee Club and gave occasional piano performances. He received his Bachelor of Arts in music from Harvard in 1930, and then a Masters in 1932. Walter Piston (harmony, counterpoint) and Gustav Holst (composition) were among his professors there. In 1932, Carter traveled to Paris, where he spent three years studying with Nadia Boulanger, who taught him her science of counterpoint and expanded his knowledge of early music.

Arriving back in New York City at the height of the depression, Carter was hired as the musical director of the Ballet Caravan (1936-1940). The works he composed during this time were influenced by both neoclassicism and populism, from which he would gradually move away. In 1937, he began writing as a music critic for Modern Music, with essays on composers, his own music, and the place of composers in contemporary society. In 1939, he married the sculptor and art critic Helen Frost-Jones, wth whom he had a son, David, in 1943. He joined the League of Composers (remaining a member until 1952) and the American Composers Alliance (remaining a member until 1950). From 1939 to 1941, Carter taught music, mathematics, and ancient Greek at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. From 1943 to 1945, he served as a musical consultant to the Office of War Information. In 1945 (and again in 1950), he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. After the Second World War, he became a member of the International Society for Contemporary Music (until 1952, when he was elected president of the American chapter). He taught composition at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore (1946-1948) while pursuing his own musical research in the field of rhythmic language.

In 1950, he went on a retreat to Tucson, AZ, where he composed String Quartet No. 1. The work, which won first prize at the Concours international de quatuors à cordes in Liège, Belgium, in 1953, bringing him international renown that would only grow as his career progressed. He maintained a harmonious balance in his life, teaching composition in different institutions (Queens College, New York (1955-56), Yale University (1960-62), the Juilliard School of Music (1964), Cornell University (1967-68)), writing critical and theoretical articles, and composing. He traveled extensively, particularly as a composer-in-residence, holding residencies at the American Academy in Rome (1963 and 1968), Berlin (1964), and the Getty Center in Los Angeles (1992 and 1995). In 1961, he traveled to Tokyo as the American delegate for the Tokyo East-West Music Encounter.

By the 1980s, Carter began to focus more and more on composing, leaving his other responsibilities to the side. He received many prestigious awards and honors over the course of his career, including two Pulitzer Prizes in 1960 and 1973, for Second in 1960 and String Quartet No. 3 in 1973, and a Gold Medal for Eminence in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1971. He is one of the few American composers to win the Ernst Von Siemens Music Prize (Germany). In 1988, He was named French Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 1998 received the Prix Prince Pierre de Monaco.