A man, sparkling with intelligence, brilliantly cultivated, who quotes Montaigne word for word without the slightest accent... This man is Elliott Carter, an American, a composer born in 1908 and still living in New York in his apartment in Greenwich Village. He has hundreds of works to his name, among which are four Major string quartets, several concertos and an opera which was premiered in Berlin by Daniel Barenboim in 1999.

Elliott Carter studied literature and music at Harvard before coming to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. This highly classical background made him a humanist ("I have always wanted my music to evoke the humanity of things"), that the musicologist Charles Rosen defines as a something associating the two great musical traditions of the 20th century: Stravinsky on the one side and on the other Schoenberg and Berg. "He never compromises," Boulez says of him. Indeed, but with the utmost elegance.