An exact contemporary of Olivier Messiaen, Elliott Carter is thankfully still with us, providing a living link to the first decades of the twentieth century.

As a pupil of Nadia Boulanger in Paris as of 1932, he may well have heard Ravel play the piano (he was to write a moving obituary upon the French composer’s death in 1937 for Modern Music, a magazine for which he had begun to contribute articles beginning in 1936). His summaries of the New York concert seasons in the late 1930s afford a telling glimpse of performances of music which was then new (such as Webern’s recent arrangement of Schubert’s German Dances of 1824), by composers who were still active and counted as his older contemporaries: beyond Webern also Bartók and, most significantly, Charles Ives. In the book he sent me (see below), he marked several articles in the collection of his writings published in 1977 by Indiana University Press—articles from the 1930s onward, all to do with the music of Ives.

I first encountered a work by Carter in Budapest in the 1970s when Charles Rosen played his Piano Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez. I was rather nonplussed by what I heard but was nevertheless aware of its being a substantial and significant piece of music.

In subsequent years I continued to hear compositions by Elliott Carter at infrequent intervals and my impressions never changed: I found them too abstract to move me but always interesting as an intellectual challenge. The change came as late as 2007 or so when the orchestral piece Soundings, composed when Carter was well into his nineties, fascinated me with its mellowness and echoes of traditional inflections.

I was in London in the late 1980s, attending a concert which had John Cage in the audience. In the intermission, I accompanied a friend to his car, to find Elliott Carter getting out of one parked right next to it. On greeting him, I suggested he might want to meet Cage, who was conveniently nearby in the concert hall and was perplexed by the vehemence of his rejection: no, he was busy, he had an appointment to keep. Back in the hall, I told the American pianist Yvar Mikhashoff (1941–93) of my exchange with Carter.