A familiar freshness

Today is Hector Berlioz’s 200th birthday. But I’m not here to praise Berlioz -- he’s getting plenty of attention. Today also happens to be another milestone in music: Elliott Carter turns 95.

To say that someone is 95 years young is a patronizing cliche, best suited to morning television. Despite his cherubic laugh, Carter is no kid. He is the elder statesman of American music. His face is lined with age; he walks with a cane; he wears a hearing aid. He complains, his friends report, about not having the energy he once had, and now composes but half a day (knocking off early to relax with Dante and Goethe, in the original Italian and German).

But Carter continues writing complex and brilliant music profoundly alive to the microsecond. Indeed, this remarkable supply of fresh work makes many a conservative, pandering, one-piece-a-year composer a third Carter’s age appear intellectually lazy, if not downright doddering.

Fifteen years ago, I interviewed Carter for an article celebrating his 80th birthday and was struck by how feisty he seemed for the elder statesman he already was. Impressed by the agility of his mind, his wit, warmth and erudition, I marveled at his late-style miniatures -- wonderfully concise, elliptical pieces. What a gift, it seemed then, that we might get, say, five more years of them.

Who would have thought that Carter still had in him a great, maybe even the great, American symphony, his 50-minute “Sinfonia: sum fluae pretium spei” (I am the prize of flowing hope), which premiered in 1998? Or that there were astonishing concertos for violin, clarinet and cello yet to flow from his pen? Or that his chamber music catalog, famous for four of the 20th century’s most important string quartets, would be fed new masterpieces, including a fifth quartet? And no one could have predicted that after resisting writing opera for some seven decades, Carter would figure, as he approached his 90th birthday, that the time was finally right.

It has not been an easy year for Carter. His wife of 64 years, the sculptor Helen Frost-Jones, died. Still, Carter keeps going. In April, the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered the “Boston Concerto,” which he dedicated to his ailing wife with a quote from William Carlos Williams: “As the rain falls/so does/your love/bathe every/open/object of the world.”

In May, there was a new Chicago Symphony commission, “Of Reawakening,” settings of Williams poems for soprano and orchestra. Next month, two more premieres: “Micomicon,” a short piece for James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and “Dialogues,” a piano concerto for Nicholas Hodges and the London Sinfonietta led by Oliver Knussen.

Beloved though Carter is by friends and colleagues, he has a reputation among audiences, many musicians and critics as being unapproachable. He’s been regularly demonized since he turned away from his populist style of the ‘30s and ‘40s and began imagining a music that captures the experiences of contemporary society -- that, as Carter wrote a decade ago, “seeks the awareness of motion we have in flying or driving a car, and not the plodding of horses or the marching of soldiers that pervades the motion-patterns of older music.”

That exploration has led him to situations of tremendous complexity. In string quartets, each player is an individual speaking with a distinct accent, moving with a distinctive set of traits, expressing personal emotions. And they all do so at once. These characters may get along or may not. They argue all the time and work things out. And just like the rest of us, sometimes they fall apart.

Much of this -- the notion that music can be a celebration of simultaneous events -- Carter got from Charles Ives, who encouraged the young composer. But the entanglements, the daunting intricacy of many of his scores, particularly of his work in the ‘60s and ‘70s, gave Carter the reputation for being a systems freak, for writing music all about the elaboration of pitch and rhythmic relationships that has nothing to do with poetic expression.

In fact, Carter’s intention has been precisely the opposite. He always begins with a poetic inspiration. If his scores are convoluted and perplexing, so are our lives and the world we live in. For music to be vital, he insists, it must show us as we are; our environment must be suitably rendered. In explaining why his music is organic yet a bewildering deconstruction of classical principles, he has recently said that he wants his pieces to flow like the air, wind and water, like the blood in our veins. He hates the usual tendency for ensemble music to fall into lock step.

Lately, Carter has simplified his methods. He has not, however, reduced the range of contrasts that makes his music so gripping. Here, ferocious scurrying; there, a delicate little dance step. Here, strings frozen in icy harmonics; there, a trombone grotesquely slipping and sliding. Here, a stuttering snare drum; there, a soaring rhapsodic violin line. But it’s the simple here and there that are so interesting, rather than their continual flux and overlap. Nothing lasts very long, and nothing is pure; all ideas, all kinds of music, are continually undercut by others.

Sad to say, 95 isn’t old enough for the American musical establishment to take much notice of this tremendous accomplishment. Today belongs to Berlioz, who, ironically, suffered the same kind of neglect until only recently for composing idiosyncratic music. In New York, Carter’s hometown, celebrations are limited to small new-music groups; the New York Philharmonic snoozes on with Saint-Saens and Elgar.

Neither has the Los Angeles Philharmonic programmed a note of Carter this season; the orchestra’s New Music Group celebrated his 80th birthday but ignores his 95th. Locally, we have been limited to an alluring performance of the piano score “Night Fantasies” by Gloria Cheng and a cheerful performance of a trio inspired by the Italian writer Italo Calvino given by Antares at the Monday Evening Concerts this week.

But at least Carter’s recent music is being recorded. The opera, “What Next?” -- a 45-minute one-acter to a libretto by the music critic Paul Griffiths -- has just been released on ECM. Inspired by Jacques Tati’s classic film “Traffic,” it is a surreal farce, in which six disoriented survivors of an automobile crash go off on their own extraordinary, self-involved tangents.

The first recording of Carter’s whimsical 1997 Quintet for Piano and Strings has just been released on a Mode DVD that includes a film of a gripping performance by Ursula Oppens and the Arditti Quartet along with a wide-ranging, 40-minute conversation among Carter, Oppens and violinist Irvine Arditti filmed at Carter’s New York apartment three years ago. Bridge Records is now up to the fifth volume in its excellent survey of Carter’s music. On the latest installment, there are nine recent works, including such miniatures as “Au Quai,” a delightful three-minute duet for viola and bassoon written last year to celebrate Oliver Knussen’s 50th birthday.

Beware, though. Even Carter at his lightest and most charming is uncompromising, and it can take a few hearings for a new score to make sense. But once it does, your awareness of the world, and of how people act in it, sharpens. And that is a marvelous feeling.