The American composer Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. (born 1908), developed an individual musical style, courageously ignoring many of the passing musical fashions to become one of the most respected composers of his time.

Elliott Carter was born in 1908 in New York, the son of a wealthy businessman. He was an English major at Harvard and, encouraged toward a musical career by his friend and mentor Charles Ives, he took his master's degree in music there, then spent 3 years in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger. His first compositions, written upon his return to the United States, were a neoclassic ballet, Pocahontas (1939; rev. 1941), and Holiday Overture (1944).

Carter's Piano Sonata (1945-1946) is generally considered the first example of his mature style. It is highly dissonant and rhythmically complex, characteristics of all of his subsequent compositions. In his Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948) there is no attempt to "blend" the two instruments; each...