CARTER, Elliott

Educated in English literature before he turned to music composition, Carter was, until his forties, one of many Americans working in neoclassicism, which was in the 1930s and 1940s an encompassing term for tonal music that acknowledged traditional forms (purportedly in reaction to nineteenth-century romantic Expressionism). With his first Piano Sonata, he began to explore overtones (sounds inadvertently produced by notes in combination) and also the ways in which these overtones create their own...