The Century Club.(Elliott Cook Carter, Jr.)

The last emperor of China had just assumed his throne. William Howard Taft, the President-elect of the United States, was meeting with Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. A deranged veteran of the Philippine war terrorized Edgewater, New Jersey, holding up a hotel. The diva Nellie Melba disembarked from the Lusitania, resplendent in a broad-brimmed hat. Gustav Mahler was about to conduct the last of three concerts at Carnegie Hall, having unleashed his Second Symphony a few nights earlier. And Elliott Cook Carter, Jr., was born in New York City. It was December 11, 1908.

A hundred years later to the day, Mr. Carter walked onstage at Carnegie, a little hunched but moving under his own power, to receive the adulation of a capacity audience. If he had done nothing more than show up, he would have drawn a standing ovation. In fact, the composer was taking a bow for a new work: a short concerto for piano and orchestra entitled "Interventions," which Daniel Barenboim and the Boston Symphony played under the direction of James Levine. If this new piece had been merely adequate, the crowd would have been happy, but it turned out to be a lucid, vivid, potent score--one of the most immediately likable works in Carter's huge and sometimes forbidding output. This is something almost unprecedented in the history of art: an artist reaching the age of a hundred with his creativity intact.

Young composers who wonder what it takes to break into the mainstream now have the answer: live a long, long, long, long time. Carter was featured on the front page of the Times; visited "The Charlie Rose Show"; popped up on the local news; and appeared in Willard Scott's parade of centenarians, on NBC's "Today." In interviews, he spoke of seeing warships on the Hudson during the First World War (yes, the First); of meeting Edgard Varese in a speakeasy during Prohibition; and of attending the concert that inspired him to become a composer--a Boston Symphony performance of "The Rite of Spring," at Carnegie, in January, 1924. "More than half the audience walked out," he recalled at a companion event at Zankel Hall, adding that the scandal made him like the piece even more: "You know how young people are!" In commemoration, Levine ended the centenary bash with the "Rite." Looking down the aisle at the back of Carter's white head, I had a moment of temporal vertigo: this man had heard the same music in the same hall almost eighty-five years earlier. Two months later, he returned to see George Gershwin play his new piece, "Rhapsody in Blue."

Once "Interventions" began, the novelty of Carter's longevity receded, and the music became the most interesting thing. Since the early nineties, Carter has backed away from the extreme density that marked his scores of previous decades. He has by no means disavowed atonality, as an Internet hoax proposed. (It had convinced composers in China, I discovered on a visit to Beijing last year.) But he has, in his own words, enjoyed "adventures in rather simpler combinations." He has also produced myriad miniatures, as if shaking off the role--which Stravinsky, among others, bestowed upon him--of being the Great Serious American Composer. There was always an impish quality behind Carter's towering dissonances and helter-skelter rhythms, but he's now something of a modernist comedian. There's also a sweetness that never quite existed before--not even when, as a young man, he wrote tonal music in the manner of Aaron Copland. He seems finally and fully himself.

"Interventions"--one of thirteen pieces that Carter has finished in the past two years--contains much familiar-sounding material. The sustained melodies for strings and solo instruments, a melancholy kind of plainsong, hark back to the Cello Sonata (1948) and the First String Quartet (1950-51). Instruments tangle along invisible lines of scrimmage. The piano's intermittent hammering on a single note recalls the climax of the Piano Concerto, the heaviest of Carter's middle-period works. What's striking is the precision with which these skirmishes are laid out. We don't merely have an impression of multiplicity; we see, as if under a moving spotlight, each face in the throng. The ...