This collection of essays, discussions, pictures, and music honors one of America's finest composers on his 100th birthday. It contains articles and reminiscences by Pierre Boulez, Fred Lerdahl, Paul Griffiths, Alvin Curran, Louis Karchin, Charles Rosen, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Wilson, John Ashbery, and Walter Zimmerman. "The significance of Elliott Carter's longevity is more fundamental than the mere numbering of his years. Any work that has to do with performance enters a space-perception of real time. Music, simply through the minutiae of its language, intensifies real time. In Carter's music, to speak simply of real time would be not only reductive, but also deceptive. His work engages perception of time on planes of complexity, and alters that perception. It interacts, unravels, finds its existential episteme in time and with time. The way in which the language of Carter, and the specificity of its syntax and process, developed through many years, brings another stratum of experience of time."