Elliot Carter, award winning composer, fuser of European and American modernist traditions, died Nov. 5 at his home in New York City at the grand old age of 103. His assistant, Virgil Blackwell, confirmed the death but did not disclose an immediate cause.

In his remembrance, The Seattle Symphony in February will premiere a 12-minute long commissioned orchestral piece by Carter titled "Instances," to be conducted by SSO music director Ludovic Morlot, reports The Seattle Times. "A piano accelerates to a flickering tremolo as a harpsichord slows to silence," wrote composer and musicologist David Schiff, describing Carter's music. "Second violin and viola, half of a quartet, sound cold, mechanical pulses, while first violin and cello, the remaining duo, play with intense expressive passion. Two, three or four orchestras superimpose clashing, unrelated sounds. A bass lyrically declaims classical Greek against a mezzo-soprano's American patter."

His career has many noteworthy saliencies, but perhaps one of the most important occured in the 1930s. After earning a master's degree in music at Harvard, Carter took a step that was virtually compulsory for a generation of American composers: He went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. "She wasn't encouraging if you wrote very dissonant music," Carter told the Guardian in 2006. "But, meanwhile, the world of music had changed. It wasn't hard to think when we saw pictures of Hitler that it was expression that had gone on and produced such a terrible result in Germany, that it was a working out of that kind of extravagance that had become terrifying. So we thought that it was time to be more orderly and more consciously beautiful, and neoclassicism did seem to have a perfect logic about it."