Philip IfENNICOTT The new works are just as 'difficult', so is it just Elliott Carter's approaching 100th birthday that makes him a musical mascot?

Suharto is dead and, well, I don't really care. Good riddance to old dictators I say. But the strange thing is, Indonesians, who suffered from his decades of repressive rule, seem to mourn his passing. At least some of them do.

So yet another odd rule from the annals of human behaviour: time defangs all men. Take, for instance, Elliott Carter, high-minded practitioner of high-minded modernism, still going strong in his 100± year. He is a composer, not a pillager of the state and people, but the same rule applies. Time defangs all men.

Carter is the exception to most rules, and not just because he has outlived Mozart, Schubert and Bellini combined. He has never really had a reputation for ferocious music, even though his musical style had evolved by the 1950s into one of the most challenging, and ferocious, of any composer of the last century. As composers, especially the atonal or serial practitioners, became the

Enemies of the People, Carter remained on the emotional sidelines, writing astringent, scattered and terribly busy music, without ever really getting a reputation for musical house-breaking.

He didn't really become an enfant terrible until well into his late forties, by which point, perhaps, it was too late to be an enfant of any sort. His early works, such as the First Symphony, and the ballets commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein, don't have much character at all. They sound a bit like Hindemith, Stravinsky orMithaud processed through the American tonal meat grinder.

From about 75, you begin your last chapter on the planet. If you live to be 100, that chapter, The Old Man Years, is extraordinarily long. For Carter, those years have also been very productive. I went to see his first opera, What Next?, in Berlin in 1999, when he was 91. Everyone was writing around the difficult fact that they assumed it was a valedictory project Not so. In the intervening years, Carter has churned out concertos for oboe, cello, horn and clarinet, a song cycle for mezzosoprano, a small handful of significant orchestral concertos and other works in diverse forms.

Much is made of this late fecundity. Carter has become a kind of mascot, a lovable figure even if his music befuddles most listeners. People flock to Carter recitals and applaud lustily. Is there

Perhaps time doesn't just defang the man, but the music as well. The Fifth Quartet, written in 1995, is even more difficult, more fractured and allusive, than the four quartets that precede it.

And in the Pacifies's reading, it is not quite domesticated yet. Carter seems to be setting the same rhetorical idea over and over, multiple statements of"if...". To a casual listener, these Webernesque sketches might sound like this: "If? If? IF! If..?". The freedom of individual line that Carter has explored in his earlier quartets is maintained, but the players are all on the same but different pages, all equally uncertain, tentative, experimental, suggestive.

Perhaps with time, the Pacifica players, who are exceptionally skilful, will find a new kind of lyricism even in the Fifth Quartet. The process of musical digestion isn't always individual, a learning curve for the isolated player or ensemble. Sometimes it is collective, and over the years, the Juilliard and Arditti quartets have laid a kind of emotional groundwork on which the Pacifies is clearly building. It will be fascinating to hear how they perform this music if they are still performing together in 20 years.

Old composers also exert a different pull on the imagination to old performers. The latter species, if they play well in their late years, seem to be a transparent window on a different era. They are living fossils, for which we are all grateful because they seduce us into believing that we are experiencing a living link to an even more potent era of music-making beyond the horizon of our grandparent's lives.

But composers, young or old, are cherished primarily for their novelty, their originality, their continued creativity. When they become fossils, they are pathetic, then forgotten.

Again, Carter has eluded the usual rules. He is still a vital composer, but his music is a window on an earlier age. For a young composer to attempt to write music in the style of Carter would be a wilful act of anachronism. As the world prepares for the 100th birthday, the frenzy of activity suggests a certain unspoken desperation: Carter, the indigestible genius of an earlier century, must be hustled into the pantheon now or never. Time is running out.