ApproachingHisEightiethBirthday, Elliott Carter has acquired a new fluency, as if composing had suddenly—finally—become easy. In his middle years Carter felt compelled to exhaust a musical vocabulary with each composition. Since the solo piano Night Fantasies of 1980, however, he has based a series of widely different works on similar premises: after years of ploughing through rocky soil it was now time for the harvest. As an overflow of this bounty Carter has produced a new (for him) genre: short occasional pieces of three to six minutes in duration. Along with the five major works composed since Night Fantasies, there are seven new short works for media ranging from solo violin to large orchestra. The inventiveness and high spirits of his recent music may call to mind those other wonders of a secondyouth, Falstaff and Agon.