John and I chat about the American ultra-modernist composer Elliott Carter as well as coffee, composition, set theory, continuity, modernism, algorithms, technology, and more. I particularly enjoyed the stories John shared about his time spent with Carter which gave me a little more insight into Carter's personality, disposition, affect, and drives. I also very much enjoyed getting a window into John's composition process and strategies. Carter's music has a sort of academic bent and comes with a daunting catalog of materials usually reserved for doctoral music theory classes but I feel like his musical language should be easy enough to get a feel for if you skim some wikis on set theory, combinatorics, permutations, etc. His rigorous methodology is pretty impressive and I wanted to learn more regarding his approach to internalizing such a vast swath of material.

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