Yesterday, eminent composer Elliott Carter celebrated his birthday with a concert at Carnegie Hall.  It was also the premier of a 17-minute composition — and “not some chestnut written when he was a student in Paris in the 1930s,” as the front-page New York Times tribute pointed out. Carter wrote the piece last year, at 99, along with five others.

Gemze de Lappe began dancing at age nine, with Michael Fokine’s ballet company. During the summer, the company performed a different Broadway musical each week, and one of Fokine's one-act ballets during intermission. Her favorite was Scheherazade, playing “one of the boys who got stabbed in the end, lying on stage upside down. All that drama!” she recalled happily.

After arthritis forced her to give up embroidery in her 70’s, the renowned American folk artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses (aka “Grandma Moses”) took up painting. She lived to be 101. Coincidence? Not if Gene Cohen, the eminent evangelist of good news about the aging brain, is right.

Renowned industrial designer Eva Zeisel is still at it at 101, despite macular degeneration that means she can only see bright objects, and only indistinctly. That hasn’t dimmed her sense of style: when I ask permission to take a photograph, she instructs me to move a pot of pink impatiens closer to pep up the background.