New York composer Elliott Carter turns 100 in December, and while it would be an overstatement to say that the entire classical-music world is celebrating the patriarch of atonality, certain corners of the musical establishment are indeed going all out. The Focus! Series, Juilliard’s annual festival of contemporary music, led by Joel Sachs, will feature 36 of Carter’s works (along with bits of Ives, Varèse, Stravinsky, and Boulez) in a six-concert series that opens on Friday 25. Boulez and James Levine will conduct one concert apiece. A similar immersion comes in July at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Levine, as music director of Boston Symphony Orchestra, has scheduled an all-Carter season: 49 pieces in ten concerts over five busy days.

These festivals always offer jaw-dropping technical displays by student players, regardless of the musical emphasis, but there’s also the feeling that the repertoire floats off into the ether after the applause ends. The young virtuosos, one assumes, gladly return the contemporary scores to their senders and start practicing Beethoven and Schubert again. So for all the virtues of what’s happening at Juilliard and Tanglewood, the healthiest sign that Elliott Carter’s music may have a life beyond his own very long one is the Pacifica Quartet.

Embracing his music long before the calendar said it was time to do so, this batch of thirtysomethings started learning Carter’s five string quartets in 1997, and first performed them all in a single 2002 sitting that lasted more than two hours. They’ll do it again on Wednesday 30 at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is presenting the event, along with a five-hour symposium on Tuesday 29. The Pacifica has also recorded the Carter cycle for the Naxos label, the first installment of which arrives this week.

According to Pacifica cellist Brandon Vamos, the quartet became intrigued with Carter because of the way these works had long captivated the renowned Juilliard String Quartet, which recorded a then-complete cycle of four quartets for Sony in 1991. “[Former JSQ leader Robert] Mann talked about them as pieces you could grow with—like Beethoven, you’re always discovering things,” Vamos says. “We thought that it was worth exploring.”

It took eight months of concentrated study and practice to master the first and longest quartet. Though he describes it as the most romantic of the cycle, Vamos said the players found it “eye-opening.” The possibilities of the piece and the language urged them onward.

“It’s such a big decision to take on all the pieces of one composer, but by playing all the quartets, we have a deeper understanding,” says first violinist Simin Ganatra. “You can definitely see the first quartet having been written when he was young, and his last quartet is so light and optimistic. He talks about the second quartet being four different personalities and how they work together. The fourth quartet is like the personalities have met 30 years later—the characters are just as intense but they’ve mellowed out a bit.”

“With most of the quartets we do, we’re thinking about blending,” Vamos says. “Carter is much more conversational.”

That goes for the composer himself, as well. Over the years, the members of the Pacifica have made several house calls on Carter, toting their instruments to his home in the West Village for guidance. “He was so animated when he was coaching us,” Ganatra recalls. “He wanted everything lighter and more transparent. When we played the second quartet, he said ‘nothing violent,’ and that helped so much. All great music relates to a specific human emotion, but it’s so much easier to talk about that with his music. Maybe that’s why we like it so much as a quartet.”