Elliott Carter was one of the original post-War musical modernists. This Symphonia, his largest orchestral work, is firmly in the style that developed them—hard-edged, atonal, full of dense dissonant chords and light scattering individual orchestral notes. For the most part melody and rhythm (as most classical listeners understand the terms) are nowhere near in sight.

Elliott Carter (b. 1908) adapted Charles E. Ives' idea of polytempo music music unfolding at different speeds in different sections of the ensemble. This is a technique that he has grown ever more fluent in, so that when he reached the standard retirement age he was only just beginning the most productive part of his life. He started this, his largest orchestral work, when he was 85.

Carter conceived the Symphonia as a 45 to 50-minute work from the beginning. However, he recognized that at his age he could not assume he had time to complete it, so wrote each of its three movements as a self-sufficient work, each commissioned by a different orchestra and duly delivered to them individually.

The overall inspiration, and the source of the inspiration of each of the movements, is a Latin-language poem by the English writer Richard Crashaw (ca. 1613 - 1649). The poem is called "Bulla" (The Bubble) and uses the evanescence of a bubble as a metaphor for an artist's burst of creativity. The subtitle of the work, rendered into English, is "I am the prize of flowing hope."

The opening movement is called "Partita" and is inspired by the passage: "[I am]...the star of the sea, as it were, the golden wit of nature, the rambling tale of nature, the brief dream of nature." Its commission was from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Carter uses the name "partita" not for its Baroque association but in the sense of "game." It plays with shifting, crossing lines of various tempos. An especially important sound is a kind of ringing chord that gets thrown around the orchestra. The music is explosive, with some solo voices occasionally emerging. But mostly it is an ever-shifting, never-repeated structure of bursts of sound.

The middle movement, Adagio tenebroso (Slowly, shadowed), is as dark as its title suggests. Its poetic epigram is "I am the glass of the blind goddess" and it was written for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In this brooding, desolate movement, chords and fragments of musical ideas cross slowly, with only one major eruption of full orchestral power, a terrifying passage.

The end, Allegro scorrevole (I am the brief nature of the wind. To be sure, I am the flower of air), is light, with sparkling bursts of sound—as complex as the first movement, but not aggressive in feeling. At the end, however, the music suddenly plunges to the lowest register, leaving only a high piccolo—the bubble has burst. This movement was written for the Cleveland Orchestra. The first performance of the work as a whole was by Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

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