The 1960s were the time of concertos for Elliott Carter: indeed, save for the Eight Pieces for timpanist that took all of the 1950s and over half of the 1960s to write, he composed nothing but concertos during that decade. First, in 1961, the Double Concerto for harpsichord and piano appeared. In 1965 the Piano Concerto was finished, and finally, in the last year of the decade, the Concerto for Orchestra took shape. The Concerto for Orchestra still ranks in some circles today, the fame of the string quartets and the achievements of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s notwithstanding, as Carter's most striking effort. It was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society in celebration of its 125th anniversary, composed while Carter was in residence at the American Academy in Rome, and premiered in New York in early 1970.

In this work, the large orchestra is broken down by register into four groups of instruments (high, high-middle, low-middle, and low). These take turns stepping on each other's toes as the four connected movements unfold (Allegro, Presto volando, Maestoso, and Allegro agitato). To each of these freshly organized families of instruments is added an appropriate group of percussion instruments. Carter's musical conception was not an absolute one: he seems to have organized certain elements of the concerto around the poem Vents by St. John Perse. Still, the purely musical architecture of the work is complicated even by Carter's usual standards, and the interested listener would do well to locate a copy of Carter's own "chart" for the work (in which certain matters of structure, pacing, and harmony are broken down movement by movement) and then listen, listen, listen.

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