Carter's A Symphony of Three Orchestras (1976) typifies the composer's sophisticated manner of coordinating instrumental groups. Carter refers to the work as a symphony of three orchestras, rather than for three orchestras, to emphasize the idea of distinct ensembles sounding simultaneously rather than antiphonally. Orchestra I contains brass, strings, and timpani; Orchestra II, clarinets, piano, vibraphone, chimes, marimba, solo violins and basses, and a group of cellos; Orchestra III, flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, violins, violas, basses, and non-pitched percussion instruments. Each orchestra plays four "movements" of differing characters, as in a traditional symphony. Each movement, however, is partially superimposed upon one from another of the three ensembles, creating a 12-movement structure of continuously overlapping sonic entities. In his preface to the score, Carter wrote:

"The listener, of course, is not meant, on first hearing, to identify the details of this continually shifting web of sound any more than he is to identify the modulations in Tristan und Isolde, but rather to hear and grasp the character of this kaleidoscope of musical themes as they are presented in varying contexts."

More than simply a technical tour de force, this approach is an attempt to reflect a fluid and complex reality in music. Carter continues:

"I do not want to give the impression of a simultaneous motion in which everybody's part is coordinated like a goose step. I do not want to write the kind of music that just marches on and marches off. I want it to seem like a crowd of people, or like waves on the sea—all things that signify a much more fluid and, to me, more human way of living."

The Symphony fulfilled Carter's longstanding desire to write a work based on the poem "The Bridge" by American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932). (The same poem, in fact, is also source of the title of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring.) Carter first encountered Crane's poetry while a student at Harvard in the 1920s; the poet's work later provided inspiration for Carter's ballet Pocahontas (1936) and the song Voyage (1943). "The Bridge" begins by describing the Brooklyn Bridge and New York harbor and unfolds as an examination of the paradoxes of industrial America in the 1920s. Carter believed that Crane's America, "for all its fascinating modernism, would eventually prove a paralyzing wasteland, depriving him of his poetic gift, even destroying him completely." The poet eventually committed suicide by throwing himself over the side of a ship into the Gulf of Mexico.

Carter's Symphony, like Crane's poem, suggests a continual descent. The work begins with the players in the highest registers of their instruments. The sound of the solo trumpet initiates a falling motion:

"How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters

Liberty —

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes

As apparitional as sails that cross

Some page of figures to be filed away;

Till elevators drop us from our day. . . ."

Immediately preceding the work's conclusion, the music is interrupted by a series of violent crashes ("The forked crash of split thunder parts..."), after which the opening of the Symphony is mirrored in the lowest registers of the tuba and double basses.

Carter was commissioned to write the Symphony by the New York Philharmonic in celebration of the American Bicentennial. The Symphony is dedicated to Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, who premiered the work at New York's Avery Fisher Hall on February 17, 1977.

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