The late 1940s were a period of crucial change for Elliott Carter. Although his early career had been dominated by choral compositions, Carter abandoned the genre completely after the completion of Emblems in 1947. The Sonata for Violoncello and Piano from 1948 demonstrated Carter's striking new ideas about rhythmic flow, textural organization, and idiomatic color, and pointed in a direction quite different from the cagey neoclassicism that had characterized earlier works. Standing in stark contrast to these developments, however, is the Woodwind Quintet, the careful formulation and expressive sheen of which seem to suggest a nostalgia based on embellished memories—recollections of an "earlier style" in which Carter never actually composed.

The piece is meticulously tooled and contrapuntally sound; its contours are carefully shaped into graceful designs and configurations. The sense of consensus that permeates the instrumental layers of the work stands in opposition to the concept of absolute textural autonomy that stratifies the individual layers of pieces like the Cello Sonata. Which isn't to say that the Woodwind Quintet is somehow insincere; its dedication to Nadia Boulanger, the venerated matron of twentieth-century music and Carter's former mentor, bears no trace of ill will. In fact, the work seems to be the highest form of homage: Carter surrenders his own stylistic tastes and aesthetic agendas, in order to take on the voice of another. The composer himself admitted that he tried to compose the quintet in such a fashion that it would emerge as the kind of music that Boulanger would have wanted him to compose. Any irony of expression, then, is not born of satirical self-denial, but of self-conscious consecration.

The first of the Quintet's two movements is a colorful allegretto with a lively textural landscape. Though the gestures taken up by the different members of the ensemble are all coordinated, their actual materials offer a wide range of contrasts. Above an initial drone in the bassoon and horn, the flute engages in repeated syncopations, while the clarinet comments with florid scalar figures and the oboe plugs away with steady staccatos. As the movement progresses, these various shapes wind their way through the ensemble. This presages techniques found in later works as well—although when it occurs, for example, in the Brass Quintet of 1974, this "textural counterpoint" does not emphasize thematic cohesion, but rather takes its place altogether. Occasionally, Carter is unable to hide his own voice (or we are unable to distinguish it from Boulanger's): the close imitative material, and the occasional moments of figurational obsession, appear as topoi for the Eight Etudes of 1949 (compare for example, the imitative half-step gestures near the beginning of the Woodwind Quintet to the cleverly incessant semitones of Etude IV).

The second movement, marked Allegro giocoso, is infused with jazz motives and syncopated energy. It is built upon a series of convergences and divergences, with emphatic moments of unison, heterophony, or homophony separated by episodes of solo lines and imitative handoffs. Some figures stick out in a calculatedly awkward way—a sudden and ridiculously solemn horn proclamation that momentarily commands the silent attention of the rest of the ensemble, or the oboe solo that is pulled out of the texture by a schmaltzy shift to triplets. The lighthearted intent of this movement is sealed in the last measures, as all the winds release their final note except for a sheepishly straggling clarinet.

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