Copland's Nonet for strings was commissioned by the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C., to honor the 50th wedding anniversary of the library's main patrons, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. The work is dedicated "after 40 years of friendship" to the famed music teacher Nadia Boulanger, with whom Copland had studied in Paris as a young man. Boulanger, a friend of the Bliss family, was to have conducted the Nonet's first performance; however, Copland did not complete it in time for the scheduled premiere, and he himself led the first performance, with members of the National Symphony Orchestra, at a private subscription concert at Dumbarton Oaks on March 2, 1961.

Copland had on occasion conducted performances of the dark-hued viol music of Henry Purcell and may have taken some inspiration from that music in composing the Nonet, scored for the unusual, "bottom-heavy" (the composer's own words) combination of three violins, three violas, and three cellos. Though Copland didn't like the idea of a conventional string ensemble performing the Nonet, he sanctioned performances by larger bodies of strings, suggesting configurations of 24 players (12 violins and six each of violas and cellos), 36 players (18 violins, nine violas, nine cellos), or 48 players (24 violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos).

The single-movement Nonet, about 18 minutes long, is cast in something like an ABA arch form. The work's three opening chords provided Copland's initial inspiration for the work's form and sonic language. These chords expand into a longer main theme of a brooding, melancholy nature, played by the cellos. The textures tend to be dense; some sonorities involve as many as six different pitches. After the appearance of more consonant and lyrical material, the tempo speeds up for a lively, jazz-influenced central section. The lyrical music returns on the heels of some ghostly transitional material, and the work concludes with slow, powerfully elegiac music related to the opening. The Nonet was composed at a time when Copland was increasingly influenced by serial techniques, which are clearly in evidence in his previous major work, the Piano Fantasy (1955-1957). While Copland makes individual use of serial techniques throughout the Nonet, it is not a 12-tone work in the conventional sense.

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