Although they were born nearly 40 years apart, the lives of John Adams and Elliott Carter share several points of intersection. Both were originally from New England; Carter was born in New York on December 11, 1908. And like Adams, Carter attended Harvard University, where he studied with compositional giants like Gustav Holst, Walter Piston, and Edward Burlingame Hill. (Carter also studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s.) Their aesthetic paths were quite different, however. While Adams didn't mind if music entertained, Carter’s musical voice ultimately evolved from early neoclassicism to European modernism, his harmonic and rhythmic language fiercely unique. As Adams wrote in a tribute to Carter,

Those of us who love Carter’s music do so for its vitality, its invention, and its overall seriousness. The vitality has always struck me as an American trait, something he inherited from Ives and that he shared with his colleagues Copland, Harris, and Nancarrow. His staggering powers of invention, a gift that never failed him, came to the fore in the early fifties in the First String Quartet and the Variations for Orchestra, works that remain my personal favorites. In them the formal plans are bold and dramatic, and the personality that he accords individual instruments is vivid and full of piquant character. No wonder musicians love to play his music!

Carter completed his Symphony No. 1 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on December 18, 1942, revising the work in 1954. Dedicated to his wife Helen and written in three movements, the symphony exemplifies his early, more accessible musical voice. As Carter described, he composed the work “in a deliberately restricted idiom—that is, in an effort to produce [a work] that meant something to me as music and yet might, I hoped, be understandable to the general music public I was trying to reach.” Hints of his later modernist idiom are already present, however. In the first movement, Carter takes lyrical themes vaguely reminiscent of Aaron Copland and groups them irregularly, while the waltz features off-beat accents. The second movement, marked “Slowly, gravely,” is lush, expansive orchestration at its finest. In the final scurrying movement, which carries the tempo designation “Vivaciously,” individual instruments take brief solo turns as the symphony drives to its exhilarating close.