In the late 1950s I suggested to my old friend and schoolmate Elliott Carter that the enormous possibilities of a combination of piano and harpsichord had not yet been fully explored. I was particularly interested by the way in which the harpsichord tends to take over all that is linear and melodic, leaving the background and mass effects to the piano. But since my musical thinking is primarily determined by the harmonic and tonal language that reigned supreme from the era of basso continuo through Schoenberg's Harmonielehre, the examples I contributed were hardly stimulating in relation to Carter's own rigorous tone-row style.

It must have been a year or two later when Elliott told me that he had been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation to write a piece for performance at the Congress of the International Musicological Society in September 1961 and that he planned to make it a double concerto for harpsichord and piano, and to add to each of these instruments its own group of strings and percussion. When he asked me if I would be willing to play the harpsichord part in the first performance, I immediately promised my services. Charles Rosen was to play the piano part and Gustav Meier to conduct.

Whatever calm there had been in my own bucolic activities and unhurried meditations of the summer of 1961 was completely shattered by the arrival early in August of the first installment of Elliott's Double Concerto. Never have I been so frightened by a piece of music. It presented every conceivable difficulty of decipherment, ensemble, and balance. I had heard vague rumors about a patently insufficient number of rehearsals—less than half a dozen—and when I had recovered from my initial shock I got on the phone and saw to it that the number of rehearsals was increased to twenty. They turned out to be none too many, for indeed it was not until the first performance that we ever played the piece straight through. From looking at the poorly aligned manuscript score it was impossible to form any idea of the sound as a whole or of the relationship of the parts in terms of the give-and-take of ordinary ensemble playing. What was intelligible but terrifying was the rhythmic structure.