[Y]es

I've never really warmed much to Carter's vocal works (when all's said and done, they don't seem significantly different to those of Copland), but that might also be indirectly related to his choice of poetry as well. Makes me want to head back quickly to Feldman's vocal works (for both music and text)...

Copland to me is OK, but a minor composer (comparable, say, to de Falla, or Poulenc, or John Ireland). Neither particularly deep, powerful, acute, challenging, visionary nor historically significant in the broader scheme of things.

Copland is a good composer. I used to hear a lot of his music in the USA, but mostly big works (ballet or orchestra).
Elliott Carter is less known composer I think.
They both are good composers.

For me, the Third Quartet is Carter's finest work, and remains one of my favorite works of the last 50 yrs or so.  The Double Concerto is a very close second.

I've found it very difficult to get excited about much of anything Carter's written in the last 10-15 years.  It all strikes me as being rather dry and strangely neo-classical, lacking all of the rhythmic and gestural vitality of the works from the 60's to late 80's.  Try as I might, I just can't quite get into the Boston Concerto, the ASKO Concerto, Soundings, Dialogues, etc., etc.  My sense is that this has quite a lot to do w/ the permutational approach to rhythm/pulse streams, w/ a vastly reduced and simplified number of available cross rhythms.  It ends up sounding rather mechanical to my ears (and thus much more similar to several of his early (though post-Copland-ish Americana) works.

I did mention it, but didn't say whether I like it. I like it. I particularly think the scope and pacing of the piece are carefully worked out. This is some of his best brass writing as well, along with the Clarinet Concerto mentioned previously.

What are the saving graces of the 1980's? How about Triple Duo?

Aaron, nice to hear from you again. You of all people would love the Third Quartet. Sounds derogatory; isn't. 

Not in the slightest.  But sorry to be so predictable in my tastes ...

The Third Quartet is one of the few pieces that still sort of scares the crap out of me.  This is a good thing, indeed.

That would be a bit difficult because I haven't heard any of them for a long time, and don't have any recordings to sneak off and listen to, but I think it has mostly to do with what I think of as their "typical 20th-century atonal string quartet texture", which I've never found attractive and is what also stands in the way of my really appreciating the quartets of Bartók, Schoenberg and Ferneyhough. I find my attention wandering. (I suppose I should give a few counterexamples of quartets I do appreciate: Xenakis (all of them), Cage (likewise), Feldman (both), Ligeti (2nd), Kagel (up to the 3rd; I found the 4th awful), Nono, Finnissy (the only one called "String Quartet"), Giorgio Netti. Probably a few more I can't bring immediately to mind. That's a bit offtopic though. For me Carter is one of those composers (like Birtwistle) whose large-scale works I much prefer to the others, although I've always liked Carter's Piano Sonata. Unlike in Stuart's case (welcome back Stuart, I know I owe you a CD but I'm still not quite finished with moving house, in the middle of everything else, and it will be on its way soon I hope) Carter has never been a particularly important composer for me, and I didn't really appreciate his work at all, apart from tha aforementioned Sonata, until one very memorable performance of Penthode I heard in Amsterdam a few years ago (ASKO/Knussen). For the first time this music made sense to me - I'd heard it in London (London Sinfonietta/someone) when it was still quite new and it sounded grimly arbitrary.