Quartet for Strings No.4

For those beginning to find the process tedious, I guarantee this will be the last time (for a while, at least) a harmonically recapitulative, minimalist movement will be found at the central pivot point of a work of mine with pseudo-palindromic tempi. To be brutally frank, the Vivace assai of this quartet isn't consistently minimalist, in the first place: it is a Minotaurian hybrid of minimalist and fugal writing, peppered with occasional bursts of straight harmonic accompaniment derived from the tone row generally - not from the particular permutation and rotation then currently being developed in the other voices. So there. As a great man once wrote:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I also promised, after my third quartet, more free-standing melodies in this one; but I fear I may have failed in that regard, as well. The siren-song of contrapuntal complexity has fixed me in its fatal gravity, alas. With any luck, there may still be some time left me to repair the breach, however.

Perhaps.