String Quartet No. 2 (Glass)

Composition

After withdrawing his first sketch of a string quartet in 1963, Philip Glass composed his String Quartet No. 2 seventeen years after his first quartet, even though it was not initially conceived as chamber music, but for theater. This work was composed as a result of Glass' collaboration with the Mabou Mines quartet, of which he married JoAnne Akalaitis, one of its members. Glass himself decided to extract the music he had written for Samuel Beckett's Company, and wrote a score thought to be a concert work on its own.