For the Beethoven Year, composers were asked to set selected passages from Beethoven's conversation books to music. York Höller's text 'focused at the end on the sentence "Das Rad läuft" [The wheel is running] - containing the note letters D-A-ES[E flat]-AS[A flat] and a revolving motif around the note D, which is later expanded to a 20-note sound form', says the composer. Höller's quartet is in one movement, articulates itself in freely tonal harmony and frequent changes of time, and uses alien...