The work was composed in 1992 for the 85th birthday of Kurtág's teacher, Sándor Veress. The ensemble of instruments is unusual: two basset horns and two quarter-tone pianos (the well-known predecessor of the latter is Charles Ives' Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for two pianos). The special tuning in this case is not that the tonality moves in an ultra-chromatic direction, rather that it makes the contours more nebulous, somewhat incomprehensible and dreamlike, and especially that the two wind instru...