Diacritical Marks was written for the Chiara Quartet in 2011, and is in eight short movements. I have a huge anxiety about string quartets; they are normally meant to be giant expressions of a composer’s emotional life. Here, I focused on details: a tiny dot above a letter, a tiny swivel of the bow. The first and last movements are energetic and driving, and the middle movements are more lyrical, rhapsodic, and/or floating. The quartet is bound together by a piece of drone music, found in moveme...