ABSTRACT
The Sixth String Quartet's relatively upbeat rhetorical character and use of a standard four-movement form often cause commentators to refer to the quartet as 'pulling back,' perhaps referencing an earlier, seemingly more simple and innocent, time. In the Sixth Quartet the graft occurs in the blank space left by the anapest gesture's lack of structural closure, where the cadential figure is inserted as a signifier of syntactical closure. The fetishistic split that occurs in the modern tradition is exemplified in the first movement as the music continually ignores ruptures within its structure. The neurotic attempt to control all variables is reflected in the construction of the second movement. The interpretation of the crisis of the real as a mystical psychotic projection is reproduced in the passacaglia of the third movement. The final movement represents an attempt to posit such a reality, one that accepts the crisis of the real in its constructed reality.
