Gavin Bryars is most at home composing for strings and his own background as a bass player tends to inflect his string writing with a certain darkness and warmth, even when basses themselves are not present in the texture. That is certainly the case with his String Quartet No. 1, which he composed at the request of the Arditti Quartet in 1985. Bearing the unexplained subtitle "Between the National and the Bristol," the piece, cast in a single, 20-minute movement encompassing several distinct but continuous sections, exhibits Bryars' characteristic proto-minimalist texture while at the same time drawing out certain strong, underlying harmonic trajectories and large-scale structures. It also utilizes special techniques of tuning and performance to enhance the quartet's sonority lending the work, particularly in its last moments, a unique and engaging sound. The opening of the piece is dominated by alternating figures leaping back and forth across perfect fourths, perfect fifths, and minor thirds, with the kind of Errol Morris-like meditative restraint similar to that found in the quartets of Philip Glass. Bryars takes some slippery harmonic twists, however, so that rather than simply spinning in circles, his minimalist landscape tilts, bobbles, and swerves. Indeed, the application of rather inventive harmonies—chromatically inflected like a Gesualdo madrigal—within a rather static texture is one of the piece's most striking characteristics. Bryars' background as a bassist comes to the fore in the subsequent section in which, underneath frantic figurations in the violins, the cello and viola execute a drawn-out melody in parallel octaves. This technique, Bryars said, seeks to replicate to a limited extent the timbre of the bass, whose woody timbre derives in part from the strength of the natural octave overtone. (In the 1995 recording by the Balanescu Quartet, the violist and cellist take this idea to heart, applying extra pressure to the strings in order to replicate the friction of the bass' articulation). A central section of the work builds upon a quirky chromatic scale as it rises and falls along an angular path, the polyphony suddenly cut off by a series of rich, sustained chords with radiant major tonalities and pungent chromatic inflections. The final section of the work is perhaps the most striking, however. The score instructs the first violin and viola to tune the top two strings of their respective instruments down a half step, while the other two players lower the pitches of their bottom two strings by the same amount. After retuning, all four performers exclusively play string harmonics for the remainder of the piece, their lowered strings facilitating pitch combinations that otherwise would have been unavailable as harmonic tones. The resultant sound evokes a kind of pensive, reedy organ ending the work with a somewhat benedictory feel. This thoughtful closing passage perhaps relates to Bryars' decision to dedicate the piece to his sister, who passed away during its composition.

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