As in many of Takemitsu's orchestral works, Quatrain features a group of concerted instruments. The quartet, of clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, is sharply foregrounded by his use of predominantly chordal writing in the orchestra and melodic writing for the quartet; much like the standard left-hand, right-hand dialectic of piano music. He takes us continually through changes in listening, from the naked intensity of a solo instrument to the full lushness of the symphony orchestra, and our hearing is kept unusually sharp.

Quatrain uses a multitude of coloristic touches such as glissando and fluttertongue, but because these are genuinely used for color, and not as scaffolding to hold up weak musical ideas, they come across with brilliant effect. The piece begins with three breathless orchestral swells delineated by silence, followed an inrush of full strings and winds, then everything dies down for a clarinet melody to emerge, accompanied by string glissandi. It sounds rather like Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, which is obviously one of the influences at work here. All through the piece, the music is incredibly slippery, whether from the glissandi or sudden changes in dynamics—from f to pp in the middle of a note, for example—and we feel a marvelous sense of instability, neither able to guess what might come next, nor when. This wave-like momentum carries the piece through a manic-depressive series of highs and lows that are finally punctuated with a gigantic climactic finale.

The title was apparently chosen to represent the "fourness" of the work's construction : the four soloists, the sections which are built in groups of four bars, and the nature of the generating pitch intervals. It is odd to be made to think of fourness in relation to such fluid, non-square music. His orchestral writing of period is an imaginatively free, personal extension of the Francophone (Debussy, Messiaen) and second Viennese school idioms, that doesn't really break with either. We have to assume that Schoenberg would have approved of Takemitsu's work as energetically as Stravinsky did. Takemitsu is a mockingbird who sometimes out-sings the original.

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