Wolpe wrote the Quartet for Oboe, Percussion, and Piano while music director at Black Mountain College—an influential, mid-century, experimental liberal arts college in North Carolina. This college was home to a group of painters, architects, musicians, and poets associated with the development of interdisciplinary multimedia work. The methods and mission of this school were modeled on those of the Bauhaus, the revolutionary art school that had a decisive influence on Wolpe during his early career in his native Germany. Wolpe's Oboe Quartet reflects the composer's ongoing, deep engagement with visual art and artists.

In the 1950s, Wolpe associated frequently with the New York abstract expressionist painters, several of whom taught at Black Mountain College. Significantly, during this period, Wolpe's concern with spatial conceptions in music intensified, and he began to work out a new system of spatial proportions in music. The Oboe Quartet marks a high point of Wolpe's "abstract expressionist" style, which veered away from traditional developmental variation form toward a new "constellatory" approach. Like much of the composer's music, the texture of the quartet largely consists of energized, sharply profiled musical gestures, shapes, or images. Wolpe treats these musical images as a modernist painter might treat a visual object. He displays them from multiple perspectives, fragmenting them, reversing them, distorting them, repeating them in canons, superimposing them upon other images or other versions of themselves. Wolpe explained, "To keep the sound open, that openness which leads me to think in layers (like the cubists), often I use canonic (or double canonic) foldings to keep the sound as porous as possible. I use then all possible techniques of inversions, retrogrades, like attacking an object from all sides, or moving out from all sides of an object."

The Quartet is also deeply indebted to Middle Eastern musical traditions, which Wolpe encountered during his first years of exile from Nazi Germany in Palestine. These traditions noticeably inform the quartet on many levels, from its surface details (timbre, rhythm, texture, etc.) to its harmonic language. Middle Eastern conceptions of modality probably informed his use of what he called "organic modes" in the quartet. Middle Eastern modes were associated with ethical and cosmological values; similarly, Wolpe based the harmonic structure of the quartet on sets of notes (generally expressed as images) to which he assigned expressive associations. Each set, for example, might assume a particular shape, texture, and mode of behavior. Through such "organic modes," Wolpe sought to provide a theoretical means for dealing with fantasy.

Each movement of the Oboe Quartet has distinctive expressive associations. In a letter, Wolpe explained, "I finished one big movement [the third] ... I originally thought it is the first movement. But I wish to precede it by an 'early morning music' in which I am very much involved this minute ... I plan to write then the slow, pure, still, simple alabaster like chant of the second movement. Then comes (I think) the one which I finished the other day, which is of a very 'concretish,' rustic, realistic, con-moto quality. After this I let follow a very short movement-separating affair, and as the last will come a sort of moderato part (which some is of multiple motions, quick, slow, hampered, expertise, popular, and peopled speech ... )." This last movement even calls upon the pianist to sing, stand, clap his hands, and dance.

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