Charles Wuorinen composed his String Trio during late 1967 and early 1968, about a year before he set to work on the Pulitzer Prize-winning electronic work Time's Encomium. The trio, which was commissioned by the Potomac String Trio and premiered by that same group at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., on October 27, 1968, is not among Wuorinen's best-known pieces; but it is a fine essay in dense serial music (specifically, second- or perhaps third-generation serial music that employs and expands upon the so-called "time-point system" of Milton Babbitt) and makes an equally fine starting point for the uninitiated listener who is trying to get to know Wuorinen's music. All the hallmarks of his early music—rapid changes of texture, register, and sometimes dynamics, constantly shifting meters, complex rhythms that are often as serially organized as the pitches, intricate and often very energetic motives drawn from voice to voice in an ever-changing manner—are here, bottled up into a single 15-minute movement. The instruments of the ensemble (violin, viola, and cello) combine to provide a large arsenal of textural and timbral weapons but are, happily, incapable of growing so dense as to become opaque and lose the listener altogether.

At the start of the Trio, sustained tones from the two lower instruments provide a backdrop for leaping, energized bursts of activity from the violin (such rhythmic "bursts" are a common thing in Wuorinen's music). The viola and cello gradually join in this pointed musicmaking, so that for most of the movement each of the three players seem to be tugging at the others' rhythmic strings, each wanting its own whims to prevail, but none gaining any real ground (unless perhaps it is the violin, which throughout the piece maintains something of the superiority that it was granted at the outset). As the end approaches, however, the notes at last line up with one another into series of thirty-second notes (started by the violin, as seems to be usual for the work) that quietly simmer on repeated tones until a blast of accented eighth notes jars the music into a new concluding shape: straight, quiet quarter-note groups, to which an oscillating G natural tail in the viola and cello serves as a miniature epilogue.

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