Composers outside the mainstream often offer new standards—not just new sounds, but new possibilities for what old sounds can mean. The string quartets of Heitor Villa-Lobos lend a great illustration: in general, they are overlooked when speaking of twentieth century quartets. They are not as tight, aggressive, and revolutionary as Bartók's; they aren't as labyrinthine and emotionally encoded as Berg's; they aren't as tortured and politically charged as Shostakovich's. But Villa-Lobos' 17 quartets—a massive number by any count—do create their own wonderful universe in which logic moves differently and new modes of construction and beauty take their hold. The Fourteenth, from 1953, is a fine example; like many of Villa-Lobos' other quartets, it is formally unbuttoned; the structure of each of the four movements does not unfold with aggressive developmental intention, but unfolds until it reaches a new tributary, at which point it promptly breaks away. And while this structural freewheeling, seen in the light of Bartók and Berg, can appear facile and unrealistic, in its own light it creates an impressively individual aesthetic. Call it a branch of musical surrealism, savoring the surprising juxtaposition and generating its complexity not from individual moments (always transparent in Villa-Lobos), but from the mysterious, contradictory way in which they are sewn together. The Villa-Lobos quartet scholar Arnaldo Estrella likened this propensity to "a flowing brook, a constant becoming," perhaps an Amazonian answer to the Teutonic preoccupation with "developing variations."

The opening Allegro, for instance, holds itself together with minimal stitching; its burst of fourths at the beginning gained the score the subtitle "Quartet of Fourths," but there is much harmonic variety in its vine-swinging from idea to idea. The following Andante is one of Villa-Lobos' darker slow movements; it transforms the usual light-blue melancholy into a knotty pathos. Perhaps there is, despite Villa-Lobos' highly un-German spirit, a shade of Beethoven here, possibly referring to the opening fugue of his Op. 131 quartet. Similarly, Villa-Lobos' movement intertwines in elegiac, almost morbid ricercare textures. Its alleviation via a contrasting middle section is mirrored in the fantastical scherzo; here, contrary-motion scales and wild glissandi veer in their near-atonality toward direct triadic sunlight. The Molto allegro finale returns to the score's opening fourths and flaunts humorously chunky ideas, magnetic doublings, and a spirited evocation of the rustic Brazilian harmonica Villa-Lobos encountered in his youthful travels.

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