By the time George Antheil composed his String Quartet No. 2 in 1927, he had tempered his ultramodernist attitudes and followed his idol Stravinsky into the arena of neoclassicism. The Quartet thus reflects a new concern for form and for refinement of gesture, as well as a careful harmonic language distilled from the composer's brash experiments of the early 1920s. Embracing for the first time the music of earlier masters as a model, Antheil himself cites the pervasive influence of Beethoven's late string quartets on his own Quartet No. 2.

The Quartet is in four movements, more or less following previously established models. The opening Larghetto is well-balanced and thematically unified. The influence of Beethoven becomes quite apparent in the rhapsodic Lento with the arrival of an exciting, carefully crafted fugue. The third movement, Rondino Scherzino; Allegro Vivace, exhibits a sharp wit in its comical hodgepodge of accompanimental clichés, skewed harmonies, and angular melodic lines. Antheil incorporates material from the Rondino Scherzino into the final movement, following Beethoven's example of inter-movement cohesion.

Antheil dedicated the String Quartet No. 2 to expatriate bookseller Sylvia Beach (his landlady in Paris), who, along with James Joyce, Fernand Léger, and Ezra Pound, first recognized him as one of the most distinctive musical voices of his generation.

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