George Antheil's Third String Quartet, composed in 1948, follows the Second by more than two decades. During the intervening period, Antheil had engaged in a staggeringly wide range of activities: composing film scores, writing a syndicated romantic advice column, patenting (with actress Hedy Lamarr) the design for a radio-controlled torpedo. While his activities became more and more eclectic, his musical style became more refined. Beginning in the late 1920s, Antheil began to temper the brash style that had led post-concert riots in Paris and New York with a neoclassical aesthetic especially concerned with form and balance. The Second String Quartet (1927) betrays a strong Beethovenian influence; the Third continues along this trajectory.

Antheil's style by 1948 might be more appropriately described as neoromantic, though incorporating heavy doses of the expanded harmonic language he explored as a youth as well as a distinct twist of Americana. Within traditional forms, Antheil provides plaintive American folksong styles with dramatic new harmonic settings, yet avoids the juxtapositions of dissonant tone clusters and jarring rhythmic gestures that are characteristic of his earlier music. Of the four movements that comprise the Third Quartet, the lush Largo makes the most prominent use of this less acerbic language. The Largo features dreamily plagal harmonies and lyrical melodies, creating an unapologetically bittersweet, even nostalgic, tone. Throughout the entire Quartet, in contrast to his rambunctious earlier works, the onetime "Bad Boy of Music" seems to be on his best behavior.

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