One might wonder what the commonalities might be between the string quartet music of and beyond the fact that both were mostly active in Chicago. worked to exploit African American materials in a late Romantic classical framework, while was an avowed modernist. Yet the two works here work well together, and the two composers are said to have known and respected each other. In her of 1935, went as far as she ever did into dissonance in the first movement, setting various African American melodies against that dissonance, and her contrapuntal treatments of folk pieces in her , not all of them African American (hear the lovely slow movement built from , and is also included), find an echo in 's concluding fugue. Both 's rely on propulsive rhythms that are disrupted somehow. 's Scherzo, like those in some of her orchestral works, is based on the Juba rhythm. The big news is probably the quartet, which here receives its world premiere; it was reconstructed from a pencil score with no dynamic markings and a recording made, remarkably, at the work's 1936 premiere in Rochester, New York. The work is intense and dissonant, albeit without renouncing tonality; the final fugue, with its recitative and the main material, both opening with the ascending half-step of , resolves nothing. The , also from Chicago, delivers strong advocacy for these works; the pieces have been recorded before, but the precise, strong readings here are preferable. A fine release of chamber music from middle America. ~ James Manheim