String Quartet no. 1

The String Quartet No. 1 by American composer Elliott Carter is a work for string quartet written during a year spent in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona from 1950–51. To some extent, it can be said that this was his first major breakthrough work as a composer. The piece was premiered on 26 February 1953 at Columbia University, performed by the Walden Quartet of the University of Illinois. A primary compositional technique used in the quartet is the principle of metric modulation (temporal modulation)—one for which Carter was to become particularly renowned.