In Rome, early 1954, when Elliott Carter's First String Quartet was played, I'd never heard anything like it before, and told him it sounded like the end of the world. To this day is incised on my brain the device, in the Adagio, of two impassioned muted violins juxtaposed with the savage viola and cello - a device devised by Ives in The Unanswered Question (disparate simultaneity), and, before that, in Nuages, where Debussy's Cor Anglais rends the cloudily indifferent strings.