During the early 1960s Gloria Coates discovered the glissando. No big deal there, you might think. Xenakis had already determined that string glissandos could open up musical space in radical and unlikely ways. But Coates pushed further, revamping the whole basis of Western harmony using glissandos, writing music that was essentially tonal – well, it certainly wasn’t atonal – but with the foundations of tonality suddenly rattling and sliding around like loose teeth.

In any just world, Coates and the glissando would have been as big a story as Philip Glass and the arpeggio, but her stock didn’t rise until 10 years ago, when the Kreutzer Quartet started recording her string quartets for Naxos. And the Kreutzers return for this mixed disc of Coates orchestral and chamber works performing an early work, Among the Asteroids, from 1962, where Coates’s techniques are already fully formed. Asteroids are alien and untouchable. From a human perspective, dancing among the asteroids would be a beautiful but utterly terrifying experience, a truth Coates’s score acknowledges. Glissandos spacewalk, defining the galaxy in which this piece will exist; then our vantage point becomes more intimate and humane as Coates takes us deep inside the intelligent design of her structures, breaking the continuum with canon like asides and melodic flourishes.

The other major work here, Holographic Universe (1975) for violin and orchestra, has a moderately more expressively conventional language. Glissandos can be metaphysical but Coates has also talked about them as an allegory for tears. This piece is deeply felt and passionate without being obviously emotive – a mammoth achievement. Neil Thomson chisels a huge, aromatic, plush sound out of his student string orchestra.