The difficulty of reviewing quartets by Kevin Volans is that it’s hard to drag yourself away from the music and start writing about it. I have not so far managed to play any recording (there are several) of his First Quartet‚ White Man Sleeps‚ without repeating at least its entrancing fourth movement. Building from the very simplest (but never ‘minimal’) material it builds to a lulling‚ rocking of great (but still very simple) beauty; I know of little in recent music that conveys such quiet‚ joyous contentment. The Second Quartet‚ Hunting: Gathering‚ insists on repeated hearings to try and work out why a seemingly deliberately disparate collage of ideas should have such a satisfying momentum and‚ at its end‚ such a sense of arrival. The recent Sixth Quartet‚ though a harder nut (the composer describes it as an attempt to ‘eliminate subject matter’ from his music‚ his ideal being the white­on­white paintings of Malevich) draws one back to find out how on earth such ‘emptiness’ – pairs of simple chords reflecting each other‚ long silences‚ rudimentary five­note ‘melodies’ – so absorbs the attention. White Man Sleeps uses numerous fragments of African music‚ from all over the continent (Volans was born in South Africa)‚ but they are substantially recast: because Western and African scales are different and the string quartet a profoundly European art‚ because Volans is a composer‚ not an ethnomusicologist. Hunting: Gathering uses only a little genuine African material; the Sixth Quartet none at all. He has undoubtedly made a fresh and appealing language‚ however‚ from being a musician of both African and European sensibility. The Duke Quartet understand this – without ever sounding un­quartet­like they are fascinated by Volans’ re­invention of their medium – and their performances have fuller tone and rather more contrast of dynamic and timbre than the admirable Kronos‚ who introduced the two earlier quartets to such wide audiences. The Kronos couple the First‚ in two alternative packagings‚ with music by other composers; their account of the Second appears on a CD single. If the Duke’s recordings of the Fourth (The Ramanujan Notebooks) and Fifth (Dancers on a Plane) Quartets (once available on Collins Classics) could be re­issued and if they were allowed or persuaded to record the Third‚ The Songlines‚ a wholly original and uncommonly fascinating quartet cycle would be revealed.