A visit to London prompted the String Quartet, although Cooman says that it’s almost all unconnected to memories of specific places, but rather pure music springing from imagined ‘poetic images conjured solely by the names (of the movements)!

In ‘Elephant & Castle’, the castle (in the air?) is represented by a stately procession of high string chords, while the elephant lumbers along in interjections from the cello. ‘Embankment’ is more fragmented, with individual instruments often isolated, before the music finally dissolves. Only in ‘Kennington Park’ does inspiration come from the location itself: two evenings spent there as sunset approached. The choral-like opening reveals Cooman’s background as an organist and composer at various American churches, but there’s often an acerbic edge to the basically tonal harmony, and rhythms are never four-square: in fact the silences and lack of a clear pulse sometimes mean that the music is robbed of direction. Even in the faster-moving ‘Battersea’, the syncopations never quite add up to give overall momentum, although the final wind-down is effective.

Embrace is a 13-minute piece, written for the marriage of two friends, and it displays many of the same characteristics of the slow music in the quartet.

There’s the sustained, hymn-like succession of chords; the interruptions of silence between musical gestures; the sometimes-spare two-part writing; and the feeling of time being not so much suspended as inconsequential. The shorter Embrace Il has greater harmonic warmth, and the Tippett Quartet play with concentration throughout the album, but it’s all rather underwhelming.