Like many composers, I’ve long been fascinated by the strange, mercurial, fragmentary quality of Beethoven’s last five string quartets. This piece, with its rather cheeky title, pays tribute to those pieces in two ways. It begins as an attempt to update their language for the 21st century: it uses harmonies, playing techniques and technology that didn’t exist in the 1820s, but it moves from one idea to another in the same fluid and free-associative way that Beethoven did in his last works. Later the tribute becomes more direct, with allusions to two movements of the Op. 132 quartet. But the electronic processing of the viola adds a layer of distortion that keeps the piece from coming too close to its model, just as Beethoven often distorted the styles that he alluded to.