Composer Michael Hersch's string quartet, performed here with absolute commitment by the New York based FLUX Quartet, is inextricably connected to his friendship with the late American artist Michael Mazur. More specifically, Hersch was inspired by a series of etchings and lithographs Mazur did of inmates in a Rhode Island mental asylum in the 1960's. In his musical depiction of these images, Hersch writes music that is at times aggressive and disturbing and at other times wistful, but always with the profound intensity of a deeply sensitive nature. Mazur wrote of Hersch's music: "These compositions are filled sometimes with frightening sounds. They are unrelenting, nearly without hope... But no artwork can be without hope since it is in the very nature of creative work to be optimistic, if only in as much as we continue to work through everything but our own death."