After the dissonance... is a recomposition of Mozart’s String Quartet in C major, K. 465. The piece grew out of the composer's long-standing desire to explore what would happen if the dissonances and false relations of the quartet’s slow introduction were left hanging, superimposed and unresolved. This lack of resolution is reflected in many other ways during the piece. Structurally, the first movement avoids the recapitulation altogether, replacing it with a sort of interrupted cadence. After a measured silence the slow second movement begins; the four movements are connected in one continuous span, with cross-referencing between them, thus removing the “resolution” implied by each self-contained movement. Metrically, the music often replaces regular and symmetrical metres with irregular or prime ones, in order to dislocate any obvious rhythmic resolutions. But apart from all that, Steven Kings simply played with the music and enjoyed taking it in different directions – motivically, harmonically, texturally, expressively. (There’s even a brief quote from a string quartet by another composer often credited with the “emancipation of the dissonance”, which seemed to grow naturally from the surrounding material.) The finished work is intended as a piece of music which can stand on its own and be enjoyed without reference to its model.

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