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My first composition for string quartet muses on certain bits and pieces of music from the string quartet repertoire: traces of music from the past, archeological discoveries of parts of string quartets long since dead to living composers, yet much alive in the hearts of concert-goers today. Imagine a time in the future when the great works of music have been reduced to a set of principals that forms the basis for a series of computer programs. Sheet music would no longer exist and live musicians would have been replaced by computers. The composers" in such a time would be those who had best mastered the computer programs that "generate" the music. A disaster will have happened during a world-wide power failure: all of the original pieces of music on which the computer programs were based will be destroyed. After such a catastophe, a young musicologist-composer might seek out original musical scores printed on paper to study them. After finding only single pages here and there of bits of string quartets written by Beethoven, Mozart and Bartok, he might write a piece such as "Traces" in his search for the origins of musical inspiration.