If you’d asked me twenty years ago if I’d ever consider writing a string quartet I would have found it amusing. I was even rather dogmatic about it. I remember an interviewer asking me in the early 80s why I didn’t write a string quartet, and my telling him not to be silly, why would I ever want to do such a thing! I guess once I’d said that and it was in print it started bugging me. I thought about it a lot. Part of my resistance to the idea had nothing to do with whether I consider myself a rocker or not - I’ve never refused myself any musical activity on that basis - but with my fear of history. I grew up worshipping at the shrine of Beethoven’s late quartets and Bartok’s 5 and 6, they represented absolute perfection. The idea of writing a quartet meant somehow competing with that image of "real composers" in my head. For someone with no formal training it seemed like something completely beyond my capacity.

And then, I don’t know why, I suddenly stopped worrying about any of that and started thinking "well, what would a string quartet of mine sound like?" And I just started working on the idea, as I tend to work on everything, as if it were a series of songs. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, I just wrote and wrote until I was done. Part of it was accepting myself, I think, not worrying about avant-garde pretensions - just writing simple things that made sense to me without being stuck in one stylistic area or another, and without wanting to be "new", without having a whole pantheon of serious modern composers hovering over my psyche. So Lelekovice ended up as a rather odd and "out of time" piece… …Perhaps if I had any objective in writing it, certainly parts of it, it was to have sections that would be played more like folk music than classical music. I love Iva Bittová’s record of Bartok duets, where she re-situates the music in a folk context, even singing along in p.......
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