It was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and pianist Aki Takahashi, who premiered the piece at the 7th annual New Music America Festival in Los Angeles and released a studio recording in 1993.

[1] The performance took place at the Leo S. Bing Theater in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, beginning at 5 p.m. and lasting 68½ minutes.

[7] Interest in the composer's music grew rapidly in the period after his death and his previously scarce discography was populated with numerous new recordings, mostly on independent labels.

[9]Another great admirer of Piano and String Quartet, the minimalist composer Steve Reich, encountered the piece years after its premiere.

[13] A typical performance takes approximately 80–90 minutes, much longer than most music written by his peers in the avant-garde or even his own early works.

[21] The sustain pedal of the piano remains pressed down for the entire performance, which indefinitely lengthens the notes and causes sympathetic resonance among the strings.

According to the Rough Guide to classical music, the piece initially "seems to have no beginning or end, no intention or direction"; however, the listener's attention is gradually enhanced and subtle changes in tone become magnified as it progresses, until even the subtlest differences take on the capacity to impart "a resonance and an intensity that is startling.

"[4] Upon reading the score, Steve Reich found that many of its "quiet mysterious chords" were in fact "inversions of themselves", and that "[r]epetitions of material were never exact repetitions".

[25] The Kronos Quartet and Takahashi recorded the piece in November 1991 at Skywalker Ranch in Nicasio, California, with production by Judith Sherman.

Sherman called the Skywalker facilities "the most perfect recording room", noting that the reverberation was distributed remarkably evenly across the frequency band.

Although he cautioned that less-adventurous listeners may find the recording to be "the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture, made all the more excruciating by its quiet dynamics and lack of rhythmic, melodic or harmonic gesture", he noted that "[o]thers will find Feldman's tranquil, self-contained sounds a balm for ears and spirit long since turned off by the busy density that characterizes so much new music.

"[28] Art Lange called it "[m]usic unlike any other" in a review for the classical music magazine Fanfare, though he hedged that those already "familiar with Feldman's idiom" would likely consider the newly recorded piece "different enough, without making any major breakthroughs".

"[30] Glenn Swan of AllMusic called the recording "[b]reathtaking" and wrote that the musicians "conjure up the ghost of Feldman to wander the streets of New York as if they were abandoned.

[38][39] Colin Clarke of the journal Tempo praised "the utmost delicacy" of Tilbury's playing and compared the recording favorably to the original: "The sense of space, so evident in the Nonesuch version, is here even more entrenched—there is almost a feeling of risk in how long the gaps between statements of the prevailing arpeggio figure can last.