2 (1954) is the second of six string quartets by the American composer Milton Babbitt.
The form of this chamber composition evolves from and expounds features of a basic twelve-tone series.
And the beauty is not purely formal: there are many incidental pleasures in the springing deployment of string effects, as well as elegant changes of gear at the junctions between the four principal sections.
[1])The pitch material is developed gradually in the opening bars.
The quartet alternates such sections of intervallic exposition with sections that develop the intervals presented up to that point, until eleven different ordered pitch-class intervals have been presented and developed until, in a moment referred to by Babbitt as "telling you the butler did it", the set that controls the entire musical structure is revealed by a process of "disambiguation", as Babbitt himself described it.