3 and 4 were discovered by Bianca Ţiplea Temeș at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, and represent Ligeti's late period.
These two movements were written for the graduation exam at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, with a stylistic uncertainty.
[2] Ligeti knew these works only from their scores, performances of them being banned under communist regimes at the time.
In the second, everything is reduced to very slow motion, and the music seems to be coming from a distance, with great lyricism.
The pizzicato third movement is another of Ligeti's machine-like studies, hard and mechanical, whereby the parts playing repeated notes creates a "granulated" continuum.
The quartet was projected to have a pizzicato movement, uneven tremolo, and the harmony would also be very chromatic, but also spectral and with complex polyrhythms.