Decca Records reissued the album in the UK on July 8, 2002, as part of the British Music Collection, giving it yet a third cover.

It is built out of three distinct and diverse pre-existing music sources: John Bull's Walsingham Variations, Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartet No.

"Walsingham" was a popular song in Bull's time, and Nyman's use of "Unchained Melody" (originally written for a 1955 prison film titled Unchained and famously covered by The Righteous Brothers, and the favorite song of Nyman's wife, Aet) is a contemporary equivalent.

2 (1988) was commissioned for a dance work called Miniatures, choreographed and performed by Shobana Jeyasingh, who dictated the rhythmic structure of the piece, based on the South Indian Bharata Natyam tradition.

3 (1990), commissioned by Alexander Balanescu, is based on Romanian folk music, along with material from his choral work Out of the Ruins, via a process Nyman describes as "translation."

It affected much of Nyman's composition throughout the 1990s—riffs, in particular, a seven-note scalar ostinato, from it appear in À la folie, Carrington (in which it was used as a temp track and ultimately was transformed into a theme for Lytton Strachey), Practical Magic (not used in the finished film), The End of the Affair, and The Claim.

In addition, he elides caesuras and makes use of the stringed instruments' ability to sustain far longer than a human voice.

Some cause of the variation is that the quartet is a celebration of the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, whereas Out of the Ruins is an expression of the hopelessness after an earthquake.

Like the first String Quartet, the piece is a reflection of Nyman's postgraduate work with Thurston Dart, who sent him to Romania in 1965 to gather folk music.