There are Books, and there are Albums. We understand the Book. It is structured, hierarchic, a monolith. The Album - suggested Roland Barthes - is magically different: an ‘interweaving of contingencies’, an ‘anthology of inspirations.’ Tear a page from an Album and you ‘lose nothing’. A Book of Inventions by John Woolrich - six string quartets and counting; a compendium of characters, one-offs to be heard in isolation, or choice groups, or splendid entirety - is pure Album.

Yet clearly it is also Book: a total project; a model collection of ‘mechanisms for discovering good ideas’ (as the inventions of Bach have been described); a significant, and wondrously Protean, addition to the modern quartet repertoire. We admire the whole, and wonder at the parts. Does Villanesca simply replay an old Italian dance, as the title suggests? ‘Another journey calls.’ But what kind of journey, striking out so boldly in the sunshine, ending in an icy hush on the instruments’ fingerboards? The short stories of Robert Walser were sketches for novel that was a ‘torn-apart book of myself’; they too very often took the form of a stroll by the abyss.

One of the quartets is titled ‘Scamander’, after the mythical river. And indeed, Woolrich’s diaristic pieces, travelling from A to Z at their circumstantial pace, seem to follow the river mode. But there is always the double edge with Woolrich. Scamander was a strange river, we are told by Homer, with a source in two springs, one hot, one cold.

We must be alert. Book, or Album? Hot, or Cold? Or even, possibly, both?