String Quartet No. 2, also known by its other title Company, is a string quartet by American composer Philip Glass. This composition was finished in January 1983 in New York City, and was expected to be a piece of instrumental music for Fred Neumann's adaptation of Samuel Beckett's 1979 novella with the same name.

After withdrawing his first sketch of a string quartet in 1963, Philip Glass composed his String Quartet No. 2 seventeen years after his first quartet, even though it was not initially conceived as chamber music, but for theater. This work was composed as a result of Glass' collaboration with the Mabou Mines quartet, of which he married JoAnne Akalaitis, one of its members. Glass himself decided to extract the music he had written for Samuel Beckett's Company, and wrote a score thought to be a concert work on its own.^[1]

This composition consists of four movements and takes approximately nine minutes to perform. The movements are listed as follows:

The main theme of this work is subjugated to arpeggios in minor keys all along the four movements. All of the movements of this monochrome work are highly and closely related to each other. This composition is written for string quartet, but has been performed by string orchestras.^[2]

Notable recordings of this composition include:

• String Quartet No. 2 on YouTube, ReDo Quartet, 2011

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List of compositions
Compositions	Music in Twelve Parts Glassworks String Quartet No. 2 (Company) String Quartet No. 4 (Buczak) The Light Passages Itaipu Songs from Liquid Days Aguas da Amazonia
Operas	Einstein on the Beach Satyagraha The Photographer Akhnaten The Civil Wars The Juniper Tree The Fall of the House of Usher The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 1000 Airplanes on the Roof Hydrogen Jukebox The Voyage Orphée Les Enfants terribles La Belle et la Bête Monsters of Grace White Raven In the Penal Colony Galileo Galilei The Sound of a Voice Waiting for the Barbarians Appomattox Kepler The Perfect American The Trial
Symphonies	No. 1 (Low) No. 2 No. 3 No. 4 ("Heroes") No. 5 (Choral) No. 6 (Plutonian Ode) No. 7 (Toltec) No. 8 No. 9 No. 10 No. 11 No. 12 (Lodger)
Concertos	Piano Concerto No. 1 (Tirol) Piano Concerto No. 2 (After Lewis and Clark) Harpsichord Concerto Violin Concerto (withdrawn) Violin Concerto No. 1 Violin Concerto No. 2 (American Four Seasons) Cello Concerto No. 1 Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra
Film scores	Dracula (1999)
Related articles	Philip Glass Ensemble Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts Minimal music Robert Wilson Dennis Russell Davies David Henry Hwang Godfrey Reggio Errol Morris La Monte Young Steve Reich Terry Riley Kronos Quartet Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread
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