String Quintet is a short piece written for, as the name implies, five string instruments: two violins, a viola, cello and double bass. I wrote it when I was about 14, maybe 15 years old.

The story behind String Quintet is this:

One day I picked up my first violin, a sparkly red, toy of a violin, which I hadn't used for a few years. The E string had snapped and it had a nice layer of dust on it. I plucked the three remaining strings to hear just how out of tune they were, and they are very out of tune, but to my surprise they harmonised nicely together. I messed around with it for a while, making an unoriginal, tango-ish bass line, then, thinking nothing more of it, I carried on with my day. A few days later, at the piano, I found myself messing around with this bass line, but couldn't remember why it sounded so familiar (I have a short memory). A few days later still, I plucked the violin strings again and it all came back to me. I decided to get it out of my system by turning it into a composition. At about the same time, one of my music teachers had been explaining to me different transposition techniques used in compositions (writing phrases upside-down, back-to-front, higher or lower in pitch, half or double time etc), so I employed, or rather, used to death, these techniques throughout the compositional process, developing the music almost entirely from the three notes I heard when I picked up my little, sparkly red, out of tune violin.