Gloria Coates was born in Wisconsin and began composing at an early age. Her string quartets are a unique combination of her love of melting, indistinct textures impossible to pin down by ear, but also that of symmetry manifested by canons, palindromes (a form which is the same backwards as forwards), and simple structures underpinning the swirling waves of sound. The first movement of her Quartet No. 5 is a canon at the quarter tone, while her Quartet No. 1 is an elaborately structured mirror canon which has become distilled in her more recent Quartet No. 6, whose second movement features a melody emerging from a web of glissandi, as though long forgotten.