I've had the honor of knowing my friend, Joel Mandelbaum, for decades. Kind and supportive, he is also as erudite a man as one is ever to encounter. His music, in general, is in a tonal, almost neo-Mahlerian vein, and is compelling, moving, and often witty. His Second String Quartet, though, is a bit of an outlier. It came out of his "most intensive and extensive attempt to come to terms with serialism and other 'Avant Garde' ideas of the establishment in 1965." Personally, I find the result to be one of his most effective works. And, though most of it can hardly be classified under the umbrella term "tonal," because the 16-note row he uses is comprised of two registrally-disparate octatonic collections (resulting, naturally, in a fully-diminished seventh chord being present as 4 common tones between the collections: in this case C#-E-G-Bb) there are certainly what one might refer to as tonal overtones (if you'll pardon the expression) throughout the work. They come as a type of cognate, or tonal "currency" as I call them in my dissertation (about Ives). To my ear, this is particularly evident in the variation excerpted for this month's clip.