Like the desert horizons I saw daily while it was being written, the First Quartet presents a continuous unfolding and changing of expressive characters—one woven into the other or emerging from it—on a large scale. The general plan was suggested by Jean Cocteau's film ''Le Sang d'un poète'', in which the entire dreamlike action is framed by an interrupted slow-motion shot of a tall brick chimney in an empty lot being dynamited. Just as the chimney begins to fall apart, the shot is broken off and the entire movie follows, after which the shot of the chimney is resumed at the point it left off, showing its disintegration in mid-air, and closing the film with its collapse on the ground. A similar interrupted continuity is employed in this quartet's starting with a cadenza for cello alone that is continued by the first violin alone at the very end. On one level, I interpret Cocteau's idea (and my own) as establishing the difference between external time (measured by the falling chimney, or the cadenza) and internal dream time (the main body of the work)—the dream time lasting but a moment of external time, but from the dreamer's point of view, a long stretch.〔Elliott Carter, "String Quartets Nos. 1, 1951, and 2, 1959," in ''Collected Essays and Lecture, 1937-1995'', ed. Jonathan Bernard, 231-235 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 233.〕

Note that while there are really four movements in this piece, only three are marked in the score as separate movements, and these three do not correspond to the four "real" movements. The four "real" movements are Fantasia, Allegro scorrevole, Adagio, and Variations. But the movements are all played ''attacca'', with the pauses coming in the middle of the Allegro scorrevole and near the beginning of the Variations. Thus there are only two pauses, dividing the piece into three sections. The reason for this unusual division of movements is that the tempo and character change, which occurs between what are usually called movements, is the goal, the climax of the techniques of metrical modulation which have been used. It would destroy the effect to break off the logical plan of movement just at its high point. Thus pauses can come only between sections using the same basic material. This is most obvious in the case of the pause before the movement marked Variations. In reality, at that point the Variations have already been going on for some time.〔Elliot Carter, "The Time Dimension in Music," in ''Collected Essays and Lecture, 1937-1995'', ed. Jonathan Bernard, 224-228 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 227.〕

In all my works from the Cello Sonata up through the Double Concerto I used specific chords mainly as unifying factors in the musical rhetoric—that is, as frequently recurring central sounds from which the different pitch material of the pieces was derived. For example, my First String Quartet is based on an "all-interval" four-note chord, which is used constantly, both vertically and occasionally as a motive to join all the intervals of the work into a characteristic sound whose presence is felt "through" all the very different kinds of linear intervallic writing. This chord functions as a harmonic "frame" for the work in just the sense I meant earlier, in talking about all the events and details of a piece of music feel as if they belong together and constitute a convincing and unified musical continuity.〔Allen Edwards, ''Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter'' (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 106-107.〕