Scenes for String Quartet started out life as a series of fragments written as incidental music for Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays when I was a fellow at Tanglewood Music Center in 2016. Over the following two years I gradually reshaped those explicitly programmatic miniatures into the present set of seven movements. As can be inferred from their titles, the movements became more abstract than their original conception, with a symmetrical structure of two Lullabies and two Scherzos intercut with a Prelude, an Interlude and a Postlude. I hope, however, that the music retains a quality of vivid storytelling and scene painting.