With Shostakovich's Twelfth Quartet, Op. 133, completed in 1968 and published this year (why the delay?), the contemporary problem stands on its head, on and off, for close on thirty minutes—if, that is to say, we take the reactions of some of the most interesting members of our musical culture into account (composers, advanced and conservative, critics, musical music lovers); and without reactions, without music's social situation, there wouldn't be any problem anyway: the Grosse Fuge was absolutely unproblematic before it was repeatedly played, and some of it understood. But that was, has been, the contemporary problem standing on its feet—chronically advanced music: in advance, that is to say, not only of its own time, but of successive later eras, with the result that we still don't altogether understand the work (as I call it), or the movement (as others call it)—or I don't anyway; why does it end so abruptly? All I get in reply to my question is my own musical depression: people don't even notice that it does end abruptly.