"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...' (Charles Darwin)

Charles Darwin returned from his voyage on the Beagle in 1836 and two years later married his cousin Emma Wedgwood and settled in Down House, Kent. This beautiful house was the home of Darwin for the rest of his life. The first movement, taking Down House as its background, develops the 3-note figure of The Man Who Walked With Henslow, this time spreading it across the strings to give a celebratory feel to the opening of the work. The lines interweave in a way reminiscent of Darwin's quotation (above) gradually stretching the scale to be longer and more chromatic, and filling in the octave, the first interval used in Henslow. The mood is interrupted with a memory from the Beagle quartet before a reworking of the first main section from Henslow - Down House was full of children (the Darwins had ten in all) and so the material from Darwin's own childhood is the main component. Occasionally, the 'English' quality of the movement marks the music of Darwin's great nephew, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

As the title suggests, Origins is a bringing together of the contributory material of Henslow and the string quartet. It opens with a memory of the Galapagos, becoming intertwined with some material from the death of Darwin's mother and a feel of the hard walking/trekking that he did during his voyage. The mood is broken by a reworking of one of the 'Darwin finch' motifs ; eight were used in the quartet, taken from original recordings of these famous birds. This section completes via the three notes (C, B, G) of the bells of the church in Downe* village and the completion of the scale as eight notes, set across the strings with some intervals inverted. The movement is closed by a re-emergence of a finch motif, this time slightly altered (as a species would be) and underpinned with a counter-melody of different character.

The publication of On The Origin of Species was hurried due to the closeness of others to Darwin's theories. Thus, after a fragment of Henslow opens the movement in a declamatory way, it has a darker feel, reminiscent of the difficulty which Darwin had with bringing his studies to conclusion. A more agitated section follows in which the notes of the scale increasingly form the harmony, alongside patches of rhythmic development both within an instrumental part and across the strings. After the rigours of publication and the intense attacks on his thinking by the Church and Press, Darwin's life gradually settled to one of recognition and acknowledgement. The piece therefore closes with a return to a more settled character.

* Although Downe Village took this spelling, Darwin refused it for Down House. Further bells have been added to St. Mary's Church in Downe since Darwin lived in the village.