Danuta Mirka in Eary Music: "Part One includes a perceptive discussion of texture and ensemble play. Although the issue of texture is one of long standing in scholarship on the Haydn quartets, the authors make a significant contribution by providing a fine-grained specification of textural types. Particularly persuasive is their account of thematic diffusion and conversation. They observe that the texture in which a succession of solo phrases is assigned to different ensemble members (described by Mara Parker as ‘polite conversation’) is not typical of Haydn. Instead, Haydn's string quartet technique is best represented as the flexible collaboration of individual instruments exchanging their functions as leading or subservient voices, and building up unified sound complexes."