Variation XXVII (Quartet for Ruth) is for any four instruments and live electronic processing. The melodic material is derived from the third movement of Ruth Crawford-Seeger's 1931 String Quartet, in which clusters of pitches slowly ascend and then descend, the harmony changing one pitch at a time. An homage to Seeger's ideas, Quartet for Ruth implements a similar process through live electronic processing. The quartet plays in unison while a computer records and plays random samples from the past twenty seconds, creating a changing harmonic background from the melody.