Bartók’s Third String Quartet, often identified as an affirmation of the composer’s fundamentally modernist stance, has been approached with a variety of post-tonal analytical methods, many of them pitch-class oriented. Certain features of the work suggest that a method that specifically privileges pitch, yet also allows for limited ‘impingement’ by pitch-class considerations, would yield valuable insights into its structure. The ‘sites’ chosen for analysis exemplify various types of textures and procedures that seem especially significant to the quartet as a whole.