Shih-hsien Hsu, born in 1953. He is a composer, trumpet player and the 10th chairman of the music department of National Taiwan University of the Arts.

The subject of this thesis, Potter and clay, a string quartet, is his first work composed in 2011 for the resident string quartet of the school of music.

It is a single movement consisting of five paragraphs, as a Christian, he compares the creator God and man to potter and clay as the title, and the music is based on the four instruments of a string quartet, which compares the cooperation and competition between the four human bodies and spirits.

This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, explaining the research motivation and methods. The second chapter expounds on Shih-hsien Hsu’s life and creation process. In the third chapter, the author takes the creation technique of the string quartet "The Potter and the Clay" as an entry point and conducts a detailed musical analysis based on the style and characteristics in each paragraph. In the fourth chapter, the author views this work from the perspective of the composer, and through face-to-face interviews with the composer and personal performance experience, sorts out the interpretation methods that are closest to the composer's creation vocabulary. The fifth chapter is the conclusion, which is the summary of all the above research contents.