Golds

Premiered by Bergamot Quartet (Hardanger instruments) and Liam Elliot (Resin) in October 2025. Video by Four/Ten Media. The constant of the prairie is golds. [In the eastern and coastal forests, you find every nuance of green represented in the bright mass of mosses and near blackened spruce.] By September the summer heat has bleached the grasses to a sea of golds, their seeds dried and loosened. I reach down and strip the seeds off a stalk with two fingers, forming a brief flower that scatters on the wind whose breaths are echoed by racing ripples in the grasses. Patches of poplar and aspen trickle the dawn light. By September the shortened days have aged their leaves, turned them to golds, thinning the washes of wind that rattles their leaves and sounds like home. This piece was composed for Bergamot's quartet of Hardanger-style instruments featuring sympathetic strings, and for my own instrument Resin, which adds playable sympathetic resonance to the sounds of other performers. This performance was a part of my dissertation show in completion of my PhD at Princeton.