Instruments are not instruments. Instruments are people. My compositional praxis is based on this fundamental principle that the musical potential of any instrument depends on who is playing it. As a composer, I depend upon fully engaged performers who enable me to take risks. New music requires trust and commitment. Elinor Frey is just that kind of player, who inspires me and who I trust. The opportunity to write for her and her five-string baroque cello was a chance to imagine a counterfactual history of the five-string baroque cello. My piece is a kind of meta-suite in five movements, one that traverses time. Starting with a contemporary recasting of a prelude (“Night opening its black flower”), the following movements gradually approach a ghost of the baroque. The ghost appears clearest in the middle movement (“we are resurrected”) distorted by microtones, then fades away. In the last movement (“an ocean bell sounding”), bell-like incantations of chords of the open strings, harmonies based on just intonation, linger insistently in a gesture-less field, until, they begin to exert their own validity, or, perhaps we begin to accept them for what they are, an assessment no longer appurtenant to standards of the past.

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