Instrumentation:
string quartet (2 violins, viola, cello)

Duration:
9 minutes

Premiere, 1st version:
December 20, 2018 – Denver, CO
@ Understudy Art Incubator, in the Colorado Convention Center

Premiere, 2nd (current) version:
October 10, 2025 – Portland, OR
@ The Hallowed Halls
performance by:
Casey Bozell, violin
Jenny Estrin, violin
Amy Roesler, viola
Dylan Rieck, cello

Download a perusal score:
The Root Takes Hold – Perusal Score

If you’d like to purchase pdf versions of the score and parts for The Root Takes Hold, drop me a line. Cost: $15

I first wrote and produced The Root Takes Hold in Denver in 2018. The performance was made possible through the support of my friend Karli Rhind, a violist who studied at UNM in Albuquerque the same time as me. By 2018, we were both living in Denver, and Karli was in a quartet looking for music to play. She helped me scope out the original venue (a little performance space tucked under the Colorado Convention Center, looking out on a Light Rail station) and the performers.

The current version was updated shortly after that performance, and it was again fully revised for a recording and performance in 2025. That is the current version.

There is no specific image or story to go with this piece. It’s spun out of feelings of desire and nostalgia.

The title refers to a sense of longing I’ve had my whole life, a feeling of displacement and restlessness that has led me to wander. Arriving and leaving and arriving, with their joys and sorrows, always follow one another. But I think, if you pay attention, there’s something deep within us that weathers all these changes, and draws a kind of nourishment from the movement. That wants everything to unfold exactly as it does. I believe this piece outlines that thing buried in us – at root – that abides beneath all the striving, celebrating, and sorrow.

The roughly 9 minute piece follows a rondo-like structure. Beginning with a short, languorous duet between viola and cello, a main melodic theme in F minor is introduced, which returns over and over again in different forms, interspersed between several counterthemes, resets, fugues, and other explorations.

The piece was recorded on October 10, 2025 at The Hallowed Halls in Portland, with the seemingly effortless talents of Casey Bozell and Jenny Estrin on violin, Amy Roesler on viola, and Dylan Rieck on cello – for which I’m very grateful.