Alongside members of Schallfeld Ensemble and fellow Rome Prize winner Jen Shyu, this concert showcases my work as a composer with the Italian premiere of a string quartet I wrote when I was 22 years old, laugh radish (2017). It also incorporates my work as a performer within the framework of a free improvisation. The program notes for laugh radish—dedicated to my partner Alex—still ring true, eight years later:

I wish I could say this is about hunters, but I do not like hunting. I want to say it’s about this map of time in the sky, how each star’s light reaches Earth a little later than the other. I would like this to be about an ocean or a heart or a tree. But the instinctive expressions of happiness have pressed this to be about radishes. The spontaneous sounds and movements of the face and body, those swollen, pungent-tasting roots that are small, spherical, and red—I gather them. My heart moves toward them like slow summer rain in the distance. The colors yellow in the warmness. I tell you I want to be one, sticking out of the ground like a tongue. All I can think about is eating radishes raw with salad.