Composer’s note: Far Psalteries of Summer was written for the 2003 Ernest Bloch Music Festival Composers Symposium, which took place in Newport, Oregon. The four instruments are often treated in pairs, with piano and marimba providing a rippling undercurrent to long lines played jointly by violin and cello, as if enhanced versions of both plucked and bowed psalteries (a kind of zither) were accompanying one another. The title is taken from an Emily Dickinson poem, whose first stanzas are these:

The Trees like Tassels — hit — and swung —

There seemed to rise a Tune

From Miniature Creatures

Accompanying the Sun —

Far Psalteries of Summer —

Enamoring the Ear

They never yet did satisfy —

Remotest — when most fair