I don’t bleed sweet - for solo cello. Commissioned and premiered by Aliya Ultan in May 2017.
I don’t bleed sweet traces between three main ideas – aggressive jete hits, a glassy flutter, and more restful trills. The interplay between these few characters allow for different areas of stasis, rest, or intensity that flow between each other. What emerges is a piece that always maintains a contradicting undercurrent of stability and restlessness. This unsettled tone is echoed in the title, I don’t bleed sweet, which comes from a poem by Susan Lewis from her collection State of the Union.