Year: 2025

Duration: c. 5 minutes

Instrumentation: violin, cello, piano
(alternate arrangement available for violin, viola, and piano)

Premiere information: 8 December 2025, Nicholas Music Center at Mason Gross School of the Arts

Wenting Bian - violin
Eliott Wells - cello
Jorge Tabares Garcia - piano

Notes: This is based on an Appalachian variant of a folk tune called “The Cuckoo,” which I chopped up, scrambled with magic squares, layered, and chopped up again - hence, diced cuckoo. The title is from Sumer is icumen in, a 13th-century song about cuckoos (and the oldest known example of 6-part polyphony).

In modern English, it means ‘and the wood is coming into leaf now.’