I promised one of my performers that I would write a viola quartet about a year ago, so I figured this concert was the perfect opportunity. The idea to write the piece came when I was curious about a picture on the wall in a friend’s room: a misty red mountain scene, with the moon setting in front of the mountains. I assigned each aspect of the picture to a short motif and created a timeline of events as one would “travel” through the picture, though I eventually abandoned the timeline and finished the piece independent of a particular story, though the name stuck.