Quicksilver is a five-minute, one movement work with a slow-fast, two part structure. While composing Quicksilver, my working titles were Mercurio and Bead Games. Although these titles were eventually abandoned, they offer insight into my thoughts while composing. I saw the piece as one with sudden shifts of character and a synthesis of styles, the latter being a vague reference to the game in the Hermann Hesse novel. The "glass bead game" in the novel was never fully described, but was a very sophisticated game in the future involving complex recombinations of music, mathematics, and philosophy. – Steve Rouse