George Lewis models his 20-minute commission for the Mivos Quartet on rice-growing in Sierra Leone, where experimentation and risk (“playing with seeds”) lead to better harvests. In his piece, “The music is ‘grown’ from ‘seeds’ that are developed into new ‘varietals’ through trajectories of register, temporal flux (stretching/compressing), sudden reversals of apparent fortune, and the nomadism that is central to shifting cultivation.” Lewis numbers his string quartets with .5 because Signifying Riffs, for strings and percussion, counts as half a quartet.