The Rose of the Winds was composed in anticipation of my first visit to the Taos region of New Mexico, where I was invited to be Composer-in-residence for the 1998 Music from Angel Fire chamber music festival. I even bought a beautiful book of photographs of the area and kept it propped open to a few favorites, in particular a wonderful shot of a single desert flower perched at the top of a dune against a bright blue sky. So the piece unfolds as a kind of imagined journey in that landscape, starting out with an evocation of its quiet spaciousness, and then moving through more animated phases evoking various sounds of nature, insects, birds, wind and rain, before settling down at the end to more quiet, inward singing and the tolling of bells.