A Melange of Savage Flowers was written for Nick Walshe, An-Laurence Higgins, Mehdi Rezania and Julie Sun Lee during Toronto Creative Music Lab 2016. The title arose from a creative mistranslation of the French-language label on a packet of seeds, “mélange des fleurs sauvages.” The phrase strongly suggested a musical image to me, delicate but unruly and full of incongruously mismatched elements. Creative mistranslation also seemed an apt metaphor for the process of bringing together such an eclectic group of instruments, each one native to a distinct tradition.