Plutonium Tears (2026) - performed by Mivos Quartet, 7/20/26

Premiered at the Ateneo Musical del Puerto, València, Spain as part of the Valencia International Performing Arts (VIPA) Summer Festival, July 20, 2026 Artistic Director: Carlos Amat Executive Director: Emmanuel Berrido Composition Program Director: Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann Both the audio and video were expertly produced by Emmanuel Berrido, a truly impactful voice in the teaching and coordinating of new music and an amazing composer himself! Check out his works here:    / @emmanuelberridomusic   My heart is full of deepest appreciation for Mivos Quartet, too, for putting so much time and energy into this work and into the fostering of an unforgettably fulfilling festival experience. Check out more of Mivos's legendary recordings on their channel:    / @mivosquartet   Mivos Quartet: Olivia de Prato: violin William Overcash: violin Victor Lowrie Tafoya: viola Nathan Watts: cello Revised program notes: "Plutonium Tears" found its genesis in a compliment paid to me by a family friend, who after hearing one of my recent works performed live in Boston, said that my style evoked "the language of Pluto" to his ears. I returned to this imagery after rereading an old childhood favorite, R.J. Palacio's Auggie & Me, wherein a character cries upon learning that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, losing its planetary status. The character's friend reflects on this incident years later, saying, "I knew he couldn't explain his Plutonian tears." This sentiment, to me, has always confirmed the idea that grief rarely manifests in expected ways: it can be audacious or even shocking, and it often transcends explanation or codified standards of behavior. In this way, Palacio's writing also goes hand in hand with another clever literary observation. In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le petit prince, the unnamed narrator tells us: "C'est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes." ("It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.") These thoughts naturally led me back to my work as an educator, and how rapidly and disorientingly the field is changing. I've noticed how the encroachment of large language models on public schools has created frustration in the minds of children who don't understand why there is now another voice telling them what to do, a voice that doesn't belong to a trusted adult but to a computer algorithm. Seeing students take home AI-generated subtraction worksheets, complete with spelling errors and unclear syntax, made me think of what a child might go through when they attempt this inscrutable assignment later on at home. Perhaps they would approach it with confidence first, later marred by the confusion of encountering these "unsolvable problems" devoid of human intuition. Then, they might try to overcome it in the pursuit of tenacity, only to finally fall apart and melt down into grief as the task gradually reveals itself to be impossible - not by design, but by accident. The quartet's harmonic and rhythmic adventures essentially map this journey, and the tears that the sound world is designed to reflect are not the quiet tears of the adult world, but the loud and angry tears of childhood, when everything feels crucial and immediate. In this sense, the tears are both "Plutonian" (from that far-off mysterious world that adults may never fully grasp, in the broadest Saint-Exupérian sense) and "plutonium" (read: radioactive, hot, stinging, damaging). "Plutonium Tears" (C) 2026 Adam Beiter (Late Cretaceous Music/ASCAP) Score available for perusal or purchase! Contact the composer directly at adam.[mylastname]03@gmail.com to obtain a score.