I had been listening to a lot of Bartok before composing Goldenrod. The intention was to create an energetic, dance-like and somewhat chaotic feel to the music, similar to Bartok's Dance Suite. The piece is structured in a simple ternary form. The outer sections are primarily modal and characterized by frantic and de-synchronized motion punctuated with unison cadences while the inner section is more ethereal and colored with whole-tone tonalities.