Goblin Market was composed in 1993 for trombonist William Bootz on a National Endowment for the Arts Composer Fellowship, and is based upon the poem of the same name by Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). The work itself is not intended as a programmatic representation of the poem, but is rather a structural and psychological study of the actions and characters portrayed therein; thus the material has been reworked to the extent that it exists in this form as a parallel or alternate realization of the original impetus, almost as a shadow or spectre. To this end, the work is divided into five movements, according to the dramatic unfolding of the poem. Each of these movements is itself parsed into smaller sections, the number and duration of these sections corresponding to each paragraph of text; thus, the pacing of the musical work is based directly upon that of the poem itself.

The Rossetti poem concerns two sisters, Laura and Lizzie. Each day as they stroll through the woods to the market, they hear the cries of the goblin men, enticing them to come buy their fruits (come buy, come buy). Though the girls are aware of the dangers of listening to the goblin men, Laura one day gives into the temptation. As she peeks over a knoll, the grotesque little men rush her, offering luscious fruits from their strange, enticing garden. After buying their fruits with a lock of hair and a tear, Laura is treated to tastes and pleasures beyond her imagination. Eager to repeat the encounter the following day, Laura is devastated to find that now only her sister hears the cries of the goblin men (open heart/absent dream). Pining for lost pleasures, Laura begins to waste away (Laura dwindling). In an effort to save her sister, Lizzie confronts the goblin men, but stubbornly refuses to eat their fruits (resistance). Eventually the goblin men give up, leaving Lizzie in disgust (bitterness without a name). The shared experience brings the two sisters together and heals Laura of her wasting anguish.

In the present work, the two main characters of the poem are represented by mutually exclusive pitch cells, one consisting of five pitch classes, the other of seven (thus comprising all twelve pitch classes when combined). These cells are utilized according to the action within the poem; thus their segregation or integration is directly linked to the poem's narrative structure. The 5:7:12 scheme is also applied proportionally throughout the work, evidenced primarily in the temporal relationships between the various elements within the environment and solo parts.

The musical-dramatic content of each section of the work is the result of a psychological extrapolation of the drama within the poem, which has then been superimposed upon or recast within more traditional formal models. However, in several cases these boundaries have been obscured as a result of the various interrelationships: for example, the theme of the second movement variations is actually a paraphrase of the second section of the first movement, as well as a miniature set of variations in itself; the variations of the second movement continue in the fifth movement, after being interrupted by movements III and IV; the third movement is a passacaglia (i.e., continuous variations) based exclusively upon the seven-note pitch cell, and is thus an extension of (or obsession upon) variation 4 of the second movement. In a broad sense then, the entire work may be viewed as a set of variations on the two pitch cells (thus making the second and fifth movements "variations within/upon variations").

From a dramatic standpoint, the work depicts the course of a protagonist (trombonist) through a reflection of the plot (environment) as generated by the composer's response to the content of Rossetti's poem.