In this piece I was interested in exploring, what was for me, at that time, a new and burgeoning personal aesthetic of simplicity and trying to develop a sense of elegantly crafted musical design. In particular, I was fascinated with subtle concepts of time, timbre, and inversional relationships: the contraction and dilation of pulse, the cessation of abstract time, timbral fusing, and intervalic affinity under diatonic-like inversion and contraposition. All of this I tried to evoke in the title of the piece.
There are twelve small vignettes that range in length from one measure to around sixty. Some serve to educe musical ideas, others remember and ruminate on previously stated material; it was intended that some elements of the composition, through an almost syncretistic way, would cohere to form the dramatic arc of the piece and provide an aurally apparent structure.
are | our was written for flute and piano. The recording is broken into 9 segments which contain the 12 pieces. It was premiered by Tod Brody on flute and Karen Rosenak at the piano.