This time I wanted to play around with atmosphere and very little movement. Mahler explored silence and its role in music in his later compositions. Here, I’m doing something similar. I wanted to take a small amount of material and expand it over about two minutes. The key, I found, to making a lasting phrase over the course of the long two minutes is to have the material make the ear ask a question, pause, then answer it. Once the ear is used to this amount of time in between question and answer, it knows what to expect for the duration of the piece. These expectations make the ear adjust to the stretched-out lines and long pulses of nothing.

– Ben