Always fun when I get to rig a Super Nintendo controller with Ableton. This 60-second composition is a good chunk of my childhood.

As a teenager, I was once stranded with my brother-in-law in Tel Aviv. My parents were settling a “security crisis” at the airport (that’s its own story for another day). We waited for them in the apartment of Manya, one of my oldest relatives. I think Manya spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Polish. We spoke English. We spent hours together waiting for my parents. In the meantime, we had lunch and developed a sort of pidgin language for things like “pass the butter, please”. In our language that was, “Le Petit General, bevakasha”. That’s because Israeli butter packaging had a cameo of Napoleon Bonaparte where the Land O’Lakes lady is supposed to be. Manya told us stories in unknown languages for hours, accompanied by old photographs and colorful gestures - the only one I remember was of a bullet going into someone’s leg and blood spraying out Wednesday Addams style. I wonder what those stories were about. Photos of faces who have no one left to remember them. Now I speak a…passable conversational Yiddish. But Manya isn’t around to speak to anymore. Not many Yiddish speakers are. I often hear the icebreaker question, “If you could have lunch with anyone who ever lived, who would it be?” I’d love to have that lunch with Manya again. I’d listen to her stories as an adult who speaks her language. In real life, we don’t get to go back. We can only live our lives once and when moments have passed they’ve passed. Anything else is for imagination. Aether is a 60-second composition for backward string quartet. Notes and dynamics were performed in reverse order and the recording you see has been inverted. The feathers that seem to float up were actually dropped down from out of the shot by other ensemble members. Thanks to Delirium Musicum for performing the piece without even being able to know what it would sound like. Etienne, YuEun, Emily, and Javier, I can say with all sincerity that you sounded marvelous forward and backward.

Performed by Kristin Delia Hayes and Eric Peterson

A 60-second composition

Making music out of a recording of my future daughter's heartbeat.

I think I nearly broke Adobe Premiere with this. It was not happy.