Besides the fact that Ur is an ancient Sumerian city on the Euphrates in the Southern Iraq, the legendary birthplace of the patriarch Abraham (Genesis 11:31), in German the word also refers to something that is primeval and privitive. This piece is inspired by the concept of "Ur(sprache)"(German), which refers to the concept of a hypothetically reconstructed parent language. Each measure in "Ur" is constructed like the vocabylary of a language, and is repeated, as required, to form structural sentences. The musical vocabulary is visually mapped to the Aramaic Estrangela script. Aramaic, one of the oldeest and rarest languages, combined with the ancient sound of the oboe d'amore served as the pretext for "Ur". Originally composed in 1998, I (very) recently completely revised the piece for my friend Lise Beauchamp.
Michael Oesterle
January 2001