When requested by my Los Angeles-based art-collector friend Raj Dhawan to write music for an exhibition of his collection of Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) paintings, I at once thought of basing the music on that of a Mucha contemporary and compatriot. My choice fell on the composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), born, like Mucha, in Moravia (then in the Austrian Empire, today in the Czech Republic). Thirty-seven selected Mucha paintings are matched by an equal number of Janáček pieces, many of them movements of larger works. The bigger the paintings, the longer the music selections are: the square root of the areas in inches (") of the Mucha works equals the corresponding Janáček selection durations in seconds ("). A sharp crack preceding each section stems from a clapperboard as used in movie recordings.

At first the music is constrained to the range of a minor seventh, all notes outside this range being discarded. The notes are also redistributed among five instruments – flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano – and the range gradually increases to just over four octaves, each instrument being allotted exactly ten notes by then. Analog to this, each Mucha painting is first shown only with its most widespread color, the rest being rendered in grey. During the run of each Janáček music, the colors of the Mucha works are expanded in range, starting at the middle of the image, to finally include all original colors. This audiovisual composition bears the title )ertur(, which – because of the widening ranges of pitch, area and color – could be expanded to include words like aperture (English, French), apertura (Czech, Italian, Polish), copertura (Italian), abertura/cobertura (Spanish, Portuguese) or obertura (Spanish), all implying opening or covering. "Ertur" happens to mean "peas" in Icelandic.