Toru Takemitsu (1930 - 1996) began his interest in composing music with the sudden revelation to him of French music. The militarist-oriented governments of his childhood and youth promoted traditional Japanese music of a martial quality on the radio and banned Western music broadcasts during the Chinese and Pacific Wars. Takemitsu had been drafted before he was 15 years old. An officer played on his phonograph a recording of the French song Parlez-moi d'amour for Takemitsu and a group of other conscripts.

The resulting interest in Western music was finally fulfilled when the War ended and occupying American forces established their radio network, which anyone could listen to. Takemitsu decided at the age of 16 to become a composer, despite his lack of any training. He decided early on Debussy as a model and soon added the enriched harmonies of Messiaen.

Takemitsu's late music, such as this 13-minute chamber work, was increasingly interested in presenting calm, meditative surfaces with complex, chromatic harmonies and modal melodies and exceptional subtlety in tone coloration. At the same time, Takemitsu's harmonic and melodic style if anything became increasingly French. In this work, Takemitsu uses the orchestration of Debussy's Sonata No. 2 for flute, viola, and harp, and might well have been planned to provide a companion work for recitals featuring that sonata.

Takemitsu was also interested in the often invisible motion of water in a stream or of the wind, and in dreaming. Both these interests coincided in a poem by Emily Dickinson containing the line "...And then I knew 'twas wind" which, translated, provided the title to the composition. Takemitsu explained that the piece draws an analogy between the wind, which is invisible but can be detected by the motion is causes in the visible world, and the "...soul, or unconscious mind (we could even call it a 'dream'), which continued to blow, like the wind, invisibly, through human consciousness."

In common with much of Takemitsu's music, the work has a dream-like episodic nature and a smooth unimpeded flow of sound and silence throughout. The composer negates any feeling of bar lines, pulse, or beat by constantly changing the time signatures and tempos. The main musical idea is stated by the viola by the beginning. It is a rising figure that comes from Debussy's Sonata.

As the work progresses, a seven-note figure emerges as important to the composition, representing what is for Takemitsu a fairly long melodic idea. It has a remarkably tender effect. Takemitsu prescribes unusually precise playing techniques in order to get specific and very subtle tone effects. One of these effects is to operate a harp pedal while a plucked tone is sounding. This has the effect of lowering the note by as much as a whole step in a very Japanese-sounding glide. Another striking effect is to ask the harpist to softly play a chord including notes being more loudly played by the flute and viola, which when they suddenly stop their sound, reveal the harp already vibrating in the now disclosed background.

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