Lou Harrison, usually considered one of the quintessential "West Coast Composers," spent most of the 1940s living in New York City, where he was an influential music reviewer and had success as a composer. During this period he befriended Charles Ives and prepared Ives' Third Symphony for publication from Ives' confusing collection of manuscript pages (the best copies having long-since disappeared into the hands of conductors who professed interest in it and then failed to return them).

Harrison then conducted the world premiere of the symphony. When Ives won the Pulitzer Prize for it, he insisted on splitting the monetary reward with Harrison for his efforts.

Harrison had already been strongly affected by his exposure to eastern Asian music on the West Coast, particularly that of the Indonesian gamelan orchestras. But he had a difficult time turning this into a personal style for some years.

The Air in G minor is one of the most striking and lovely works on his transition to a monophonic, non-harmonic style in which melody and rhythm are primary.

It was originally composed for tenor recorder, but later specified by Harrison as belonging to the standard transverse flute. The flute part is pensive (not a frequent emotion in Harrison's music) and frequently quite chromatic.

Having composed the flute part, Harrison had a difficult time figuring out how to set it. He tried it with various different instruments in counterpoint with it after he composed it in 1947.

That year, however, he suffered a nervous breakdown, the result of poverty and the stress of big-city living. He would thereafter chose rural settings for his home, notably Black Mountain, NC, and, since 1953, Aptos, CA. (At least, it was rural when he moved there.)

Recovery from the breakdown was also the occasion for him to rethink his style. Realizing what it was he so admired about eastern music, he now tended to strip harmony from his compositional thinking. Returning to the Air in G minor, he dispensed with the counterpoint in favor of the most simple possible sort of accompaniment, a drone, a single pitch held throughout the work. This device is ubiquitous in the music of India, but the chromaticism and the minor-key basis of the melody prevents this music from sounding Asian.

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