This eight-minute work, available in versions both for chorus and for solo piano, alternates between the angry, searching expression typical of Asia's earlier music and more tender passages characteristic of his later works. The composer first wrote Why (?) Jacob in 1979 for Seattle's Lakeside School Chorus; for the 1983 solo piano version, Asia removed some of the original binding materials and inserted some transitional passages and a new conclusion.

Asia describes the work as a elegy written in memory of a childhood friend killed in the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The composer writes that "its mood is clearly nostalgic in its effortless alternation between a hazy chromaticism of star-like images, and a simple statement of a folklike tune."

He further advocates great interpretive freedom on the part of the performer(s). The non-tonal sections, in particular, are subject to a degree of rubato that would eliminate any sense of time or beat; in the piano version, this is effected largely through the nearly continuous use of the damper pedal, producing a hazy effect.



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