Ardor is a collaboration project commissioned by Jon Melcher. Jon had some general ideas about a genre-bending project that he wanted to work with me on. The instrumentation would include 3-4 classical instruments with drum kit. In wanting to work on a genre bending piece, I said yes and wrote the instrumental parts to Ardor. Because Jon wanted to play the drum kit part himself, we worked together to come up with a percussion part that would work well with the instrumental flow already composed. To keep I n line with many non-classically trained drummers, we wanted to keep the music notation for the drum parts pretty basic and leave some room for improvisation.