We live in a never-ending series of crises. Today’s ills are frequently blamed on the recent past, and we strive frantically to find radical departures from it. In this presentation I focus on the concept of relationality in the temporal domain, meaning how we might understand various relations between the recent past, the present, and the future in art music. History’s recent turn towards ethics has highlighted challenges in our relation to the past. In this connection, I have studied Nel Noddings’ ethics of care, which draws attention to the importance of relationality when considering care as a human action. Her identification of reciprocity as a key concept in caring raises critical questions regarding what kind of reciprocity could ever take place on the temporal domain. From the viewpoints of sociality, materiality, and method, I consider the ways in which we can connect seemingly unconnected agents from different times in art music, drawing references from philosophy, education, and technology to align the inquiry to contemporary thought. The presentation is interspersed with a performance of Intermedio alla ciaccona for solo violin (1986) by Brian Ferneyhough.