Commissioned by the Mise-en Ensemble. Mixed quintet — 8’00”

Premiered April 5, 2016. Moon Young Ha, conductor

Many of my works from the 1990s (e.g., Cycles and Myths; Mimetic Variations) were influenced by my interest in how cycles—whether economic, political, or cultural—tend to mimic themselves. I have also noticed that when cycles begin to turn, the contrasts can be very extreme. (Think of our current political climate or our recent weather patterns.) In The Pendulum Swings, I take the dimensions of repetition and contrast into the world of a chamber music group, where one repeated section of music is contrasted with dramatically different iterations.

The music that starts the piece contains all the elements of extreme polar opposites: high
and low registers, consonance and dissonance, fast and slow tempi, angular and static motion, and so on. My instrumentation supports these contrasts in pairs of high and low instruments (violin with double bass, flute with bass trombone), and the piano plays an important role as a mediator sometimes with a glissando that swings through the center range of the instrument.

This opening material leads us into different contrasting sections: a static, slow section where the double bass eventually plays above the flute; a very high, bright dance where the trombone is voiced above the violin; a section with rapidly moving scales that wrap themselves around the bass trombone and double bass. The closing section juxtaposes very high, consonant thirds with a very low, percussive cluster. In this short eight-minute piece, the music is, essentially, a variant of what we have already heard—but the cycle takes us from one extreme to another.