The Pendulum Process: Point of Balance

Abstract

This chapter delves into my own geology as a composer. It investigates the coalescing of twentieth-century innovations with influences stemming from early music practice. It casts light on a pre–compositional process that brings together historical, metaphoric and poetic references with an art music convention spanning more than a millennium.

Composition is like a map. Finding the potential of that map determines the nature and the margins of the music. It is about setting up a structure for an aesthetic from which to move, in a methodical way, beyond style and fashion. Within that structure there is a hierarchy of levels and attributes. From the larger framework to micro–units characterised by gestural language through pitch and intervallic formations, rhythmic devices, articulation and orchestration, each of these levels informs the other. They are interconnected in a vertical harmonic framework that then extends horizontally, in a lineal direction. This compositional process plays out much like a force, a pendulum moving from one reference point to another seeking polarities that determine the pathways within the map.

Examples of this contradistinction of materials and compositional strategies will be illustrated in the chapter, drawing from two chamber works, Ruisselant (1991) and Silva (2012).