JANUS TURNS
Year of composition: 2014
Instrumentation: mixed ensemble (15 players)
Duration: 14’
Written for the Wellesley Composers Conference
Premiere: Musicians of the Wellesley Composers Conference, James Baker, cond.
Wellesley, Mass.
July 30, 2014
PROGRAMME NOTE
In Roman religion and myth Janus was viewed as the god of beginnings and transitions, and was depicted as having two heads that faced both forwards and backwards; in his association with passages he came also to represent the passing of time, looking into both the past and the future. Janus Turns is a sort of meditation on this guardian of gateways, looking both forwards and backwards for its inspiration. In this work I repurpose the circle-of-fifths cycle – inherent to diatonic tonal music as an agent of transition or modulation – into a harmonic progression that I pair with a stepwise cycle of diatonic modes. Distinct cycles unfold simultaneously across different time-scales, which results in a subtle layering effect as they drift in and out of phase with each other. Like the hands of a clock these underlying patterns rotate independently and then finally return, after a slow and gradual process of winding down, to the same position from which they began.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
- Third prize, 2015 SOCAN Foundation Young Composer Awards (Sir Ernest MacMillan category)