| The work is a treatment of the dual nature of musical intervals, and the semantic values attributed to them. By "dual nature," I am referring to the distance between two notes (e.g. [C] and [E]) being measured as either a major third or a minor sixth, depending on which of the two pitches you are travelling from and the direction in which you are travelling. The work's opening eight measures find the violinist between two outlooks represented by inverted forms of a single interval, with orchestra serving as chorus to add emotional heaviness to the melodic utterance. In the proceeding music, the orchestra continues to respond, first literally (with the exact notes of), then contrapuntally (in reaction to), the gestures of the violin soloist as it vacillates between these two antithetical affective states. Synthesis occurs in the form of a cadenza: the violinist, free of the projected reality provided by the orchestra quietly enacts counterpoint that rectifies the troubled binary between the two intervallic motives. The transgressing motive is called one last time as the violinist slowly descends to a cadence in an effort to finalize this Hegelian dialectic. |
