Be a Cycle
US premiere; after T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
Performed by PinkNoise (Ensemble), Jonathan Hass (Conductor)
Be a Cycle is written after the poem The Waste Land by the English-American poet-modernist T. S. Eliot, reflecting the composer’s musical thoughts on dissonant living in contemporary times; the idea shifts from the original concept of the wasted society to the individual who mirrors this cycle of living and abruptly becomes its reflection, confused while finding his own harmony. The composition has two sections: in the first, the extended timbral possibilities of the instruments are explored within a pointillistic texture, where one feels a certain looping and impossibility of leaving the closed environment; the second exits into a new space where cyclicity is filled with imaginative impulse, the drama of searching. It was commissioned by the 19th Festival Die Tage der Neuen Musik Bamberg (Germany, November 2023) and first performed by Ensemble Nostri Temporis; it is the first part of a one-movement cycle (2023–2024).