Shadow to Light

score at donemus

This work, Shadow to Light, grew out of a previous work for Chinese chamber orchestra, The Grey Tree. The focal point in Shadow to Light was to compose a piece for intercultural ensemble (consisting of Chinese and Western instruments) with elements from my Dutch heritage. The heterophony of traditional Chinese music, where several instruments play different versions of the same motive simultaneously, is applied in my piece in a technique called the microcanon. In the microcanon, each time a player enters with the same motive, it is shadowed a beat, or a half beat later in a different instrument, creating a canonic presentation of the material in polyphony, albeit on the microscopic level. You can also compare it with the delay effect of an electric guitar. A specific trait of this post-minimalist style in Dutch music is that it is more chromatic, creating dissonant swarms of music. A balance in this composition is found in the ebb and flow, the shadow to light between this chromaticism and the pentatonicism of Chinese music.
The previous version for Chinese orchestra, The Grey Tree, was based on a painting by Mondriaan from 1912 with the same name. Mondriaan grew up in Winterswijk, the same town as myself in The Netherlands, a hundred years before me. His work forms a transition between a figurative representation of the real world, to the abstraction of the spiritual world behind it. As I was looking for a new title for this changed version, I was drawn to Mondriaan’s earlier painting Willow Grove: Impression of Light and Shadow. It is an impression of my youth in Holland, of stout and bulky trees next to the water. The piece I had composed consisted of elements of this nostalgia, a melancholic sadness of bygone times, but turning towards a sense of redemption towards the end.