PALINDROME’S DANCE

Palindrome’s Dance, a short fantasy for piano completed in August, 2005, was written as a gift of admiration for my friend, pianist, Robert Blocker, the Willam Edward Gilbert Professor of Piano and former Dean of the Yale School of Music. The work, a “moto perpetuo” is marked “restlessly, with rhythmic intensity.”

A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backward or forward, and in this instance, the musical design unfolds in four major sections with the ordering of musical events reversing at the midpoint of each section. The musical texture remains constant and unchanging throughout in a series of repetitive phrases with shifting meters where dynamics, register and harmony continually evolve and develop.

-Joseph Schwantner