Foucault's Pendulum

Foucault’s Pendulum (2004) was commissioned by the Dutch Schönberg Ensemble, which gave the first performance of it on November 11 of that year at the Main Hall of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, under the baton of Reinbert de Leeuw.  The title refers, in addition to the famous pendulum of Léon Foucault, to the mystification novel of the same name, by Umberto Eco. Tarnopolski points out, however, that the title only occurred to him when the compositional work was already well underway. Into the standard staff of the ensemble of contemporary music are integrated two pairs of relatively rare instruments – cimbalom and guitar, as well as bayan (Russian button accordion) and accordion. But the most striking instrument is the metronome standing on stage, which is a kind of musical pendulum. It enters, replacing the conductor, twice - in the middle and at the end of the work, emphasizing the edges of the form and shaping a kind of rhyme of the large two-part composition. According to the composer, “the pendulum symbolises the binary rhythms of the universe, and that idea lies at the root of the work. It contrasts two different types of music, and correspondingly two kinds of time, one continually wave-like, similar to real-time breathing (the first part of the piece), the other mechanically uniform, quantum–time (the second one). The breathing embodies here living matter, in opposition to mechanical automatism. It was especially intriguing for me to examine the processes of the emergence and formation of each type of music, and also to trace the stages of the transition of one into the other. I was also greatly interested in the idea of the gradual modulation of the timbral beats of sound into rhythmic structures, as well as the transformation of instrumental sound-color into rhythm”. The “main protagonist” of the composition is time; its leading motif, or more accurately its leading timbre, associated with the sound of the cymbals. Its frequent repetitions, with gradually accumulating variations, build up to a powerful culminating phase – “the breath of time” little by little “overflowing” (given that, unlike the pendulum of a clock, the oscillation plane of Foucault’s pendulum shifts according to the rotation of the Earth). After a long fading climax, rhythmic beats occur imperceptibly from the residual sound beats. Conduction of the ensemble is transferred from the conductor to the metronome. By and by, through the regular beats of the metronome, there gradually emerge other “irregular” and asymmetric rhythmic figures, disrupting the rigid metrical grid. These elements loosen the orderly mechanism of the pendulum to the point of complete “asynchronisation” – a virtuosic fifteen-layered poly-ostinato. In the following large second climax of the piece, the rhythmic unification of all the instruments replaces polymetry and aperiodic phrase formations tease out periodic patterns. The general climax is not broken off, but deconstructed, as if “falling apart” and slowly running out, reaching a stage where the sound is almost completely “dematerialised”. And again, as at the end of the first section, we are left with the solitary, “laid bare” tick of the metronome, beating the implacable passage of time. (Svetlana Savenko)