Julian Anderson - Khorovod (1994)

info from the website of Anderson’s publisher, Faber: “The title is the Russian for “round dance“ and refers to a category of melodies celebratory in character, whose most obvious feature is their limitation to a small group of pitches (often just three or four) which are cycled round and round in ever-varied rhythms. Although Khorovod does not quote any Russian, Turkish, Romanian or Lithuanian melodies of this type, about twenty of them were used as models for melodic writing in the piece. The piece is primarily melodic; all the harmony results from sustaining notes of a melody, or from sustaining its harmonics. These subsequently form the basis of new melodies, and so the process continues. Khorovod avoids transitions, consisting in the main of a sequence of dances at various tempos shunted against one another; but as they are also frequently superimposed at different speeds and meters, the texture is often multi-layered. As the composing progressed, references to other folk tradit