Temperance
Temperance was written between March 31st and April 7th of 2019.
This card symbolizes balance, patience and duality.
Temperance was one of the cards that I struggled with finding inspiration for when I first started this project. I wasn't sure how I was going to portray balance. I thought about composing a piece with counterpoint to have two voices interacting with each other and finding a balance. When I was deciding on the next tarot card to compose for in March of 2019 I decided to tackle Temperance.
As I was thinking about ways to show balance I thought "Are there any balanced scales? Are simple time signatures balanced?" When I searched "balanced music scale" I found the Double Harmonic Major scale which has the same intervals forward as it does backward. After deciding to use this "balanced" scale I wanted to have an element of imbalance. I thought the best way to show imbalance is by using an irregular time signature. Since Temperance is number 14 I thought that using the 7/8 time signature could be a numerical way to represent the card since 7 is half of 14.