Opus number: 38

Title: What Goes Around Comes Around

Instrumentation: flute, oboe, clarinet, viola, cello, and piano

Date written: 1992, Boston

Length: six minutes

Commissioner: Bennington Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East

Premiere performance:  Brenda Levy, flute, David Halpert, clarinet, James Lewin, viola, Edward Bowe, oboe, Robert Secombe, piano, Frank Werber, cello, Larry Bell, conductor, August 1, 1992, Bennington College Chamber Music Conference, Bennington, Vermont

Important subsequent performances: 20th-Century Music Ensemble, December 9, 1994, The Boston Conservatory: Ellen Rakatansky, flute, Tanya Wills, oboe, Kenji Kikuchi, clarinet, Jan Bofinger, viola, Galizitine Trussell-Cullen, cello, Scott Ethier, piano, Yoichi Udagawa, conductor.

Recordings: tape at Boston Conservatory

Program notes: Bell’s What Goes Around Comes Aroundwas commissioned in 1992 by the Bennington College Chamber Music Festival and Composers Forum of the East, where Bell was Composer-in-Residence and conducted the premiere. Written for specific participants of the Festival, it is a streamlined version of the last movement of the composer’s Second Symphony. The work also involves an improvisation on the Southern folk hymn “Idumea.” The title refers to a common figure of speech, suggested here by a tone of ominous warning. It begins and ends with a round.