Program note:

The Sacred Balance is an orchestrated version of a composition I had written almost 10 years ago, which had gone unrecorded, but had been performed in both trio and jazz quintet format. I wrote the version for big band whilst studying string quartets of Beethoven quite intensely, where I learned that Beethoven had a fastidious habit of experimenting with phrase balance in his thematic writing. At the same time, I was reading a fantastic book by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called The Sacred Balance which I was quite inspired by. Beethoven and Suzuki were amalgamated in this work, where an idea of balance is applied to everything from rhythm, dynamics, and voicing structure. Suzuki makes many wonderful points in his book about the delicate balance of all things in the natural and human made worlds, and this piece is an expression of my own appreciation for these ideas. - Steve Newcomb (2013)