Odd World, the third movement and the first of two purely instrumental movements in the entire work, follows. Odd World takes its name from its rather eclectic musical content, which shows stylistic indebtness to Celtic fiddling to Stravinsky, Brahms and anything in between, but also from the fact that the work has an odd-numbered rhythmic and formal structure. The piece is in 5/8 and each phrase is 7 measures long. Larger sections of the movement also reflect odd-number relationships. After a while these odd meters and phrases come to be expected as a matter of course so the music sounds much more symmetrical and consistent than one might expect given its numerical makeup.
