This too shall pass (2024)
for soprano and bass clarinet
This Too Shall Pass (2024) for soprano and bass clarinet is a meditation on impermanence that draws together four texts separated by centuries, cultures, and aesthetic traditions. Each text confronts the same fundamental truth: the transience of human life, memory, and achievement. Yet each poem articulates it through a distinct voice. The work unfolds as a sequence of contrasting movements framed and unified by a recurring haiku by Bashō. It functions as a structural and philosophical anchor. Its extreme concision and stillness distill the broader theme into a single image of nature quietly reclaiming human ambition.
The first main movement sets a short excerpt from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Here, impermanence is both cosmic and theatrical: “the cloud-capp’d towers… shall dissolve.” It is the most lyrical and continuous section of the work, reflecting the rhetorical flow of Shakespeare’s language. The voice and bass clarinet intertwine in a highly expressive manner, though this lyricism is continually undermined by instability in pitch and timbre, suggesting dissolution already at work within the musical fabric.
The second movement, based on Khayyam, compresses time into a single gesture. The image of a bird addressing a king’s skull evokes the collapse of glory into ruin. This is rendered musically as an extended, evolving glissando, primarily in the bass clarinet, with the voice emerging from and dissolving into it. The king’s glory is reduced to a continuous descent in which distinctions blur, and meaning slips away.
The final movement sets Sappho, whose fragmentary text is mirrored in a broken, discontinuous musical language. Isolated syllables, phonetic fragments, and disjointed gestures dominate both parts. Regular pulse and continuity are deliberately destabilized. The fragmentation reflects both the poem’s surviving form and the disintegration it describes.
Throughout the work, extended techniques such as multiphonics, microtonal inflections, breath sounds, and non-vibrato tone expand the sonic palette while emphasizing its fragility. Many sounds are deliberately unstable and, at times, barely speaking, existing at the threshold of audibility. Certain multiphonics are selected specifically for this quality; they resist full projection, flicker, and threaten to collapse. The voice similarly moves between pitched singing, whisper, and pure breath, blurring the boundary between language and sound. In this way, the sonic material itself embodies impermanence as a physical condition, continuously forming and dissolving in real time.
Ultimately, This Too Shall Pass does not present impermanence as purely tragic or consoling, but as an enduring condition that governs all human endeavor, regardless of scale or significance. Empires fade, names are forgotten, and monuments collapse into silence. In this sense, the work turns impermanence into a form of perspective: an invitation to look beyond accumulation and appearance, and to reconsider what, if anything, endures.