Thomas L. Read

Clarinet, Violin, and Piano

Composer's Note:

Going On, a 2007 VCME commission, is a trio for clarinet, violin and piano. I like to think of it as a succession of adventurous expeditions -- journeys through five different territories. Technically speaking, Going On consists of varied passes through a "ground" in which from two to 14 durations, each of a different length are jointly and perpetually iterated. This foundational ground, for all its consistent and exact mechanism is, of course, meaningless in terms of purposeful expression. The automatically generated rhythms are constantly changing yet entirely static; the form is chaotic, but not indeterminate in the traditional way. And in the audible elaborations that regularly obscure the ground nothing is left to chance. Care is taken to, at least, create the illusion of a purposeful, expressive unfolding"”a musical realization. Still, the result, in the present case, of trying to "give sense to the senseless" is often to attenuate expectancy. Instead of goal-directed progression the listener must deal with succession, with episodes whose possible meaning is only retrospectively comprehendible. Individual episodes are never repeated exactly. Some are revisited as extensive transformations. Exact repetition is confined to short figures and has only local significance. Sometimes traditional narrative moments coalesce and unreliable recollections of other music emerge, but are soon contradicted by other material. While the title of my trio is partly inspired by Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, the music echoes a comment in Malone: "there is a choice of images."