Thomas L. Read

Clarinet (Doubling Bass Clarinet), Cello, and Piano

Composer's Note:

To Reach! To Sing! was composed between July and November 2008. There are three movements: Proclamation, Caprice and Peroration. There is no pause between the second and third movements. The Proclamation introduces all of the trio's basic material. At first, one can hear a boisterous but cheerful disputation among the three instruments - individual personalities, by turns each demanding authority over the others. Eventually, argument gives way to consolidation and the music becomes more reflective and melodious.

The movement follows sonata form procedure. The material introduced in the two contrasted sections is freely developed using such traditional devices as juxtaposition of contraries, fragmentation and reassembly. A recapitulation of the movement's opening sections follows. (Such sectional repetition, even varied sectional repetition, is unusual in my recent work.) In the course of the recapitulation a new theme is introduced, a kind of upward reaching, arpeggiation pattern. This pattern will have great importance in the Caprice and the Peroration, and it prevails in the very last section of the trio.

As if to compensate for its frenzied rush closing the first movement, the clarinet, alone, begins the Caprice with a playful, doodling riff. This figure is abruptly contradicted by the cello and piano with darkly obscure, descending arpeggiation. Antiphonal iteration of the animated and the dark gestures follows, interrupted in turn by a chasse musicale, the cello being pursued by the piano in its highest register. A return of the Caprice's dark and gloomy opening serves as a bridge to the third movement, which unfolds two extended lyrical meditations. The first meditation, seemingly monorhythmic, is centered by the piano's single melodic line; the second takes advantage of the cello's cantabile capability to spin out an expressive melody accompanied by piano and clarinet. After a disruptive, rude, hyperbolic flurry of activity from the piano, lyric elements of the entire trio are transmuted into homophonic arpeggiated figures that bring the music to a peaceful close.