Together While Apart

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Together While Apart for Clarinet and String Trio was written in the first two weeks of June 2020 for the 2020 Rapido! Composition Contest, which required the creation of a new work expressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the composer.  My piece deals with physical separation and how the pandemic can be turned into an opportunity to feel more connected with each other in non-physical ways.

The beginning of the piece represents our modern world before the pandemic.  The four instruments are caught up in the hectic pace of our world and the pressure to do everything and be everywhere at the same time, as they play loud, fast, and disjunct melodies that bounce around everywhere with little or no time to rest.  While they are connected in what they play, it is a fraught and fragile connection, where they often break off to play their own frantic melody without regards to the others, and when they do play the same melody it is only for a brief period of time and usually at a dissonant interval.  Clearly, this way of being is unsustainable, and after a minute or so the instruments are forced to quarantine themselves, as the instruments physically move themselves to different parts of the stage while the music reaches a breaking point. 

Following the first silence of the piece, the instruments are now quarantined both physically and in musical space, with each limited to a different octave of pitch-space.  At first, they are frustrated and rage against these limits that have been placed upon them, but they eventually run out of energy and give up fighting them, coming to the first calm, yet uneasy, point of the piece. 

Having resigned themselves to their circumstances, they finally have a chance to reflect and breathe, enabling them to see that, while they are separated, they can still play together and in a more mindful way than they did before the pandemic.  In fact, the instruments decide to limit themselves beyond what was imposed upon them, using just four pitch-classes (E, F#, A#, B) but each in their own quarantined octave.  A melodic idea using these pitches, which has been latent in the music all along (see the first four notes of the piece) gradually develops and spreads (perhaps a kind of good virus?) across all four instruments, binding them together.  Connected deeply by their musical material, the music becomes more and more joyful as it brings them ever closer together despite still being physically apart.  The piece ends with a final statement of the melodic idea by all the instruments in octaves, representing the closest they can get while still quarantined.  

Premiered October 7, 2021 by Ashrey Shah-clarinet, Carina Yee-violin, Ashley Vogler-viola, and Dylan Jowell-cello, at the 2021 College Music Society National Conference in Rochester, NY.