Program note

THE TITLE
The title (spoken as “This too shall pass”) is a tongue-in-cheek jab at the in-vogue tendency to drop vowels in brand names—just one of the more recent (and silly) trends in a serious and long-term project to extract ever more time, money, and attention from each one of us. Marketing and technology are mustered to convince and compel craving and chasing what we don’t need, companies happy to manufacture compulsion and the products that briefly satisfy it, all the while we lose and forget what makes living possible and worthwhile—those missing vowels: face-to-face connection with others, connection to the natural world, seeing ourselves as part of that Something Larger here before us and here after us.

Apocryphal or not, “this too shall pass” is said to be a carefully calibrated answer to the question “What is a phrase that is always true?” Often it is evoked when things are bad—but it cuts both ways, equally true when life is going well.

THE MUSIC
This music captures my own anxieties about our moment in media and technology. We are fully immersing ourselves in a torrent of information and bespoke digital realities without the ability to discern what is important or true or real or good, trading away—in fact, consuming—the natural world of blood, flesh, bone, tree, rock, water, and sun. This faustian swap has had and is having deleterious effects on our relationships with one another and with our home on planet earth.

While the first movement I. This evokes some of what matters and what is being lost, the center of it is the hollow frenzy, horror, numbness, and dislocation that describes parts of modern existence today. Life now regularly features absurd juxtapositions of the mundane and the existential—mass killing and cat videos a nudge of the screen apart from one another. Such trivialization and commodification of human needs and experiences degrades our ability to tell what is important and our ability to care. This music receives a similar treatment, the existential juxtaposed with the trite, the absurd set alongside the sublime—all tossed in a blender, repackaged, enhanced, accelerated, piled upon, versions cast aside with frightening frequency until cycles simply overlap and we find ourselves lost in the storm.

If I. This is the maelstrom, II. Epitaph for Lost Time looks on from a distance, giving perspective and space to reflect on and mourn the paths not taken—of people, land, ecosystems, and ways of living cast aside for the tyranny of small conveniences.

After the rupture and outpouring of the first two movements, III. New Order tries to chart a cautious new path while having to live (and maybe not fully thrive) with the traumas of Before.

In the title is the hope that something better is on the near horizon.

Note for performers

This piece can be performed in three configurations. The entire piece is a little bit of a "choose your own adventure" for potential performers, depending on where they’d like to leave the audience. Stopping after the first movement is devastating, a powerful message that leaves listeners out in the cold. Appending the second movement gives space for reflection and some emotional outpouring/catharsis. The third movement hints at the possibility for renewal, clarifying the stakes and the challenging path ahead. Each of those three options leaves the listener and performers in a different place emotionally and I find each place totally valid to my conception of the work.