for clarinet in C (or B flat or A)

“It is as if He has a kind of progressive amnesia. The only way we can get Him to remember is to show Him pictures of Himself. Or play certain music, read passages from books … Only then does He remember. … You see, the saddest thing of all is even He has begun to forget the details…” – from ‘the Sadness of Detail’, in the Panic Hand (1995), by Jonathan Carroll, speaking of ‘God’.

When the American clarinetist Michael Norsworthy asked me for a new solo piece in 2002, I knew exactly what to write. I’ve long been an enthusiastic reader of the novelist Jonathan Carroll, an American who lives in Vienna, and earlier works of mine had drawn on his writings, notably my earlier clarinet piece, ruins within from 1992, which has the epigraph ‘the archaeology of the heart is the only important study’. I don’t necessarily agree with the sentiment but it is nonetheless a compelling statement about the purpose of art. For the sadness of detail I drew on a short story of Carroll’s from his collection the Panic Hand, a harrowing narrative that has stayed with me since I first read it. In referencing it I have not tried to catch more than the mood of sustained dispiritedness that imbues the story with its vast emotional heft.

At the time I was preparing to write the sadness of detail I was interested in a structural model that I referred to as ‘labyrinthine’. The essential point of this model is that the various threads of the music are segmented into component cells, using proportions derived from an n x n matrix. These cells are reordered in a form of this kind (using 7 x 7):

A1 B1 A2 B2 C1 A3 D1 B3 A4 C2 C3 E1 B4 D2 C4 A6 E2 D3 F1 B5 F2 A7 C5 G1 B6 E3 G2 …

which continues systematically until all the cells are utilised. As will be clear an entirely new structure emerges from such a shuffling, one that maximises contrast and minimises continuity. I wrote the sadness of detail initially in such a form, using precisely the order above, where the A material is all exhausted before the G material has even entered. This gives the music a clear sense of forward direction as one kind of material dominates and is replaced by another in a fan-like fashion. By adopting similar strategies in composing the material inside the cells I have attempted to give the music (as in so many others of my works) a fractal character. In the conceptual frame of the piece, this progressive replacement is indicative of the “progressive amnesia” attributed to ‘God’ in the Carroll quote. It is this version of the piece that Richard Haynes can be heard playing in the Audio tab.

However, even as I wrote it, I began to feel that this complex reordering did not allow the ur-material enough capacity to speak. It seemed to me the segmented cells alternate too rapidly for the complexity of each thread to be adequately perceived. Which results in a music in which local articulacy is sacrificed to holism. Pondering this dilemma I realised that the piece could have both characters, holistic and narrative …but not simultaneously. So, having completed the Intercut score, I reassembled it so that the threads are all played in their linear entirety before moving on to the next, as “a sequence of seven short pieces”. This version of the work is now designated the sadness of detail 1 – linear, and the original one the sadness of detail 2 – intercut. It was the linear version that Michael Norsworthy chose to play at the work’s premiere, and it is the recording of this performance that appears in the Audio tab.

The piece had a second life in what New Music USA called the “elaborate pageantry” of Richard Haynes’ Listen my secret fetish show. I’m ordinarily resistant to my music being used as soundtrack: I don’t write it to be superseded by visuals, choreographic, theatrical or cinematic. But Richard’s incorporation of the music into what is essentially a melancholy, auto-erotic, metaphor – a distant relation of Stockhausen’s Harlekin – seemed to me entirely apropos.