Gone Today
Robinson McClellan
About this work:
Gone Today is a response to several deaths that came near to me in the past year, of many kinds: death in my family, deaths of family friends; people very old, very young and in between, in good health and bad; deaths that were long expected and those that came very suddenly.
As it is, I spend a lot of my time thinking about death–it serves as a kind of meditation for me. All of these deaths made it feel even closer. Today, those that died are gone. And today, death is so unthinkably close to you and me that we are also, in a very tangible sense, already gone.
I had an image in my mind as I wrote the piece: vast beings step through our human-sized world with vast feet. They are not ill-meaning, but the physical scale they inhabit is too large for them to concern themselves with us, or even to notice us. If we do not watch carefully for their movements, we might be crushed.
Three slow, overlapping sequences in the strings determine the harmony. Each sequence proceeds according to its own logic, indifferent to any incidental frictions or odd concords between itself and the other two. Among and around these steadily marching progressions, a delicate piano/harp figure alternates with a free oboe melody of long, soaring notes, aided by the horn, flutes, violins, and finally the trumpets.
The piece begins in the depths, and at the end it rises higher and higher until it disappears–as if the music has simply left the audible range, though it may continue indefinitely beyond our hearing.
Premiered March 31, 2006 by Yale Philharmonia, Shinik Hahm, dir. in New Haven, CT
Year composed: 2006
Duration: 00:07:00
Ensemble type: Orchestra:Unknown
Instrumentation:
Instrumentation notes: 2+picc.22(bcl)2(cbn)/422+btb.1/timp.bd.vib.glock/hp/pf/str