to the intangible

for quartet [clarinet, viola, cello, guitar / or clarinet, alto sax., bassoon, electric guitar]

May 2023

Duration: c. 6 mins

Performance:

Colin Roshak - clarinet

Will Hawkins - viola

Chris Wild - cello

Carlos Henrique Pereira - guitar

June 27th, 2023

The Walden School

Dublin, NH

Program note:

“It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory... It is face-to-face with something that does not yet exist and that only it can accomplish, then bring into its light ... But it is struggling too far away, too confusedly; I can just barely perceive the neutral glimmer in which the elusive eddying of stirred-up colors is blended; but I cannot distinguish the form, cannot ask it.”

- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1, trans. Lydia Davis

To the intangible is about the feeling of reaching for something, the sense of longing for something whose existence one can only feel yet is just barely out of ones grasp; perhaps a memory from the past, or maybe a made-up image from ones imagination.

Charlie Zhong

May 2023