Sometimes People Take Goodbyes Too Lightly

Sometimes People Take Goodbyes Too Lightly was written for the Hinge Ensemble during their residency at CNMAT, UC Berkeley, and premiered by them there in March 2023. It is an eight-minute piece for tenor saxophone, electric guitar, percussion and piano, and it has since travelled with the quartet to Boston and Providence.

The title is a line I overheard and could not put down. The piece is about the asymmetry of partings — the fact that for one person a goodbye is an event and for the other an afterthought. Its material is made of things that are almost over: long saxophone tones that lose their core and become air, guitar chords left to feed back and thin out, a piano figure that repeats with one note fewer each time, percussion that is mostly decay — bowed cymbals, a gong allowed to ring into silence. Whenever a phrase reaches the point where it would naturally end, one instrument keeps going, a little too long, a little too loud, refusing to take it lightly.

The ending is abrupt on purpose. Someone leaves the room mid-sentence.