THGC

THGC stands for This Is How Galaxies Collide. Written in June 2018, it is a piece of five or six minutes for clarinet in B♭ and fixed media in six cues, premiered by the Belgian clarinettist Tom Collier on July 7, 2018.

When two galaxies collide, almost nothing touches. The stars are so far apart that the two systems pass through each other; what actually collides is gas and dust, and what changes is shape — each galaxy pulled out of true by the other’s gravity, throwing off long tails of stars as they part. The piece is about that kind of collision: two things that meet without meeting. The clarinet and the tape share a single spectral world — the electronics are made from the clarinet, stretched and frozen — but they never play the same material at the same time. Each cue sets the tape in motion; the clarinet threads through it, bending toward the tape’s pitches and being bent in turn, and each time the two come closest the clarinet is flung off into a long, rising tail of multiphonics and air.

By the sixth cue both have changed shape, and neither is where it started.