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 7 July 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.