whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered by Daniel Aaron Webbon

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whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered is a percussion quartet written by Daniel Aaron Webbon for mixed instrumentation including drums, tuned metal pipes, glass bottles, wood slats, and assorted cymbals (complete instrumentation listed below).

Program notes from the composer about the work:

I wrote this piece at the 2016 Sō Percussion Summer Institute, where I was inspired, in part, by a short story by David Foster Wallace, "Incarnations of Burned Children". The line that connects the two parts of the story—the action and the prologue—is "and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered." While the story's content is horrific and moving, it was the formal design that captured my attention. This notion of a traumatic event that ripples forward in time with all these implications seemed to me a powerful way to structure a piece.

The local level is built, almost obsessively, on a single motif. A five-note repeating gesture undergoes the standard techniques found in an imitative, contrapuntal texture: inversion, stretto, augmentation, layering, and so on. But this academic approach to development, along with a standard fast-slow-fast arch form, is under constant assault from the initial explosive gesture. And so, the piece isn't about trauma, violence, or similar themes per se, but rather its form—how a dramatic, catalyzing moment can keep reasserting its influence throughout one's life.

Many thanks to Sō and to the members of the Portland Percussion Group, the University of Washington Percussion Ensemble, and the Baylor Percussion Group for their subsequent performances and assistance in revising the piece to its current form — Daniel Aaron Webbon

Total duration is ca. 6 minutes.