It so happens that ears have no eyelids (2022)

for clarinet, bassoon, horn, and electric guitar (4 min.)

All sound is invisible in the form of a piercer of envelopes. Whether it be bodies, rooms, apartments, castles, fortified cities. Immaterial, it breaks all barriers. Sound ignores skin, does not know what a limit is: it is neither internal, nor external. Unlimiting, it is unlocalizable. It cannot be touched: it is ungraspable. Hearing is not like seeing. What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. Undelimitable, it is impossible to protect oneself from it. There is no acoustic viewpoint. There is no terrace, no window, no keep, no citadel, no panoramic lookout of sound. There is neither a subject nor an object of hearing. Sound rushes in. It violates. Hearing is the most archaic perception in the course of personal history, even before smelling, well before seeing, and is allied with the night.

—Pascal Quignard
The Hatred of Music
trans. Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck

It so happens that ears have no eyelids was written for the Dal Niente and DePaul Summer Residency for New Music 2022.

Ensemble Dal Niente
Jesse Langen, guitar
Katie Jimoh, clarinet
Ben Roidl-Ward, bassoon
Matt Oliphant, horn
Michael Lewanski, conductor

June 16, 2022
DePaul University, Chicago, IL