Karel Goeyvaerts – You’ll never be alone anymore & De Zang van Aquarius

 

A musical search for harmony between the individual and the cosmos

This recording brings together two pivotal works for bass clarinet by Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts (1923–1993): You’ll never be alone anymore (1975) and De Zang van Aquarius (1984). Both pieces reflect the composer’s lifelong engagement with serial techniques, spirituality, and the ideal of integration — of tones, of people, of societies.

As one of the early pioneers of serial and electronic music in post-war Europe, Goeyvaerts sought not only formal innovation but also existential depth. His music is marked by a tension between radical abstraction and a desire for transcendence and unity. These works for bass clarinet explore that tension with remarkable clarity and expressive subtlety.

 

You’ll never be alone anymore

Written for the renowned Dutch bass clarinetist Harry Sparnaay, this work is scored for bass clarinet and electronic tape. The tape, created at the IPEM studio in Ghent, is composed of delicate, drifting tone clusters — what Goeyvaerts called “wandering tones,” reaching toward each other like lost voices in the dark.

The bass clarinet part is sparsely notated in twenty psychological “phases,” each representing a stage in the individual’s journey toward self-discovery and integration into a greater whole. Goeyvaerts provides poetic performance instructions that guide the interpreter through this inward path, from hesitant emergence to ultimate dissolution into unity.

The piece concludes with near silence: a breath, a soft tone, and then — timeless stillness. It is a quietly profound ritual of surrender, in which sound and self merge with something larger.

 

De Zang van Aquarius

Originally conceived as the basis for the third scene of Goeyvaerts’ magnum opus, the opera Aquarius, this version for eight bass clarinets (all performed and overdubbed by Dries Tack) offers a powerful collective counterpart to the solo voice of You’ll never be alone anymore.

Goeyvaerts saw the coming Age of Aquarius as a symbolic promise of greater harmony and spiritual renewal. In this work, the eight instruments breathe and move as one — not as soloists, but as a unified ensemble. There is no melody with accompaniment here, but a woven fabric of equal voices, unfolding in modal harmonies and shared gestures.

While sonically far removed from his early serial works, De Zang van Aquarius remains grounded in the same conceptual rigor: there is no hierarchy between horizontal and vertical structures; motifs move seamlessly through the texture, and all tonal centers are treated with equal weight. The modal language — often Lydian or Dorian — supports an atmosphere of stability and resonance, even as the music gently hovers in ambiguity.

 

Unity in diversity

Though these two works differ in sound and structure — electronic vs. acoustic, solo vs. ensemble — they share a common aesthetic foundation. For Goeyvaerts, composition was always “the projection in time and space of a basic idea,” as he described in reference to his seminal Sonata for Two Pianos (1951), a landmark in integral serialism.

Here, too, that principle finds new expression. Whether through the intimate dialogue of a single instrument with tape or the choral breath of eight clarinets moving as one, Goeyvaerts’ music gestures toward a deeper harmony — one that transcends individuality without erasing it.

 

Tracks

You’ll never be alone anymore – for bass clarinet and tape

De Zang van Aquarius – for eight bass clarinets

 

Credits

Dries Tack – bass clarinet & edits

Stijn Cools - sound & mix

Erik Bogaerts - photo's

Mark Delaere - liner notes

Label - Sub Rosa

 

Recorded at Studio 3, De Singel (Nadar Ensemble)