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SCORED FOR: trombone, tuba, and string quartet
TOTAL TIME: [12:00]
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RECORDING
PROGRAM NOTES
WHAT REMAINS
What Remains is the most personal piece I’ve ever written. It was composed in the months following the loss of my mother—a loss that reshaped everything I thought I understood about love, memory, and resilience. Writing this piece was not an act of closure, but of survival. It gave me a way to process what words could not hold.
The work unfolds in three movements, played attacca—each reflecting a part of the emotional landscape I walked through: the innocence and comfort of life before loss, the devastation and stillness that followed, and the slow, fragile process of learning to keep moving forward.
This is not a eulogy. It is not even an answer. What Remains is simply an attempt to hold space—for grief, for memory, and for the quiet, enduring love that stays behind when someone we love is gone.
I. Before We Knew
This movement is a reflection of life before I understood how deep loss could feel. It’s filled with warmth, light, and the simple kind of joy that doesn’t yet know its own fragility. When I think back on moments with my mother—her laughter, the way she held a room, the sound of her voice—I hear those memories in this music.
The lines are lyrical, almost suspended in time. They don’t rush; they breathe. Like the calm before a storm you don’t yet know is coming. It’s a kind of beauty that only reveals its full meaning once it’s gone.
II. When the Silence Fell
The second movement is where everything changes. After my mother passed, the world didn’t feel loud—it felt silent. There was a quiet that surrounded everything, a stillness I hadn’t known before. This movement lives in that silence.
The music becomes fractured, as though the themes from the first movement have been broken and scattered. Some notes feel like they are searching; others feel abandoned. I tried to capture that numb, suspended state of early grief, when everything seems both too much and too empty.
There are moments in this movement that are nearly still—but the stillness is full of ache.
III. What Remains
This final movement isn’t about resolution. It’s about what we carry forward.
After loss, nothing is ever quite the same. But we don’t remain broken forever. This music emerges slowly from the silence, not triumphant, but steady. There is strength here—gentle, quiet, but real. As the movement unfolds, there are echoes of the past, now softened by time and love. There are even moments of joy, thankful for the time we had together.
I didn’t write this piece to say goodbye. I wrote it to remember. To say that my mother’s love, her spirit, her presence—they didn’t vanish. They became part of me. What Remains is not what was lost. It is what still lives.
Todd Goodman’s What Remains for trombone, tuba, and string quartet was commissioned by Sérgio Carolino and Hugo Assunção for the 2025 Gravissimo Festival in Alcobåca, Portugal. It is in loving memory of my mom, Sandra Goodman, and Sèrgio's dad,
