Eric Moe (b. 1954)
Strange Exclaiming Music
Of his saxophone trio Rough Winds Do Shake the Darling
Buds, Eric Moe writes: “The title has to do with the
contrasts between the beautiful quiet music (the mournful
alto solos in the second movement, for example) and the
rough, raucous stuff. One of the things I love about the
saxophone is its ability to deliver such extremes of
expression.” Those extremes and others are part and
parcel of Eric Moe’s distinctive compositional alchemy.
He has fashioned a unique musical language of rare
eloquence, grace, force and beauty from what might at
first seem the most incongruous of elements, drawn
variously from pop, rock, jazz, classical and non-Western
musical traditions. His idiom can be edgy and gritty,
primal, elemental and visceral, yet is at least as often
tender, lyrical and elegiac. It frequently gives off a feeling
of spontaneity and effortlessness, as well as a sense of
humor that can be gentle and whimsical or mordant and
sardonic. Whichever of these aspects comes to the fore at
any given moment, Eric’s music is unfailingly and
exquisitely controlled in all of its technical particulars:
melody, harmony, rhythm, orchestration and form. And
while his music may draw crucial sustenance—including
many of its salient surface features—from such wide-ranging
sources as the virtuoso pianism of Bud Powell,
the traditions of African drumming and the Jimi Hendrix
Experience, he also loves, reveres and has found essential
nurture in his extensive and intimate knowledge of the
classical repertory, particularly of works by two of his
musical icons, Mozart and Stravinsky. The former
provides object lessons in clarity, proportion and formal
elegance, and the latter contributes a rhythmic vocabulary
of surpassing suppleness and vigor, as well as a spikiness
and piquancy born of a more angular melodic approach.
The influences of these two past masters do not merely
interact with and complement the vernacular elements in
Eric Moe’s music, but meld with them, enhance and are
enhanced by them. He is able to find the commonalities
among these different musical worlds, and what emerges
from his discoveries is a seamless unity, which the ear
never questions.
Market Forces (2005) is an exemplar of all of the
characteristics outlined above. Its obsessive first
movement is inflected with bebop, and yet is cast in a
concise classical sonata form that recalls both Mozart and
Stravinsky, particularly such works as the latter’s
Symphony in C and Ebony Concerto. The genius of this is
that structure never becomes stricture; it is never worn on
the sleeve and could easily go unnoticed on first hearing,
but its governance somehow affords the jazzy elements
free rein. The slow movement, with its plaintive writing
for soprano sax and modal harmonic language, can easily
encompass a breathtakingly lovely Debussyan harmonic
twist a few bars from its conclusion. The final movement
returns to the expressive world of the first, and also
confirms an overall tonal center of C sharp minor.
Rough Winds Do Shake the Darling Buds, while
sharing a number of surface characteristics with Market
Forces, including its crazed roulades, insistent rhythmic
patterns, and even its overall tonal center of C sharp, is
also subtly different from the later piece in a few respects.
Apart from the slightly leaner texture of three saxophones
rather than four and the absence of the distinctive timbre
of the soprano sax, there are formal distinguishing
features as well. Most notable among these is the fact that
more extreme contrasts of tempo and expression occur
within each movement (particularly the second) of Rough
Winds than is the case with Market Forces. Composed in
the summer of 1999 at the request of the Raschèr
Saxophone Quartet, the work bears a dedication to the
composer Lee Hyla. Eric Moe describes the first
movement as “energetic and taut in a Stravinskian vein.”
It also contains spare, lyrical duets for the alto and tenor
saxes, and ends in a somewhat inconclusive manner, the
opening repeated-note motive seeming to dissipate its
energy, leaving behind only a bare open fifth. That ending
is a harbinger of things to come, as the raucous, obsessive
music that begins the second movement alternates with
the hollow, austere beauty of a doleful alto melody, set
off by slow drones in the lower two saxes. The movement
drives to its close with a metrically reinterpreted version of its opening music, now in a fast, gigue-like tempo.
The name Teeth of the Sea (2003) literally translates
the phrase Denti di Mare, which the composer informs us
served as the title of the Italian release of the motion
picture Jaws. Though neither that film’s subject matter
nor its soundtrack is invoked in Eric Moe’s work, he
admits to having “the breathtaking fierceness of the
natural world in mind,” adding that “the work is virtuosic
throughout.” Besides the considerable demands on the
executant, Moe’s compositional virtuosity consists in
achieving the maximum variety possible in a work for
very limited forces: two different sized drums of
indefinite pitch played by a single percussionist. This
variety is ensured by means of exploiting various playing
techniques, including hand damping, slapping, use of the
fingers and other parts of the hand, and producing
harmonics to subtly change the pitch of the drums. The
piece, commissioned by the percussionist Michael
Lipsey, is cast in a tripartite form, its middle section
exploiting the quieter, more delicate sonorities available
on these instruments. In addition to Michael Lipsey, the
composer acknowledges the help of the Montana Artists
Refuge, where he composed the work, Anne Appleby, for
loaning him her conga drums, and “the rainbow and
cutthroat trout of the Missouri, Blackfoot, and Madison
rivers, who provided ample inspiration in the form of
breathtaking fishy fierceness.”
For down the stream, merrily (2002) again the
composer provides an epigraph, this time a line from
Wilhelm Müller, set by Franz Schubert in his song cycle
Die schöne Müllerin:
Ich hört ein Bächlein rauschen…
(I hear a little brook rushing along…)
Of this little gem Moe writes: “Neither Row, row,
row your boat nor the Schubert song is quoted musically,
but this short piece seems to bubble along as they do.”
Composed for Steve Paysen and Dominick Donato, in the
summer of 2002 at the Montana Artists Refuge, down the
stream, merrily does indeed bubble along, and like the
flowing brook picks up intriguing particles along the way,
in this case new notes foreign to the original scale. These
accumulate to the point that the original tonal center is
blurred, but they are ultimately jettisoned as the stream
returns to its initial pristine state and moves on.
I Have Only One Itching Desire (2006), illustrates
the exquisite balance between spontaneity and control
that is at the heart of Eric Moe’s aesthetic. The main
stimuli for this work are the playing of Mitch Mitchell,
drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and the West
African drumming tradition. The title is a line from Jimi
Hendrix’s song Fire, and Mitchell’s main drum lick from
that record becomes a catalyst for much of the piece.
Mitchell, while one of the greatest drummers in the
history of rock music, came from a strong jazz
background and was heavily influenced by such legends
as Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones and Art Blakey. That
foundation afforded him a greater capacity for subtle
soloistic interaction with his bandmates than was the
norm for rock drummers of the period. This more
sophisticated degree of rhythmic interplay also has
affinities with the interlocking and overlapping pulses of
West African music. Moe’s work is scored for an
imposing ensemble comprised of six percussionists. His
deployment of these forces, however, is extraordinarily
adroit and economical. The “master drummer” in this
case (Percussion I) is placed behind what essentially is a
trap set, and each of the other percussionists is assigned a
limited number of instruments, the most strikingly
colorful of which—the Chinese opera gongs, for
example, with their amazing pitch bending capabilities—are held in reserve until just the right moment to ensure
maximum impact. The individual sections of the piece
build logically upon each other and toward an inexorable
and thrilling conclusion. I Have Only One Itching Desire
is dedicated to Paul Vaillancourt and was commissioned
by the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and
Musicians for the Percussion Ensemble of Georgia State
University at Columbus, Georgia.
Flex Time (2006) is described by its composer as “a
merry quasi-perpetuum mobile.” Curtis Macomber
commissioned the piece and gave the première in June
2006 at the Institute and Festival for Contemporary
Performance (IFCP) at the Mannes School of Music in
New York City. Flex Time gets an amazing amount of mileage out of its principal figure, which cycles through a
number of different incarnations, touching on various
tonal centers, interrupted by perfectly placed long tones
and occasional rests.
Strange Exclaiming Music (2004)
Long since the happie dwellers of these vallies,
Have praide me leave my strange exclaiming musique,
Which troubles their daye’s worke, and joyes of evening…
—Sidney, “Ye Goatherd Gods”
Truly one of his most superbly realized works,
Strange Exclaiming Music embodies several essential
aspects of Eric Moe’s compositional art. Of it he writes:
“Strange Exclaiming Music was written for
violinist Curtis Macomber, and composed in
2004. The title comes from the great double
sestina in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. The
opening movement, Rhyme Does Not Pay, plays
with anticipation on various levels; the two
instruments are out of synch throughout,
beginning and ending their music at slightly (or
sometimes impressively) different times. This
asymmetry is reflected at a metric level as well:
following a mixed-meter opening, the music
comes close to settling down in duple or triple
time, but never quite gets there. Not so in
subsequent movements: the fiery Alla Breve is
relentlessly in cut time (as per the title), loaded
with anticipations and syncopation, while The
Sorbet of Regret is a slow, palate-cleansing 3/4
aria.”
In this wonderfully passionate and compelling work
Eric Moe’s infinitely pliable harmonic language obviates
any need to re-fight the culture wars over tonality and
atonality. At the outset of the first movement he has the
violin playing first an A major triad, then A minor. The piano finally enters with a member of the prevailing A
minor chord, but instead of an A (the root of the chord) in
the bass, it is sounding an E. This position of the chord—traditionally considered dissonant in tonal music—is a
destabilizing factor, as is the music’s seeming inability to
settle on a mode. Add to this the asynchronous nature of
the individual phrasing of the two instruments and one
can easily find common ground between tonal and non-tonal
musical materials. Near the end of the movement
there is a varied recap of the opening music, with the
roles of the violin and piano interchanged. The same A
major triad, in the same unstable position as at the
beginning, lends a disturbing, unsettled quality to the
final bars. The relentless and metrically stable second
movement is less obviously tonally centered, but near its
conclusion finds momentary security in a bracing E major
harmony. Ultimately the center will not hold, the former
agitation crashes back in, and the ending seems to break
apart, its shards flying. The Sorbet of Regret is in many
ways the most masterful (and certainly the most
economical) movement of the entire piece, based almost
solely on the alternation of the skeletons of two basic
harmonies, which seem to suggest G-sharp major and C-sharp
minor. The ambiguity arises with regard to which
of them is actually the tonic harmony of the movement;
depending on how one is listening at a given moment,
either one might be heard as a center. The counterweight
to all of this is a much greater degree of rhythmic stability
than has heretofore been in evidence, and because there is
nothing extraneous, every gesture tells, particularly the
changes of register in the violin. The first time the
richness of the G string is heard, for example, the effect—partly because there are no really low notes heard in the
piano—is nothing short of magical. There is a sense of
coming full circle at the very end, with the final A minor
harmony, its tones spread so far apart in range as to seem
unfettered from any familiar context. This time, however,
the effect is not disturbing, but beautifully serene.
Hayes Biggs © 2007