The Moon-Meeting

Moonbook Chapter 4: The Moon-Meeting (1998) is based on a text of Hans Arp, who was a sculptor and painter as well as a poet. He was active in the surrealist movement in the first half of the 20th century. I was at once attracted to the striking and fantastic images in the text, and wrote music that would reflect and compliment these images. I tried to capture not only each line of text, but also the overall mood of the poem. Additionally, I used not only the words of the poem, but also “sounds” (the “m” of “moon” for example) which emphasize and comment on the poem. In the course of rehearsing for the first performance, one of the singers asked me is this serious or funny? It seems to me to exist in that wonderful space between the two. A dream-space where rather odd, absurd or even contradictory notions – Moonagrams consisting almost entirely / of Anna / and which have added to them /only a couple of grams of moon (for example) – demand to be taken seriously and given great importance. Certainly, such things should be expected when there is a meeting of so many different kinds of moons.