8-voice chorus – 12 mins.

This piece was composed during the final years of my study, during my tenure in Buffalo, New York. I was coming to grips with their computer and wrote a choral piece to ensure I was producing work as Lejaren Hiller’s doctoral assistant.

O Faccia d’una Luna was part of a text from the madrigal, O occhi, manza mia by Orlando di Lasso (aka Roland de Lassus). I sang it at secondary school and students intentionally mispronounced Faccia (with a hard c) to support their adolescent yearnings and thus the expression stuck with me. (The madrigal is beautiful, of course.)

The piece is in four movements:

I. Why not sneeze, Rows Sail-a-vis? is a play on words of Marcel Duchamp’s alternative name which was written Rrose C’est la Vie). It is a part spoken, part sung interpretation of a wonderful anarchic text of his about taxing us for the air we breathe.

II. Hommage à Doppler involves a transcription of a lovely Bulgarian folk tune (normally sung by women) involving a technique I’d heard of which called for listening to the phonetics in a language one doesn’t speak and replace them with words using similar phonetics from your own language. You can imagine the surrealism that is inevitable. This pieces descends a semitone about halfway through the movement, thus the Doppler effect.

III To Morton Feldman: Soft and Low – basically the reason I was in Buffalo was that Feldman had offered my a scholarship to complete my PhD in Buffalo and thus dropping the one I was completing at Columbia University (in ethnomusicology) in New York City. He often said his pieces were soft and low (and long). This movement is an homage to his style at the time.

IV. To Holland: East does not meet West – I knew I was about to leave the US with a Fulbright grant (in fact I was to leave the country permanently) and move to Amsterdam. This movement features a transcription from Balinese angklung with its microtonal nuances that a singer can only approximate celebrating the amazing sound found only in that part of the world. (Indonesia was a former Dutch colony.)

The piece is dedicated to Anna Madugno and Ray Malone, two members of the music department at Greenwich High School (Connecticut) who opened my ears to new music.

A recording of the piece and its score now follow.