Piano music is a natural fit for composer-pianist Eric Moe. A new collection of his keyboard-centric music from the past decade presents four pieces for solo piano and one for piano-driven ensemble. Featured are pianist Solungga Liu, New York New Music Ensemble, and Moe himself.
Prelude to an Interview
The title of Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years (and its title track) takes inspiration from that ubiquitous and ridiculous job-interview question. The set opens, though, with a piece that lasts only five minutes.
“Alternating Currents” starts out with staccato piano notes plunked out in a steady rhythm, suggesting nothing if not bouncing Superballs. Variation is introduced with legato notes joining in the game. Single-note stabs splay into dissonant multi-tone strikes that don’t quite feel like chords; the register drops as the rhythm slows. Melodic flickers and restless trills expand the sound world further, until a restful ostinato announces a quiet dénouement.
The pianist (Liu in this case) must alternate hands, hence the title. But for the listener, “Alternating Currents” is a good introduction to the flavor of the whole album.
“Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust” is a circular-sounding miniature of under a minute. The composer performs it, and the next piece, “Scree Slope,” in a lighthearted style that feels slightly tongue-in-cheek. The tumbling quality of the staccato figurations in “Scree Slope” do perhaps suggest rocks scattered about a mountainside. The piece is also thoughtful, though, more lyrical, with discrete episodes of music that is, Debussy-like, harmonically graspable if ever-shifting. It finishes on what feels like a quivering question, perhaps glancing ahead to the title track.
Now This
First, though, comes “Now This,” a 13-minute opus played by Lui. During my first close listen I took more notes on this than on any of the other pieces. Of the album’s piano solo works it’s the densest exploration of the harmonic and pseudo-melodic possibilities of the musical language Moe employs throughout the set.
Blurs coexist with angular gesturing. Chilly trills decorate a constant rhythmic motion that in the first few minutes suggests something like a subterranean toccata. Studied development ensues, intruded upon by toneless tapping, until a short, laid-back middle section fades to silence with a mechanical groan.
After an elfin scampering sequence that serves as a scherzo of sorts, steady rhythm returns in a fast march that growls down to the piano’s lower octaves. There it flattens into a rough blur, from which individual sustained bass notes emerge to pound out a pediment for rather grim and dissonant rhythmic figures above. More tapping draws the curtain, with a final reprise of the groan that ended the slow section. We are again left with intriguing questions.
Quite different is “Rowdy Sarabande,” played on a digital piano tuned in equal temperament with 19 notes to the octave. Perhaps because of a lifelong mental block against fully understanding the science of harmony and acoustics, I’m not sure if 19 being a prime number contributes to the specific microtonal effects of the piece, but the nasal, plucking timbre certainly does. J.S. Bach wouldn’t have recognized this as a sarabande, but Moe’s title is understandable to a modern ear. This dance is a rollercoaster of rising and falling punctuation, with passages of the album’s most aggressive music, constellations of repeated percussive notes, and, again, quieter intervals.
As in most of this music, I find the piece aesthetically pleasing in an unaccustomed way. I think this comes from the very human patterns of notes and irregular rhythms Moe uses. Contributing too is the revelation at times of the (apparent at least) mechanics of the instrument in a way that recalls at times the sound of a harpsichord. Even with the unnatural-sounding digital-piano sound of this “Rowdy Sarabande,” the sensibility feels recognizably emotional, which is to say, biological.
…Um, Alive, and Gainfully Employed Somewhere?
The 16-minute title track is the album’s lone ensemble piece, but it has a now-familiar quirkiness, given further dimension with strings, winds, and percussion along with piano. It’s a kind of call-and-response piece, with a speaker verbally asking real questions from job interviews and the ensemble responding playfully or seriously with music that remains abstract but may be suggestive of specific answers. (Think Snoopy talking with Woodstock.) The introduction seems to suggest colliding thoughts and moods – maybe the anxiety of an approaching interview.
The placid, optimistic response to the title question contrasts with the fraught popping of the answer to “What are your expectations?” and the painful stress elicited by “Do you handle stress well?”
Asked what is its greatest weakness, the band responds with a lyrical softness that brings to mind the language of someone like Ralph Vaughn Williams. Asked to describe something it has handled well, it produces a pastoral “conversation” between piano and the other instruments. The skillful interplay among the instruments and the contrasting moods of the responses show once again a musical sensibility deeply rooted in the human.
Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.