Other Music

Lullaby Jax

Last Christmas my cousin Jennifer sent me a box of children's jax and two rubber balls. I was delighted to receive such a gift, and knew instantly how I wanted to play with the new toys. I opened the lid on one of the pianos at the Maybeck and threw the jax and balls inside. Listening to them bounce on the strings, metal struts, and wooden sounding board, it occurred to me that somehow Jenny's name might suggest a good melody.

I began with the low note "A" in the piano and repeated the entire alphabet through the letter "Z" all the way up the instrument (rather than beginning again from "A" immediately after the note "G," like the traditional musical scale). In this way I found individual pitches for each letter in her name. I continued throwing jax to record some harmonizing accompaniment, bounced the rubber balls for percussion sounds, and mixed everything together to compose the music.

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CAMELBACK PICTURES

Camelback Pictures is another piece I composed with inspiration from visual sources. I've always been fascinated by the images some people see in wood grain, plaster walls, linoleum, and other random patterns and lines in the materials of our daily living spaces.

I have twin nieces, and one day when they were 9 years old I asked them if they'd ever noticed such imaginary figures. They both said yes, and we discovered they'd each seen different "characters" in the same three spots on their bathroom floor.

I ran my tape recorder as they sat drawing and describing what they'd seen, and over the past few years I've deveveloped this collage of their conversation. It's a celebration of the powers of our imaginations to colorfully transform and vitalize the world.

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POP FISHES

Pop music with Japanese Text Collage

"Pop Fishes" is a short sketch for a larger piece I'm composing about the transition from the old century into the new, the old millennium into the new, and the concurrent passage from the astrological age of fishes, or Pisces, into the "new age" of Aquarius. The new work, Fishes Only, will be completed for performance at Maybeck Studio in 2005.

I come to bring you fish from far away to dream,
salmon from the lines I see across the sea.
These lines align a pattern
of the pieces, in the pink and parallel.

The age of fish is popular
before we bear the water which has borne us.
I will bring you water dreams, more stately seas:
lines for crossing, far away
to futures.

(Japanese translation by Kaori Hino)

Listen to an excerpt...

Synthesizers and voice collage: Gregory Moore
Voice: Kaori Hino
Recorded at Maybeck Studio
© 2000 Handprint Series