These Moonsongs were born on a cold January evening in 2004, from a conversation I had with soprano Caroline Helton inside of a loud, smoky restaurant in South Bend, Indiana. She was featured in a recital of work by my dear friend Gabriel Ian Gould, and I drove in from Ann Arbor to listen. After the concert, Caroline mentioned that she was thinking of putting together a recital of songs about the moon. This evolved into a request: "write me moon songs."
Three days later, my friend Sonoko Kambara, moved by a nocturnal muse, composed and emailed me the poem that became the first setting of this cycle. That poem started my search for moon-poetry in Japanese haiku literature, which led me to an abundance of work that was no-nonsense, pithy and very rich.
The first two verses are about the moon moving water. They, like the fourth and final moonsongs, employ the chromatic scale, and some use of "basic shapes." The Interlude is a tonal and thematic palette cleanser. I wrote it after visiting a long trail of daffodils in the Ann Arbor Arboretum. The third moonsong is dedicated to composer David Liptak, on the ten-year anniversary of our first working together. Instead of the moon moving water, it is about a wanderer, and her footsteps. The fourth moonsong is a meditation, or a place to rest on a question. It bears the tempo indication, "like a ticking clock." The final song is about the vastness of the night sky. It juxtaposes two spheres of registral and harmonic activity on the piano.
Moonsongs were composed, with great gratitude and admiration, for soprano Caroline Helton.