Shattered Fragments of the Moon

Composed 1999. Duration: 6’30”

Instrumentation

viola, piano
also arranged for oboe and piano

Program Notes

Fascinatin’ Fragments!

In a conversation with my friend Chris Myers, I happened to relate to him an incident involving the production of a video on gravity (entitled “Gravity: Check it Out!”) for my high school physics class. To abbreviate the long story: it happened that I needed to chisel into tiny shards a marble representing the moon in order to free it from the thumbhole of my grandfather’s bowling ball, which represented the sun. When it was finally in smithereens, I poured the shards out of the bowling ball onto the table from which I hosted the video and then attempted to brush them off with the palm of my hand.

Not realizing that what I was doing amounted to dragging my hand across a thousand slivers of broken glass, I was surprised to find that several of the chips had embedded themselves in the heel of my thumb.

“I looked down and realized that I had just gouged my palm on shattered fragments of the moon,” I said.

Chris heard a strange music in that line and thus was inspired to compose—starting with the title—Shattered Fragments of the Moon.

He soon imagined set of variations on Morgan Lewis’s “How High the Moon.” Structurally, the piece lives up to its title. Each variation develops a simple enough aspect of the theme: the raising and lowering of the third, the progression of each chord down the circle of fifths, the repetition of perfect fourths in the melody. But between variations, it leaps from genre to genre, startling the listener with an eclectic crazy-quilt of styles and musical allusions. The theme is never wholly realized—it’s not even recognizable for the first several variations, and there seem to be several false starts as the piece caricatures various composers before taking the musical equivalent of a deep breath and beginning the final stylistic “plunge.”

Fragments begins with an instantly recognizable reference to Alban Berg’s famous violin concerto by inverting the descending circle-of-fifths chord progression underlying “How High the Moon” to resemble the ascending circle of fifths that stands out from Berg’s prime row. Likewise, the third variation, beginning at measure 34, opens with a pizzicato dialogue in rhythms that recast the second movement of Britten’s Cello Sonata into a slightly compacted but otherwise familiar rendition of (what else?) the first phrase of “How High the Moon.”

However, neither of these stylistic shifts seems to “take” for very long. The Berg tapers off into Britten; the Britten pops like a bubble with an accented sforzando chord. The fourth variation (the “deep breath” mentioned above) follows by offering the piece’s first actually recognizable quotation of “How High the Moon,” and then basically taking it back: after the melody dissolves into a quasi-expressionistic series of unsingable leaps, it collapses upon itself in melodic, rhythmic, and dynamic retrograde. The withdrawal is unsettling, like the sound of reel-to-reel audiotape unraveling and spooling an old jazz tune backwards onto the carpet. The piece seems to be apologizing for its progress thus far, almost trying to undo itself in order to prepare the listener for what is to come.

Indeed, the solemn, reflective (literally!) quality of this variation reveals itself in the rest of the piece to have been the setup to the best sort of musical punchline. The palindrome’s mournful coda diminishes down from Grave eighth-notes to rapid-fire sixteenths, and the piano gradually picks up into an old-fashioned walking bass. However, instead of merely following the lead of composers such as Ravel, whose comparable “Blues” movement in the Violin Sonata in G likewise fuses ideas from the idiom to classical compositional technique, Chris instead delivers a more direct sort of loving caricature from the inside out, and we encounter a dialogue between the instruments that draws upon popular “jazz” clichés, from that walking bass, to exaggerated “blue notes” in the melody, to the flamboyant runs in the piano’s last few measures.

- Daniel Johnson