The Moon

The Moon was commissioned by Vox Musica, the women’s choir based in Sacramento directed by Daniel Paulson, for their spring 2023 concert, Ode to the Earth and Sky, featuring Molly Pease. The words are a poem of the same name by Henry David Thoreau:

The full-orbed moon with unchanged ray
Mounts up the eastern sky,
Not doomed to these short nights for aye,
But shining steadily.

She does not wane, but my fortune,
Which her rays do not bless,
My wayward path declineth soon,
But she shines not the less.

And if she faintly glimmers here,
And paled is her light,
Yet alway in her proper sphere
She’s mistress of the night.

I set out to write a companion piece to the other work that I wrote for Vox Musica several years ago, called Ode to the Sun, which is also featured in this program.  As they are the two most dominant figures in the sky from our vantage on earth, one in the day and one in the night, I attempted to display their differing traits within the music.  Ode to the Sun features more dissonant harmonies and relentless, wide spanning sonorities, representing the intensity of the star and our inability to look directly at it.  The Moon, alternatively, features harmonies and melodies that are more familiar, growing and subsiding like its monthly cycles, and upon which it is a pleasure to gaze.  The two pieces are connected, though, through a very similar melodic figure that is constantly revolving throughout both works, more active and in triplets in Ode to the Sun, and slower, in straight eighth notes in The Moon.  If the choir is the moon rising and falling in the sky, filling out with each nightly return, the organ and cello are the sea’s waves, being gravitationally pulled towards its changing presence.  As the choir grows in dynamics and upwards in register, so too do the cello and organ, cycling like the tides.