This piece was recently commissioned by Chamber Music Silicon Valley and premiered at the 2024 Silicon Valley Music Festival by Elijah Reyes, Shota Otaguro, and myself. The intention of this piece was to showcase how “classical canon continues to inspire contemporary creativity,” so I was asked to incorporate Schoenberg’s “Pierre Lunaire” as my source of inspiration - to sample from it and create a new story out of it.

The piece is specifically about the moon in "Pierrot Lunaire." As if we, the performers and electronics, are the moon trying to attract and lure the audience like the moon did to Pierrot which led him into his spiral into madness throughout the piece. The beginning is meant to be very ambient and drone-like in order to grab the listener’s attention then later in the electronics is when the vocal samples start coming in, which are supposed to resemble the moon's influence slowly trying to "take over your mind."

I used samples from the piece which specifically talk about how beautiful the moon is and how powerful and influential it is. For instance, the first line is the same as the title, and the first line of the poem, “the wine we drink with our eyes; pours from the moon in waves upon us” and the very last line is “sick, ailing moon” to indicate the moon’s failure in its intentions. Scattered throughout the piece are different, subtle homages to the original piece regarding structure, motives, and so on!

DURATION: 7 minutes