Fascinatin' Fragments

Fascinatin' Fragments
Some Thoughts on a New Piece of Music
by Daniel Johnson

Somewhere there's music;
How faint the tune!

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!") my friends and I shot for my high school physics class. To abbreviate the long, strange story I told him: it happened that I ended up needing to chisel into tiny shards a marble representing the moon in order to free it from the thumbhole of my grandfather's old bowling ball, which represented the sun. When it was finally in smithereens, I poured the shards out of the bowling ball onto the card table from which I hosted the video, and then attempted to brush them off with the palm of my hand.

Not quite realizing that what I was doing basically amounted to dragging my hand across a thousand tiny 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, always listening for the knock of inspiration, heard a strange music in that line, and thus was inspired to compose - starting with the title - a piece of music called "Shattered Fragments of the Moon."

Soon, he had imagined an appropriate structure for the piece, in the form of a highly unusual set of variations on the old melody, "How High the Moon," by Morgan Lewis. The instrumentation would be for viola and piano, in honor of the piece's genesis, since I play the viola and Chris plays the piano, and as the composer pointed out, there would be no way for me to politely refuse to perform a piece which had been dedicated to me. Unfortunately, due to a series of unforeseen events, the piece never received its intended premiere on the composition department recital, but it is nonetheless a beautiful piece of music and will hopefully see public performance in the near future. [It was premiered on 10 February 2000 by Esther Minwary and Albert Mendoza. - ed.]

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 — and not even recognizable for the first several variations — and there seem to be several musical false starts as the piece attempts to imitate the musical styles of various composers before taking the musical equivalent of a deep breath and beginning the final stylistic "plunge."

The allusive eclecticism of Fragments may owe a debt to the viola concerto of Schnittke — as well as the piece which may have inspired its composition, the Shostakovich sonata for viola and piano — as Chris was first introduced to those pieces very near the time he began composing this piece for viola and piano, and the confluence, whether conscious or not, is unlikely to be coincidence. For example, just as Shostakovich's final movement clearly draws upon the almost universally familiar "Moonlight" piano sonata by Beethoven, Chris's piece begins with an instantly recognizable reference to his favorite violin piece — Berg's famous concerto — by inverting the descending circle-of-fifths chord progression underlying "How High the Moon" to resemble the ascending circle of fifths (i.e., the instrument's open strings from bottom to top) that strands out from Berg's prime row. Likewise, the third variation, beginning at measure 34, opens with a pizzicato dialogue between the viola and piano whose rhythms recast the second movement of Britten's Sonata in C for Cello and Piano into a slightly compacted but otherwise familiar rendition of (what else?) the first phrase of "How High the Moon."

However notice that 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 "sfz" chord. The fourth variation, the "deep breath" mentioned above, follows by first 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, withdrawing into 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 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. Although the source of the jazz elements in the music is almost certainly Chris's own background as a jazz pianist, he has confessed to me that he felt freer to include them due to the influence of another composer at USC: his own teacher, the vigorously American Dr. Frank Ticheli. The preceding palindrome might even be seen as a sort of quiet homage to Ticheli, whose most famous piece, "Postcard," incorporates many palindromic elements as well as his trademark jazz-style rhythms and harmonies.

However, instead of merely following the lead of composers such as Ticheli, Chris instead attempts a more direct sort of loving caricature of jazz music from the inside out. He has written out a dialogue between the instruments that draws upon his favorite jazz clichés, from that walking bass, to exaggerated "blue notes" in the melody, to the flamboyant runs in the piano's last few measures.

How, then, might one classify Shattered Fragments of the Moon? Unlike much student work, its disorienting pastiche of styles keeps it from being convincingly "neo-" anything. On the other hand, describing it with the popular, but bland label "eclectic" is far too broad (couldn't Mahler, for example, be called an "eclectic" composer? Yet there is nothing resembling his music here). The most tempting classification, may be the controversial and perhaps even vaguer category of "post-modern" or "post-modernist" music, and, in fact, the piece's numerous references to modernist musical composition make this label seem particularly apt, loath as many may be to use it.

Whatever it is called, "Shattered Fragments of the Moon" remains an entertaining and fascinating piece. Its historical moment may be difficult to describe, but its challenging form and structure constitute the basis of a surprising and often clever musical language in whose creation it has been a great honor for me to participate.