Composer and pianist Eric Moe's newest release, WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 5 YEARS, is a collection of five works for solo keyboard and one quintet featuring piano that centers the instrument in his compositional output. Drawing on some of his most common sources of inspiration, namely natural, scientific, and social phenomena, Moe deftly integrates his observations about various paradigms into the aesthetic and musical vocabulary of his music.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 50:00 | |||
| 01 | Alternating Currents | Solungga Liu, piano | 7:55 | |
| 02 | Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust | Eric Moe, piano | 0:56 | |
| 03 | Scree Slope | Eric Moe, piano | 4:38 | |
| 04 | Now This | Solungga Liu, piano | 13:05 | |
| 05 | Rowdy Sarabande | Eric Moe, digital piano | 6:58 | |
| 06 | WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 5 YEARS | New York New Music Ensemble, Adrián Sandí, clarinets, Karen Kim, violin, Chris Finckel, cello, Stephen Gosling, piano, Eduardo Leandro, conductor | 16:28 | |
Piano is at the center of composer Eric Moe’s newest release, WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 5 YEARS. Moe is an accomplished pianist in his own right, having made major contributions as a performer, while consistently featuring his keyboard music in his compositional oeuvre. He uses the instrument to its full capacity, even stretching it beyond its assumed limits at times, as in his work Rowdy Sarabande for digital piano retuned in 19-tone equal temperament. Moe organizes this collection into five solo pieces, three of which he performs, plus a culminating title track, a quintet in which the piano plays a leading role. Common sources of inspiration throughout his work shape these pieces, namely an interest in exploring natural, scientific, and social phenomena, and embedding analogous systems that allow these observed dynamics to play out within his compositions.
The album opens with Alternating Currents (2020), performed by Solungga Liu, a sonic manifestation of a phenomenon most often associated with electrical behavior. The piece is a kind of etude for alternation of the hands on the keyboard, and Moe revels in the playful resultant rhythms and accents that emerge from the physicality of the execution. Implied melodies pop out from an ostinato texture like unpredictable elements within a controlled system. As the piece evolves, the interrupting material becomes more irregular and adventurous. Only in one section is the insistence of an ostinato broken by brilliant trilled figures and luminous arpeggiations.
Moe is the performer on the brief miniature, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust (2014). As with Alternating Currents, Moe plays with variability within a regular context in this short work. Opening with a repeating five note figure, he extends it modularly into seven notes, six notes, etc. Moe distills this process into a fleeting microcosm of the organic but non-repetitive impact of water and wind over centuries that shapes stones at a glacial pace over centuries.
Read MoreErosion is also the focus of Scree Slope, named after the small, loose rocks on a mountain side that once comprised solid ground. Moe is an avid hiker, and the experience of stepping up followed immediately by sliding back down informs the pacing of this piece. One hears the forward physical motion and the retreats, but also the mental dialogue that accompanies it, a mix of frustration and mindful persistence. Scree Slope has a few moments of uninterrupted progress, but ultimately, its forward march is the result of a patient composite of advancing and retreating. At the work’s final minute, the music ascends and opens to an otherworldly vista, leaving the trials of the slippery scramble behind.
Now This is a reaction to the sometimes jarring juxtapositions of topic that occur as a result of this common phrase among news reporters that is meant to facilitate a transition. In composition, transitions are often the most fraught part of a piece’s structure to manage; here Moe takes this TV paradigm of sudden tone shifts as a formal cue and organizing principle. The piece opens with thunderous energy and taut, insistent figures, later migrating to airy, disjunct melodies over a lightly toggling ostinato. A rhapsodic, flowing passage is interrupted by the groan of a mallet dragging across the strings inside the piano, only to make way for a enigmatic, pointillistic section. Muted, clicking timbres punctuate a dramatic episode of pillared arrivals connected by virtuosic flourishes. Unlike your nightly newscast, Moe does ultimately tie divergent threads in the piece together in its final minutes, bringing back both of the extended timbres as well as several of the thematic ideas; in doing so, the piece provides a kind of aesthetic cohesion one can only yearn for from the disconcerting world of current events.
Rowdy Sarabande begins with the lilting rhythm associated with the baroque dance for which it is named, embellished by elegant filigree and increasingly agitated interjections. Moe’s choice to use 19 tone equal temperament for the piece sets it in a mysterious haze, as he leans into the tuning’s sonorous consonances and striking dissonances alike. The work’s rowdy character bursts forth in earnest after the one minute and half mark, replacing liquid obscurity with ferocious, angular passagework. Tangled sequences are marked by sharp accents, charged pauses, and poignant sustains during which the listener can contemplate the exotic intonation of the temperament. A series of repeated pitches evokes an off-kilter toy piano, and Moe winds down the raucous energy and returns to the beguiling lilt of the opening, but not before a final brusque gesture to close this study of expressive contrasts.
WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 5 YEARS is a meditation on clichéd job interview questions, and more broadly the tension between a vision of life put forward by the professionalized work world versus a more humanistic way of understanding life’s trajectory. Moe cleverly positions a kind of mechanistically charged rhythmic energy, most clearly articulated by the grooves in the percussion part, as a stand-in for the kind of productivity obsessed mentality that dominates our culture. Pre-recorded samples of interview questions are heard throughout the piece, in addition to the title question, such as: “do you handle stress well?,” or “what are your expectations?” Moe’s treatment of the ensemble alternates between moments when the instruments assert individual character and expression, to others when they conform and coalesce into a hybrid machine. After the questions “what is your greatest weakness?” and “describe something you have handled well in the past,” are posed, we hear lyrical passages for violin and flute, and then piano respectively, that inject a sense of self-reflection that lingers underneath any kind of professional evaluation.
– Dan Lippel
Alternating Currents, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust, and Scree Slope recorded March 10, 2023 at Oktaven Audio, Mt. Vernon, NY
Recording producer: Judith Sherman
Sound engineer: Charles Mueller
Engineering and editing assistant: Jeanne Velonis
Piano technician: Daniel Jessie
Editing: Judith Sherman
Now This recorded May 8, 2024 at Oktaven Audio, Mt. Vernon, NY
Recording producer: Judith Sherman
Sound engineer: Owen Mulholland
Engineering and editing assistant: Jeanne Velonis
Editing: Judith Sherman
Rowdy Sarabande recorded February 4-6, 2025 at MacDowell, Peterborough, NH
Recording producer and editing: Eric Moe
WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 5 YEARS recorded May 12, 2024 at Oktaven Audio, Mt. Vernon, NY
Recording producer, sound engineer, and editing: Ryan Streber
Mastering: Jeanne Velonis
Cover photo: © Barbara Weissberger
Design: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
All works published by Dead Elf Music (ASCAP)
Eric Moe (b. 1954), composer of what the NY Times has called “music of winning exuberance,” has received numerous grants and awards for his work, including the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship; commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, Meet-the-Composer USA, and New Music USA; fellowships from the Wellesley Composer's Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the UCross Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Aaron Copland House, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Montana Artists Refuge, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, the Hambidge Center, and the American Dance Festival, among others.
Tri-Stan, his sit-trag/one-woman opera on a text by David Foster Wallace, premiered by Sequitur in 2005, was hailed by the New York Times as “a blockbuster” and “a tour de force,” a work of “inspired weight” that “subversively inscribes classical music into pop culture.” In its review of the piece, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette concluded, “it is one of those rare works that transcends the cultural divide while still being rooted in both sides.” The work is available on a Koch International Classics compact disc. Strange Exclaiming Music, a CD featuring Moe’s recent chamber music, was released by Naxos in July 2009 as part of their American Classics series; Fanfare magazine described it as “wonderfully inventive, often joyful, occasionally melancholy, highly rhythmic, frequently irreverent, absolutely eclectic, and always high-octane music.” Kick & Ride, on the bmop/sound label, was picked by WQXR for album of the week: “…it’s completely easy to succumb to the beats and rhythms that come out of Moe’s fantastical imaginarium, a headspace that ties together the free-flowing atonality of Alban Berg with the guttural rumblings of Samuel Barber’s Medea, adding in a healthy dose of superhuman strength.” Other all-Moe CDs are available on New World Records (Meanwhile Back At The Ranch), Albany Records (Kicking and Screaming, Up & At ‘Em, Siren Songs), and Centaur (On the Tip of My Tongue). The Sienese Shredder, a fine arts journal, includes an all-Moe CD as part of its third issue.
As a pianist and keyboardist, Moe has premiered and performed works by a wide variety of composers. His playing can be heard on the Koch, CRI, Mode, Albany, New World Records and Innova labels in the music of John Cage, Roger Zahab, Marc-Antonio Consoli, Mathew Rosenblum, Jay Reise, Ezra Sims, David Keberle, Felix Draeseke, and many others in addition to his own. His solo recording The Waltz Project Revisited - New Waltzes for Piano, a CD of waltzes for piano by two generations of American composers, was released in 2004 on Albany. Gramophone magazine said of the CD, “Moe’s command of the varied styles is nothing short of remarkable.” A founding member of the San Francisco-based EARPLAY ensemble, he currently co-directs the Music on the Edge new music concert series in Pittsburgh. Moe studied composition at Princeton University (A.B.) and at the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.). He is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and has held visiting professorships at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. More information is available at his website, ericmoe.net.
https://www.ericmoe.net/Solungga Liu has earned acclaim as a pianist of remarkable breadth, celebrated for her advocacy of early twentieth-Century American music, underrepresented works in the classical repertoire, and her interpretation of contemporary compositions. Her discography is both wide-ranging and extensive.
Liu’s 2017 debut at the Library of Congress was praised for its “rhythmic precision, expression and a finely calibrated sense of balance between all of the moving parts.” There she performed a solo recital, including the premiere of Charles Griffes’s 1915 piano transcription of Debussy’s Les parfums de la nuit from his orchestral work Iberia, once thought lost by Griffes’s biographers.
A dedicated performer of new music, Liu has had numerous premieres and recordings of contemporary works to her credit and has collaborated with many leading composers of our time. She is Professor of Piano and Piano Area Coordinator at Bowling Green State University.
Eduardo Leandro teaches percussion at Stony Brook University in new York, where he is also the artistic director of its new music ensemble, the Contemporary Chamber Players. He taught at the Haute École de Musique de Genève and directed the percussion program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst between 1999 and 2007. He has conducted some of the most important pieces of the twentieth century, including Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Chamber Symphony, Ligeti’s Piano and Chamber Concertos, Messiaen’s Exotic Birds, Xenakis’ Palimpsest, Boulez’s Derives I, and several premieres for mixed ensemble.
As a percussionist Eduardo Leandro has performed with ensembles such as the Steve Reich Ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and Bang-on-a-Can All Starts. He is part of the Percussion Duo Contexto, which was an ensemble in residence at the Centre Internacional de Percussion in Geneva for ten years. He played regularly with Ensemble Champ d'Action in Belgium, with Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, and with Ensemble Contrechamps in Switzerland, under the direction of Pierre Boulez, Heinz Holliger, and David Robertson among others.
Eduardo Leandro was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He attended the Sao Paulo State University, the Rotterdam Conservatory in the Netherlands, and Yale University, having studied percussion with John Boudler, Jan Pustjens, and Robert van Sice.
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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