Label: Editions Verde

長年に渡り様々な編成で実験音楽を演奏してきた、作曲家&演奏家Judith Berkson、Laura Cetilia、Katie Porter、Christine Tavolacciからなる米コンテンポラリー・カルテットMoonsのデビュータイトル。自分達が聴きたかった作品を自分達で作り上げたという2024年11月発表のアルバムであり、メンバーそれぞれが作曲を担当したという全4曲を収録。ミニマルなグラフィックスコアの使用、ハーモニーの探求など、まさにこのレーベルらしい抑え気味ながらもハードコアという素晴らしい持続音ベースの楽曲が聴けます。







MOONS is a quartet of composer/performers Judith Berkson (accordion/voice), Laura Cetilia (cello), Katie Porter (clarinet/bass clarinet), and Christine Tavolacci (flutes). Having performed experimental music for years in various configurations, the quartet seeks to create works for ourselves that we have always wanted to hear. This debut 4-track album was recorded at an artist residency at Westminster University in Salt Lake City, Utah, May 26-27, 2023.
In Judith Berkson’s natural:neutral tuning is used as a gateway for memory, attention. and perception. Scordatura tuning in the cello creates a neutral third with the clarinet, a harmonic interval that sounds somewhere in between a major and a minor third. The slightly out of tune intervals within the ensemble sound familiar but are simultaneously not. These changes in the tuning reframe the intervals and pitch relationships we may recognize or deeply remember, where a slight shift of pitch can alter the experience within us; a kind of listening between the present and the past. Christine Tavolacci’s breath in order to be completed is a collection of writings, illustrations and musical compositions based on a series of 26 divine visions that Hildegard experienced throughout adulthood. Fear, insecurity, and the confines of a patriarchal religion created extreme hesitation around sharing these visions, and it was not until she suffered a major illness that she gained the strength to freely share these works in her early forties and create . Inspired by impermanence, Katie Porter’s 18 Flowers in a Row is a collection of very minimal graphic scores in a notebook, with just a few notes, gestures, texts, and hand drawn flowers, written specifically for the beautiful playing of Laura, Judith, and Christine. As a place for us exist in together, each flower can last any length of time, but often exist in just the same amount of time as a pop song, so these are in song-form, moment-form, and will never be the same twice. Meditating on systems that collapse and expand upon themselves, the piece uses our own texts about abstract change in our lives, and how we cannot always see what is right in front of us. Throughout inside seconds, Laura Cetilia make use of the smallest intervals in Western music theory, the minor and major second. At times this interval is suspended by one or two players while another slowly slides from one note to the other with her singing voice. this gesture is done very quietly, almost imperceptibly, so that one just senses a slight shift in tonality. There is a sort of shimmering harmony where the dissonance within these seconds is treated as a delicate timbre, negating traditional resolution. the title also references the measurement of time. there is no unifying pulse or meter in this piece. Instead the players rely on their own felt-time, entering and exiting at their own pace.

Moons:
Judith Berkson (accordion/voice)
Laura Cetilia (cello)
Katie Porter (clarinet/bass clarinet)
Christine Tavolacci (flutes)