MOON AND MOSS
Tenor, clarinet, piano
Commissioned by Erinn Komschlies
Text by Chelsea Komschlies
2019
A dreamlike, wet, writhing forest at night. The singer’s simple text and square rhythms sound like a children’s folk rhyme, but uncanny visual descriptions lend the piece a dark quality, rife with the scent of rich, wet earth and slow decay by fungal bodies. The piano undulates in damp arabesques and gong-like repetitive figures while the clarinet bursts out of the texture with quarter-tone inflected special effects. Faux folk melodies have been left to decay on the forest floor, becoming transformed and strange.
At the juncture of moon and moss,
The elms are slick with dew;
The morels thick with spores.
Ferns bow to twilight,
Heavy with snails.
The earth beneath me is violet-black.
Blue earthworms writhe in mud;
The writhing tadpoles wait.
The lungs of the elms
Howl open and closed.
A rabbit lies dead in Warbler Swamp.
A desiccated king
Mycelium hoary crowns.
Slowly an earthworm
Glides through his eye.
But now the forest is flat and gone,
The snails are only shells.
The shells are only dust.
I place my hands on my ribs,
Feel my lungs howl
Open and closed,
Open and closed.
The elms are slick with dew;
The morels thick with spores.
Ferns bow to twilight,
Heavy with snails.
The earth beneath me is violet-black.
Blue earthworms writhe in mud;
The writhing tadpoles wait.
The lungs of the elms
Howl open and closed.
A rabbit lies dead in Warbler Swamp.
A desiccated king
Mycelium hoary crowns.
Slowly an earthworm
Glides through his eye.
But now the forest is flat and gone,
The snails are only shells.
The shells are only dust.
I place my hands on my ribs,
Feel my lungs howl
Open and closed,
Open and closed.