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East Meets West in Garrett Fisher’s Moon in the Bucket
Story by Paul Cox '92
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Excerpts from: Moon in the Bucket Track
1 (56k | ISDN) |
RELATED: Oberlin Conservatory's Alumni Notes (Spring 2001) |
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the Conservatory |
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Listening Room |
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Observe
and listen carefully. This is how the story goes:
A wandering priest meets two ghosts and releases them from their past byshowing them the moon's reflection in their buckets.
Garrett Fisher’s Moon in the Bucket, an "oratorio-style mood poem" released on compact disc by 16 Vision Records, highlights his unabashed gift for writing profound music. Originally composed for a dance performance produced in Seattle at the Nippon Kan Theater, the music to Moon recalls Fisher’s earlier theatrical project, The Passion of Saint Thomas More--recently recorded on the BIS label.
According to inside sources, Fisher, who received Oberlin degrees in English and music composition in 1991, is quickly becoming Seattle’s most successful composer--and rightfully so. He has his own troupe (the eponymous Fisher Ensemble) and numerous musical and theatrical performances under his belt or in the works, among them, a score for a short film about Sally Hemings, and a multidisciplinary project about female immigrant workers called Silk Road.
Moon in the Bucket is a large-scale production, and features a unique ensemble of musicians capable of interpreting Fisher’s compositional gift for merging Eastern and Western musical ideas. Fisher writes successfully for an array of Western and Japanese instruments: koto and taiko (drum), oboe, Indian harmonium, and voices create a fresh sonority without any derivative consequences.
Inspired by Matsukaze, a 14th-century play in the Noh style by the Japanese author Zeami, (Matsukaze means "wind in the pines"), Moon In The Bucket mirrors many aspects of Noh theater--especially its subtle, slow choreography and serene music. To truly understand this work, however, one needs an insight into Japanese aesthetics.
I only began to "get" Fisher’s work while attending a lecture on Japanese screen painting given by Michael Cunningham, curator of Japanese and Korean art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In describing a 17th-century screen painting (byõbu) of a river and tall chrysanthemums, Cunningham noted its complete lack of pictorial perspective, a trait that gives much of Japanese painting an abstracted, gestural quality. Noh theater possesses a similar quality. According to Fisher, Noh "is not concerned with character development. The catharsis does not come at a single moment, but instead emerges as an accumulation of rich language, subtle gestural movement, simple song, and silence." Here, plot replaces process, and this comes across clearly in Fisher’s musical pacing.
Discussing with Mr. Cunningham the similarities between Japanese screen painting, theater, and music, it became clear to me that many Western ideas that we take for granted (perspective, plot, harmony) are not the primary focus in Japanese art. With this in mind, one can begin to understand Fisher’s use of a relatively flat or horizontal musical texture, yielding evocative chants and simple melodic lines that characterize his emotive music.
The work opens with a quiet chant in Japanese:
The
silhouette
Of wild
geese
Against
the face
Of
the moon…
There follows an extended, meditative oboe solo. This anchors the entire work, and reappears as a musical epilogue. As Moon develops, Fisher adds multiple voices in a polyphonic texture that contrasts dramatically with the prevailing single-voice texture. Fisher does this twice by layering conjugations of sung Japanese words. In track 4 we hear the phrase "to be"--gozare, gozate, gozare, gozate; and later, in track 9, "to arrive"--aku aita, aku aite, and so on. Fisher’s emphasis on language comes close to the Noh tradition of elongating words for dramatic and musical purposes.
The principal cast of Moon includes the Priest (sung by Anna Burdak); the ghost sisters, Pining Wind and Autumn Rain (Kathy Hanson-Mack and Liz O’Donoghue). Their touching voices add a unique poetic nuance to such phrases as Izaiza! Izaiza shio kuman tote ("Come! Come, we must draw brine") (track 7). The poetry, abstract as it is, benefits from the vocalists' stunning engagement with the story. In track 8, the voice of the priest intones two lines of text, accompanied by a percussion instrument known as a prayer bowl that sets up the focal point of the drama: When I view the moon,/Many thoughts come to mind. Thanks to the priest, the ghost sisters see their reflection in the bucket and rejoice. Here, the three singers reach a climactic moment, coming to rest on the word adanakute, "to arrive," forming a tone cluster that slowly merges via glissandi into a single note--a completely satisfying musical arrival.
I won't reveal any more secrets about Fisher’s excellent rendering of this gentle story. Instead, listeners would do well to check out Fisher’s web site and purchase the disc. Personally, this recording only whets my appetite for a live performance. Imagine the ritual dance, the ghostly mood lighting, and the stillness of the music. Perhaps next time we can watch a performance on DVD. Hint, hint.
