Work
The Bewitching Moon
graphic score for unaccompanied SATB choir
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About
I was inspired to write this piece after seeing Tim Hope’s remarkable award-winning animation The Wolfman, in which a scientist becomes bewitched by the moon’s intoxicating appearance at the end of his telescope, and subsequently becomes a wolf who crashes through planets on his carbon rocket. I have also been interested in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which also talks of moonlight as being the wine which one drinks with one’s eyes. I have sought to use the choir to evoke a ritualistic atmosphere of a community becoming bewitched by the moon, and, in their state of intoxication, paying homage to it and endeavouring to become part of it.
I particularly wanted to use the choir in a way that would make them sound less like a spotlessly melodious well-blended choir and more like a wildly theatrical soundscape generator.
Claire Scholes
Contents note
one movement
Text note
an Armenian folk song
Performance history
15 Oct 2006: Performed by The Reading Group and conducted by Karen Grylls at the University of Auckland Clocktower, Auckland
01 Mar 2009: Time's Past