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Sunday, June 16, 2002

By Andrew Druckenbrod, Post-Gazette Classical Music Critic

The most common synonym for "compose" is "write." University of Pittsburgh composer Eric Moe has taken this to heart over his career, spending as much energy on scripting titles as creating music.

	Eric Moe, a composer and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, tries to keep his music as simple as possible. "I want people to listen and perform it without a barrier," he says. (Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette)

The names run the gamut.

There's the poetically derived: his chamber piece "A Whirling and a Wandering Fire" and his saxophone trio "Rough Winds Do Shake the Darling Buds."

There are those that conjure up intriguing associations: his chamber works "Repeat Offender" and "Eight Point Turn."

There are frivolous titles: his piano concerto "Kicking and Screaming" and his soprano cycle "Songs Not So Serious."

Finally, there's the just downright weird: the flute piece "Dead Elf Tugboat" and multimedia "The Life of the Automobile."

And there's plenty more where those came from.

"The piece always comes first, then I agonize over the title," says Moe, 47, sitting in his studio in Pitt's Music Building in Oakland, where he has been a professor since 1989. "The titles are about process and content, but more about the content. For 'Kicking and Screaming,' I was in an artist colony, and someone said, 'They aren't going to get me out of here -- they're going to have to drag me out kicking and screaming.' I thought, 'Good name for a title.' But it's also about the struggle between piano and orchestra."

His titling practice can backfire, however, if listeners take an unintended meaning and run with it.

Take his piece "Riprap."

"A Philadelphia critic went on and on in his review about the rap influence in the piece," says Moe, noting that the word actually refers to the bumpy, rock-strewn bottom of a stream. "Obviously, he had never fished."

"On the verge"

It's been Moe's music, however, more than his appellations that has been winning over colleagues and creating fans.

	More About Moe To get a sense of the range of music composed by Eric Moe, here are downloadable mp3 samples from the six pieces on his most recent disc, "Up & At 'Em" on Albany Records (2002) "Time Will Tell" (461K) "Mouth Music" Sound samples of human voices. (469K) "Blue Air" Eric Moe on piano. (439K) "The Lone Cello" Second Movement: The Lone Prairie David Russell on cello. (471K) "A Whirling and a Wandering Fire" (463K) "Up & At 'Em" Third Movement: At 'Em (465K) Moe also released "Sonnets to Orpheus; Siren Songs" earlier this year. The disc was reviewed by the PG in January. The review includes an mp3 audio sample of soprano Elizabeth Farnum singing "Siren Songs" while accompanied by Moe on piano. Music Review: Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble gives uneven but powerful new-music performance in April, 2000. Visit the following sites to download players for Windows or Mac machines to listen to these files: Real Player Microsoft Windows Media Player WinAMP

He recently won an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and Albany Records has just released "Up & At 'Em," his third solo album and the second within a year.

Moe, a native of Carbondale, Ill., also is a veteran of the artist colony scene, the prestigious places such as MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where composers and other artists go to get away from the busy world and concentrate on their work. But the time might be ripe for him to move more prominently into the public spotlight.

"He is on the verge of breaking into a new level," says fellow Pitt composer Mathew Rosenblum.

The new CD reveals Moe's natural aesthetic and inviting language.

"I started getting really serious about composition and music in high school," says Moe. "I started working my way through the repertory systematically and chronologically, starting with Bach [going] to Bartok. Then I started realizing if I wanted to hear the type of music I wanted to hear, I would have to write it."

That music wasn't going to be an impersonation of the contemporary scene. Though he went to Princeton University for undergraduate work in the '70s, he writes nothing like the severe music cultivated there by composers such as Milton Babbitt.

"My personality is introverted, but as a composer, I am not in an ivory tower or a monastery," says Moe. "Some of my colleagues have done that, but I have rebelled against it to some extent."

One of his teachers in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, Andrew Imbrie, was close to him. But Moe never really entered into the typical mentor-student relationship. Similarly, he can't be placed in any composing "school," either.

"He is very hard to categorize, a minimalist sensibility. But you wouldn't say Eric is a minimalist," says Rosenblum. "He uses few elements in the piece but recombines them in a fascinating way. Also, the rhythmic structuring in the piece is individual and pulse-oriented. It has a lot of depth and has forward motion."

Like much tonality, Moe's pieces progress in approximation of human speech.

"It is rhetorical, nonverbal communication," says Moe. "Usually what I get from an audience member is, 'I really like that piece. I don't know why, but I really like it.'"

That's better reception than most contemporary composers get, and it's part of why Moe is becoming a central figure in the Pittsburgh and national scenes. But his work running ensembles is as important as his music. Locally, he and Rosenblum direct Music on the Edge, a Pitt new music series that's one of the few outlets for contemporary classical music in the city. Nationally, Moe co-founded EARPLAY, a new music group based in San Francisco.

"He is certainly well known among the composing community and as a performer," affirms Rosenblum. Nearly every major new music ensemble in the country has performed his music.

In fact, it is his performing career that has helped him stand apart from many composers.

"There are only a handful of composers who can truly distinguish themselves as performer and composer, and Eric is one," says Rosenblum.

An accomplished pianist, Moe premieres many of his works in concert and has performed a good deal in Pittsburgh. A tribute to this skill is that he will be featured next year as a performer for a CD of modern waltzes.

Melody maker

Moe's virtuosity on the piano plays a major role in how he composes. Though he often works with electronic instruments and sampling (using snippets of recordings of instruments or voices), the majority of his output is for traditional instruments, many with a central piano role. Even if an opus doesn't use keyboard, Moe's music stems from it.

"The piano is crucial to the kind of music I write," he says. "Sometimes I sit down with a piece of music paper, but most of the time I am getting my hands dirty."

Take his piano concerto "Kicking and Screaming." Written for Speculum Musicae and pianist Aleck Karis, it has since received many performances, including one locally by Moe with the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble in 2000.

It's an agitatedly lyrical piece whose main phrases evolve in the most natural manner. They aren't tonal, but they're not atonal, either.

How Moe constructs phrases like those of "Kicking and Screaming" is uncontrived, too. Sitting at a keyboard in the studio, he demonstrated by playing the opening two chords of the pianist's solo entrance.

"I will get to this much and then say, what happens next?" he says, playing the next chord. "Oh, that's nice. ... Or should it go here? [He plays another chord.] I think as I play -- how do I continue that melody? What sounds good?"

That Moe even talks about melody is a breath of fresh air for most audiences, who are used to difficult, nontonal music from composers of the last half-century. Moe's music suspends itself between the two extremes -- tonal triads show up, but they aren't governed by tonal, atonal, 12-tone or any other systematic rules but instead by his communicative gestures.

Moe has composed some radical music in his time. "Mouth Music" on the new disc is entirely made up of different people speaking. But for most of his output, he has a philosophy about keeping it as simple as possible.

"I want people to listen and perform it without a barrier," he says. "If they have to learn a 32-note-to-the-octave tuning with an idiosyncratic notation, it isn't going to get performed very much."

One example of that came with his last disc, in his song cycle "Siren Songs," set to the music of several poets. Moe picked one poem, about sexuality, from the contemporary writer Paula McLain. Only one problem: It contains a certain synonym for sex that normally gets a parental advisory label.

"I have three singers who won't do the piece, but there are many singers who do love singing that word. If you buy any rap CD, this is pretty mild by comparison. It is more the context of it -- people don't expect to see that there because classical is supposed to be pristine and pure."

Gestures like that aside, Moe has made his mark on the new music scene and has impressed many who hear his music with its accessibility. And he's guided his students at Pitt into music they never knew existed, bringing that to the public with Music on the Edge.

What's the next step?

"I think it is time for him to get a commission from a major orchestra. He is more than ready," says Rosenblum.

Moe has written a symphony, but his only commission from a top orchestra was a short piece heralding Mariss Jansons and the PSO in 1998, "No Time Like the Present."

Rosenblum says it's time to expect more, insisting Moe is ready to write a large-scale dramatic or symphonic work.

"I'm sure he wouldn't turn it down."