MOONS is a quartet of composer/performers Judith Berkson, Laura Cetilia, Katie Porter, and Christine Tavolacci. In this concert, MOONS performs four original works from their eponymous album.

Moons is a new collective of four fascinating composer-performers: vocalist/keyboardist Judith Berkson, cellist Laura Cetilia, clarinetist Katie Porter, and flutist Christine Tavolacci. Although they all have discrete practices, in Moons they coalesce around shared concerns for sustained, meditative sounds, often with unusual tunings. Each member brings a composition to their eponymous debut album, but by joining forces they’ve demonstrated how community can project a unified vision. Berkson's "natural:neutral" is an elegantly lumbering work in which unexpected harmonies transform the timbre of the instrumentation--particularly the trippy blend achieved by cello and clarinet, with sorrowful flute drifting over the fused, beating tones. Tavolacci's "breath in order to be completed" draws upon the words of Hildegard von Bingen who said the articulation of a word requires sound, force, and breath. The piece provides a tactile blend of instrumental tones, richly striated and abraded by friction and spilled, sibilant breath, before Berkson comes to the fore slowly singing the words in the quote, "A word has sound in order to be heard, force in order to be understood, and breath in order to be completed." Porter's "18 Flowers in a Row" uses a graphic score of notes, gestures, texts, and drawings of various flowers, an endlessly mutable work that varies with every performance. But the tender care afforded by Moons, as long tones drift and overlap and terse notes and gestures are layered with furtive, whispered, and mewled vocal phrases, sure seems like an ideal version. The album concludes with Cetilia's "inside seconds," which deploys the smallest interval in Western music, the minor and major second, creating a harmonically tricky, frictive drone that reveals lots of movement within the narrow sound field.
--Peter Margasak "Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp"