This composition is my response to the question posed Dylan Robinson in the Soundings exhibit: “How can a score be a call and tool for decolonization?”, as well as providing one alternative to what Robinson describes as “hungry listening.” Moonsong engages with topics of decolonization in music by enacting refusal, preventing hungry/extractive listening, and questioning settler logics regarding music, and serves as one idea of how electroacoustic music can challenge extractive listening and model a type of music that forces “slow listening” as an alternative to “hungry listening”.
Moonsong is first and foremost tied to and activated by the moon. It will only play when the moon is visible in the sky, and if the moon isn’t up at the moment, you’ll need to return to this page later if you want to hear the piece. Moonsong is also tied to the physical site of the soundings exhibit on the homeland of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm|Musqueam people (which is also where I reside as an uninvited guest); it is not disembodied or portable, as we have often come to expect music to be, but is conceived of as fundamentally rooted in this specific location. This means that although a listener from anywhere in the world can listen, what you hear will be tied to moonrise in Vancouver, and not wherever you’re listening from.
In addition to being connected to a specific place, Moonsong is also connected to the present moment. The score gathers current weather and astronomical data from the internet, including moon phase, height in the sky, time of day, season of year, temperature, cloud cover, and wind speed. Everything about what a listener hears, including the individual sounds used, their order and relationship to each other, the overall form and length of the piece, and global audio filters and effects, is chosen based on the current weather and astronomical condition. The number of factors and their interconnectivity is such that hearing exactly the same performance of the piece on two different occasions is almost impossibly unlikely, which contrasts the standard concept of a musical recording as being constant and unchanging. Unlike a standard recording, and more like live music, there is no way to repeatedly listen to or analyze any one individual performance; repeated listenings will each be unique and will lead to a holistic rather than narrowly analytical understanding of the work.
I hope you’ll be intrigued enough by the concepts presented by Moonsong to return and listen if your first encounter is when the piece is not active, and to come back and listen multiple times to hear different variations of the work. Doing so is an active choice to respect and to engage with the work on its own terms, rather than expecting it to conform to yours, and I believe that every experience we have with a piece of art that causes us to recognize our expectations of how music should work can help us to broaden our understanding of how music can work.
-Walker Williams
(Moonsong is powered by WeatherAPI.com)
Walker Williams is an eclectic composer from rural West Virginia, whose compositional style runs the gamut from conservative tonality to avant-garde performance art (admittedly with an overall tendency towards writing ‘pretty music’). Walker is currently pursuing doctoral studies in composition at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and he holds a MMus in composition from UBC, and a BA in music composition from Shepherd University in West Virginia.
As a white settler, Walker has benefitted from the ongoing act of colonization in both the United States and Canada, and would like to acknowledge that his upbringing and education has taken place primarily on the homelands of the Massawomeck, Manahoac, and Musqueam nations.