Haikus and urban
drastically throughout the piece. Uses of
soundscape -
Music by Alice Ho, City
Night
This week’s musical example
“My mMoonlit dDarling” is from Alice
Ho’s song cycle City Night. The cycle is a
production by mother-and-daughter team,
Bo Wen Chan and Alice Ho and Bo Wen
Chan. Written and composed in 2003, City
Night is a collection of Bo Wen Chan’s
urban haikus set to music. The series of
urban haikus talk about love in the
urban setting, about people’s pursuits of
modern superficial ideals, losing their
true selves, and failing to find love in the
process. This set explores topics of
emptiness, one’s ever-seeking of fulfilled
love, and hindering darkness both in the
modern lifestyle and one’s psyche.
In “My Moonlit Darling”, the
third piece of the cycle City Night, composer
Alice Ho uses various musical expressions
to create a soundscape of an urban setting,
inviting her listeners into a space of bliss,
mystery, and stirring winds, somewhere in
the city at night and in the company of one’s
lover. The series of urban haikus talk
about love in the urban setting, about
people’s pursuits of modern superficial
ideals, losing their true selves, and
failing to find love in the process. This
set explores topics of emptiness, one’s
ever-seeking of fulfilled love, and
hindering darkness both in the modern
lifestyle and one’s psyche.
The song is marked “Very romantic and
sentimental” at the top of the score, and
this emotional colour does not change too
cCon pedale (for piano), as well as uses
of sprecht and straight-tone (for voice)
are all used expressively to explore a
fuller range of colours both instruments
can create. Although it is far from being
traditionally ‘tonal’, the piece hinders
around the E (especially Eb) until the
middle section, after which the music will
resolve and end a step down on a Db.
Alice Ho assigns lots of octaves with
dissonant intervals to both the voice and the
piano. This is clever because the wide range
(super octaves) provide rich space and
resonance for harmonies that construct the
base of the soundscape, while the dissonant
pitches and intervals add an almost metallic
detailing to illustrate how a city night may
sound and feel. An empty landscape with
gentle stirring wind is audible to the
listeners immediately after the piece starts.
The pattern shown in the image below is a
staple gesture of the piano part that appears
throughout the song. There is almost no
significant growth or harmonic resolutions
throughout this phrase, which creates a
perfect soundscape for the type of poetry the
music is set to. Bo Wen Chan’s haikus from
this set are very modern,; they are both very
simple and very profound. Alice Ho’s
musical writing is a perfect vehicle for the
poetry because it is almost ‘“empty’” (absent
of big, strongly pronounced sophisticated
chords and elitist counterpoints; unlike
many contemporary composers, like Amy
Beach, for example), creating a neutral
ground on which the listeners are free to
just indulge in their individual experience.
 Alice Ho further enriches the
poetry by using nuances in her music.
After the first ‘“my moonlit darling’”,
there is a new ‘“episode’” that is
introduced in the piano part. As shown
in the image below, the note-clusters in
the first bar are written in a down-ward
direction, and the top Eb is played now
in a higher octave than before. It shows
a change from the piano part of the first
phrase. One can argue that this is part of
the soundscape writing: change of
direction in the wind; the higher Ebs
and Dbs could be echoes from the
previous Eb bouncing off of cement
walls and whatnot.
“coughing on the picnic bench”, it again
gives the listeners the autonomy to
decide what this particularly peculiar
line means: is the person speaking the
person who coughed, just weakly
excusing themself (whispering) and
explaining their situation? Or is it an
observation on someone else coughing?
As the piece approaches the
ending, a repeated interval (Db to Eb) in
the piano right-hand part is introduced.
As shown in the images below.

The middle part, where the singer

sings the ah’s is almost similar to a
descant. The voice takes part in creating
the soundscape. Either it is to mimic
wailing of siren or wind or stirring city
air or the people in the night, this part of
the song is quite evocative, allowing for
lots of dynamic and varied colours
variety for both instruments.
As shown in the image below, the
pluck-string piano and sprecht section is
probably one of the most iconic
moments of the song. Alice Ho cleverly
uses the piano’s pluck-string technique
to make the piano ‘“cough’”, and set the This is a significant change
vocal line to sprecht for a more narrative because up until now, the piece has been
“coughing on the picnic bench”. The relatively free, loose-structured,
pluck-string technique creates a highly imaginative, ‘“realistic’”-sounding. This
percussive, unusual, and ‘“abnormal’” last part is almost eerie in a way: do the
sound. When the singer sprecht left-hand and right-hand parts represent
two separate heart palpitations? Is one
person’s heartbeat more slowed than the
other, therefore hences the imbalance of
the relationship? Or, is the left-hand
part the slowed heartbeat shared by the
two, and is compared to the otherwise
‘“normal’” heartbeat represented by the
right-hand part? Or, in a more twisted
perspective, does this part not sound an
awful lot like someone having
unplugged a patient’s life support, and
as the person dies the monitor starts
beating against the murderer’s heart
that palpitates out of anguish or
excitement? The possibilityies isare
endless……
the dark night itself? Who is coughing
on the picnic bench? And why are they
coucghing? With whom does the
singer/narrator/poet share slowed
heartbeat? Is it the depth of the night,
accompanied with great lonesome and
despair?..... Questions go on and on, and
Alice Ho does a sublime job writing her
music in a way that opens her listeners’
minds to endless possibilities.

At the end of the day, one can

interpret the poem in many different
ways. The poem is sandwiched between
the second and fourth songs of the cycle,
both of which express an urgent sense of
angry despair. Coughing on the picnic
bench, and the sharing of slowed
heartbeat reveal one’s frustration with
their tiring pursuits - —the pursuit of
and longing for what is beyond the
moment, the pursuit of something that
is unachievable and unrealized.

The entire song simply consists of

three simple lines: my moonlit fdarling,
coughing on the picnic bench, we share
slowed heartbeats. Could my moonlit
darling be one of the ‘Pprowlers’ who
‘emerge in the dark’, as mentioned in the
first haiku of the set? Could it be the
‘blind’, who ‘cannot judge what is
purged in the darkness’ as in the last
song states in the cycle? Or is my
moonlit darling simply the moonlight,