Alice Ho, “My Moonlit Darling”

Haikus and Urban Soundscape in Alice Ho’s City Night

by Candice Luo | March 27, 2021

“My Moonlit Darling” is from Alice Ho’s song cycle City Night. The cycle is a production by mother-and-daughter team, 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 song is marked “Very romantic and sentimental” at the top of the score, and this emotional colour does not change too drastically throughout the piece. Con pedale (for piano), as well as uses of sprecht and straight-tone (for voice) are instructed to expressively 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” (an absence of complicated counterpoint writings and any harmonies that would sound too chromatic or ‘odd’ to the ear), this almost “minimalistic” writing creates an immediate affect and it echoes the nature of haiku poetry as well. Alice Ho does a great job 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 downward 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.

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 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 vocal line to sprecht for a more narrative “coughing on the picnic bench”. The pluck-string technique creates a highly percussive, unusual, and “abnormal” sound. When the singer sprecht “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.

This is a significant change because up until now, the piece has been relatively free, loose-structured, imaginative, “realistic”-sounding. This last part is almost eerie in a way: do the left-hand and right-hand parts represent two separate heart palpitations? Is one person’s heartbeat more slowed than the other, hence 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 possibilities are endless…

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 darling, coughing on the picnic bench, we share slowed heartbeats. Could my moonlit darling be one of the ‘prowlers’ 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, the dark night itself? Who is coughing on the picnic bench? And why are they coughing? With whom does the singer/narrator/poet share a 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.