Unsurprisingly, my first exposure to Viet Cuong had nothing to do with nocturnal lepidopterans. Instead, it was in the fall of 2010 when the Yale Concert Band played his Ziggurat, complete with a custom animation projected behind us that, for some reason, involved flying bicycles. At the time, Cuong was finishing up a Master’s of Music degree at the Peabody Conservatory (where he also did his undergraduate studies) and preparing to begin an MFA in Composition at Princeton, where he’s currently pursuing his Doctorate. Despite still being in school, he’s accumulated a truly staggering number of awards and performances — on all six permanently inhabited continents, according to his webpage — and I’m honestly kind of surprised I haven’t encountered more of his works. (The YCB played another of his band pieces, Sound and Smoke, in 2012.) I’m sure that will change going forward; he’s an excellent composer and his fame is only going to continue to grow.

Hardly any information about Moth Sketches (2013) is floating around on the internet — even the listing on her publisher's site is a bare-bones rundown of instrumentation and duration — but according to an archived copy of the program from the première performance, the work started out as a score for a short animated film about a moth. Eventually, the music parted ways from the movie and became a stand-alone work, but the origins left their imprint, and she found herself thinking of different materials as quasi-dramatic characters. The form is still abstract, however; she describes it as being like a braided rope, "involving many strands of differing colors" such that the surface is constantly changing as the piece unfolds.

Music Monday: Cuong: Moth

Music Monday: Lash: Moth Sketches