When Queequeg, the tattooed cannibal harpoonist in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, comes down with a fever, he asks the Pequod‘s carpenter to build him a floating coffin. But once the illness passes and he regains his strength, the crew repurposes the carpenter’s handiwork as a life buoy, which after the wreck of the ship saves the novel’s narrator, Ishmael. In 2016, when percussionist Michael Zerang performed in Blair Thomas’s staging of Moby-Dick (a story the puppeteer had been staging and restaging since 1990), one of his duties was to crank out musical drones on a prop called Queequeg’s Coffin. After the play was done, Zerang took the instrument home—and in a corresponding act of creative recycling, this Saturday in May Chapel at Rosehill Cemetery he’ll present his own concert-length composition built around it.
For this composition, which is called Follow the Light, I’m writing for four string players—two violas and two contrabasses, played by Johanna Brock, Julie Pomerleau, Anton Hatwich, and Jason Roebke. We’re going to turn it into a band called Silt, and we’re going to perform at the May Chapel and also one of the nights at the winter solstice.
Is the piece that you’re going to perform scored all the way through, or is it a guided improvisation? I’m creating a form. It’s a drone piece, and the duration is going to be about 48 minutes. It’s not so much that it’s completely notated and it’s not so much that it’s an improvisation. It has five sections, and each one focuses on a different aspect. We move through these aspects together. It’s very unified playing, with no soloistic playing by the musicians, and it’s pretty much organic and unified as far as the overall sound. The coffin itself, Queequeg’s Coffin, sometimes acts as a catalyst for different changes, pitch shifting at different rates of movement, but it’s all pretty unified within the ensemble.
