(visit http://www.carlschimmel.com to order score and parts)
"The Moon Rabbit Syllabary" was inspired by my young children Otto and Thora, and our shared fascination with the moon. They are half-Japanese, and so for this work I drew upon an old Japanese tale about the “rabbit in the moon”. In the legend, a god tests the kindness of a monkey, a fox, and a rabbit by disguising himself as a beggar asking for food. The monkey provides him with fruit and the fox provides him with fish, but being able only to gather grass the rabbit cannot provide food to the beggar, whereupon he prepares to sacrifice himself to the beggar by leaping into a fire. The god stops him, and instead places the rabbit in the moon for all to see, in commemoration of his kindness and self-sacrifice. In the music I have combined the Japanese legend with the Iroha, an old Japanese pangram and poem in which each syllable taken from the hiragana script occurs exactly once.
