This piece for violin and piano, in a slightly different form, originally served as the overture for “Harlequin and His Master Wed,” the second half of Bill Irwin’s show The Harlequin Studies, produced by the Signature Theater in 2003. I eliminated the drum part, and came up with a shorter title.

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Another piece from my student days: a brief outburst for flute, ‘cello, and piano four hands. I was 17 at the time.

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The eleventh string quartet is a revision of one I wrote back in 1988. It has three movements, each 59 measures long.

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Shakespeare’s 28th sonnet is, like Bottom, translated, by changing one letter in each word. The clinamen is in the 3rd line, where “oppression” is changed to “expression.” SHAKESPEARE MISSPELLED Now man, O when deturn on hoppy flight, What ax debarked thy bone-fit or rust? Then dad’s expression, as now, bas’d my might, Cut hay be […]

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The tenth string quartet consists of arrangements of some of the songs from The Doug Skinner Songbook. Here’s part of one of them.

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The ninth string quartet is for two violas and two ‘cellos: a rondo (which includes a round, appropriately), a fervent andante, a moderato that shuttles between a minuet and a gavotte, and a tango. Here’s the first page:  

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The Snowman Three Doors Down is now available from Black Scat Books! It has 24 stories! It’s 246 pages! Hapless characters slog through tangled plots and formal constraints in this bracing collection. Will the Chromatologist find the shade of green that identifies the adulterous cosplayer? Will a group of tipsy scholars discover the secret to […]

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Athanasius Kircher gave a brief realization of the music of the spheres in Musurgia Universalis (1650). Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars correspond to the soprano; the sun to the alto; Venus, Mercury, and the moon to the tenor; and the earth to the bass. I expanded his four measures to a hundred. He suggested that the […]

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My less-than-first string quartet collects a few pieces from my teens that I thought worth saving. Here, for example, is a rollicking polytonal number I wrote when I was 16 (recopied for legibility).

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The February issue of Le Scat Noir awaits you! This one contains the latest page of my musical instrument drawings, my story “The Snowman Three Doors Down,” and many other delights by other people! You can find it here.

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