Lewis Carroll inserted a tune into his novel Sylvie and Bruno, for the song “Ting Ting Ting.”  It’s a fine little tune; so I wrote a set of variations on it.  And this is how it opens.

The tune I’ve arranged here was first published in Hamburg in 1740, in a pamphlet by Johann Mattheson: Etwas Neues Unter Der Sonnen! Das Unterirrdische Klippen-Concert in Norwegen.

It related the testimony of a certain General Bertuch, who claimed that on Christmas Eve, 1695, he and a small group of musicians were led by a local farmer to a mountain near Bergen.  There they heard a concert that seemed to come from within the mountain: organ, voices, bassoons, violins, and other instruments.  The tune was notated by state musician Henrich Meyer.

My arrangement is for three voices, and could be played by any combination of voices, instruments, and keyboard.

Herbert Blau founded a theater company at Oberlin College in the 1970s. It was called Kraken; and in 1974 it toured a production based on the story of the Donner Party. I was a composition student at the Conservatory at the time, and contributed three songs.

Diderot is one of my favorite writers, and I’ve long enjoyed Le Neveu de Rameau. So, I was delighted to find a monograph on Jean François Rameau (by André Magnan), and particularly intrigued to learn that two melodies by that curious nephew had survived.  I harmonized them, and made a piano piece from the result; here’s how it begins.

Shakespeare’s “long word” is used to create an acrostic quodlibet.  I took one measure from each composer: the first measure of a piece by Handel, the second measure of a piece by Olagué, the third measure of a piece by Nichelmann, etc.  The honor roll is:

Handel
Olagué
Nichelmann
Offenbach
Ravel
Iradier
Franck
Isaac
Confrey
Albéniz
Berners
Ives
Lully
Inglot
Thomson
Urbanner
Dunstable
Ibert
Nörmiger
Ippolitov-Ivanov
Tchaikovsky
Alkan
Turina
Inghelbrecht
Bloch
Ullmann
Skinner

“Stumbling Block” is an essay in awkwardness: wrong-note harmonies, recapitulations that peter out, a right hand motif that gets stuck while the left hand moves on.  I played this countless times in shows with Bill Irwin, particularly to accompany some clown and trunk business in The Clown Bagatelles. Here’s the first part of it.

This was John Keel’s last book: a collection of his columns for Fate magazine.  He had promised to write an introduction, but was too ill to do it.  The publisher, Phyllis Galde, asked me if she could use the bio I had written for the Mothman issue of Fortean Times. So, I got their permission, and reworked it to make it more suitable as an introduction.  Here’s the first page.