Doug Skinner: An Archive on Your Gizmo

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“The Regard of Flight” in Cleveland

September 6th, 2011 · Comments Off on “The Regard of Flight” in Cleveland

The Regard of Flight appeared at the Great Lakes Festival in Cleveland in 1987.  It was a busy year for that show.

Here’s a review.  I’ve been called many things, but I’d never before been compared to an Arrow collar ad.

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Herrick

September 6th, 2011 · Comments Off on Herrick

I’ve written several rounds on the verses of Robert Herrick.  They seem quite suited for that.  Here’s one of them.

 

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He’s No Dummy

September 6th, 2011 · 1 Comment

An article by Tom Murrin, which appeared in Paper magazine in 1993.

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From Roussel’s “Indications”

August 31st, 2011 · Comments Off on From Roussel’s “Indications”

Raymond Roussel’s Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique is a remarkable book: four poems, describing sites in Africa, each digressing into an elaborate structure of nested parentheses.  Roussel published it himself; and to thicken it, commissioned 59 illustrations.  Characteristically, he avoided contact with the illustrator, preferring to hire a detective agency to find an artist, who then drew the illustrations without reading the book — or even knowing who wrote it.  In fact, the artist, Henri Zo, was dismayed when he received a printed copy, since he thought his pictures were too plain for Roussel’s unusual imagination.

I set seven of Roussel’s “Indications pour 59 dessins,” his directions to Zo.  In each, the right hand of the piano part is a translation of the text into Solrésol, the artificial musical language developed by François Sudre.  The bass line and vocal part were written around it.

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Proverbs

August 31st, 2011 · 1 Comment

I’ve set a number of proverbs as rounds.  We sang some of these in the Patient Island Singers, after we branched out from only doing material about Roosevelt Island.  Here are a couple of them.

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Jag

August 31st, 2011 · Comments Off on Jag

A lively piano piece, written while I was performing in Gardiner, Maine, back in 1994.

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Misapprehension

August 30th, 2011 · Comments Off on Misapprehension

A reverie, tinged with understandable concern.

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Pangrams

August 30th, 2011 · Comments Off on Pangrams

The pangrams are short piano pieces, each using every key on the keyboard once, on the model of the alphabetic kind that Augustus de Morgan introduced in Budget of Paradoxes, in 1872. The systematic exhaustion of the keyboard gets more complex as the series progresses.

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Sore Spot

August 30th, 2011 · Comments Off on Sore Spot

A clangorous sort of chorale, from 1992.

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Index Cards (20)

August 24th, 2011 · Comments Off on Index Cards (20)

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