2006 was a bad year for me.  I commented on it in this piano piece, in which a melancholy theme deteriorates.

I carried this strip in my head for years.  I finally drew it for a Valentine’s Day edition of R. Sikoryak’s “Carousel.”

These are four brief pieces written for the piano-zither, a 3/15 diatonic chord zither with a simple keyboard mechanism — a sort of miniature table-top piano.  They can also be played on other keyboard instruments, of course.  Here’s a sample of the first piece.

This little tune was written to accompany some business in Bill Irwin’s Clown Lecture; it was later revamped for use in the PBS show Bill Irwin: Clown Prince. Here’s a bit of it.

I wanted to demonstrate the artificial musical language Solrésol for my show The Musical Underbelly.  I decided that one of the famously smutty sonnets of Pietro Aretino would make an interesting example.  I later expanded this for my third string quartet, which is based on several Solrésol translations of Aretino.

Here’s the first part of the translation.

I also notated it in the Solrésol script devised by Vincent Gajewski, just to see what it would look like.  Well, this is what it looks like.

“How Unusual” appeared in Nickelodeon Magazine in 1993.  It was meant as an expansion of my Zuzu strip, “It’s Fortean,” but turned out to be a one-shot.

This alphabet was devoted to interjections.

ah
boo
caw
duh
eek
feh
gulp
hey
ick
jeez
kachoo
la
mmm
nah
oops
pshaw
quack
rah
sh
tsk
uh
vroom
whoa
x!@*%!
yikes
zzz

Here are some samples.  “Zzz,” by the way, was based on a photo of me taken the day I was born.

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.