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.

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.