This started out as a song, but soon settled into a piano piece.  I used it in some of the shows I did with Bill Irwin, particularly in The Clown Lecture.

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.