So far, I’ve written eighteen string quartets, although some are still not quite finished. Here are some descriptions.

<1: AH YOUTH. A few pieces from my teens that I thought worth saving.

1: EDDIE UNCHAINED. A suite drawn from my ventriloquial musical of that name.

2: ROUNDS. Four rounds.

3: ARETINO IN SOLRÉSOL. Five erotic sonnets by Piero Aretino translated into the universal musical language Solrésol.

4: CHORALES. Fourteen brief chorales.

5: TROWIE TUNES. Harmonizations of five “trowie tunes” from the Shetland Islands.

6: PALINDROMES. Palindromic rounds, with added bass lines, descant parts, and other embellishments.

7: VIOLAS. A chorale, round, and finale for four violas.

8: THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES. An extension of a brief realization of the music of the spheres by Athanasius Kircher.

9: VIOLAS AND CELLOS. Four movements for two violas and two cellos.

10: SONGBOOK. Arrangements of songs from The Doug Skinner Songbook.

11: IN THREE PARTS. A revision of a quartet I wrote back in 1988.

12: MOZART’S HARLEQUIN. Mozart wrote music for a Harlequinade, but only the violin part remains; I provide the rest.

13: OPEN STRINGS. Music for retuned open strings.

14: ‘CELLOS. Four movements for four cellos.

15: ON MELODY IN SPEECH. Harmonizations of 19th century transcriptions of speech.

16: PIANO PIECES. Arrangements of some of my piano pieces.

17: LOCKDOWN. Two movements written during the pandemic.

18: BARON AARON. Based on interstitial music for an album of readings.

You can now purchase the latest issue of Le Scat Noir, that being #231 (the Encyclopaedia counts as #230). It contains many funny and delightful things, including my drawings of imaginary musical instruments. It’s over here. A good way to start out the new year!

For The Black Scat Encyclopaedia (see previous post), I contributed several entries on poetics. Here’s one of them:

IAMBIC CENTAMETER: A line of a hundred iambic feet:

Beloved, when I saw you standing there beside that picturesque gazebo by the crumbling garden wall, as bluebirds gaily sang their hearts out high atop the willow tree that spread its branches over the azalea bush, and breezes played around your silken petticoats and ruffled your unruly chestnut hair, I contemplated the expression on your blushing features, shaded by that large but inexpensive hat, adorned with all those garish multicolored feathers dyed with such a startling lack of expertise, and couldn’t help but wonder if you even heard the cheerful warbling of the feathered songsters as they offered their improvisations to the sultry summer morn, or if you stood there lost in some reflection, reverie, or waking trance, and if you even noticed I had fallen down and hurt my leg.

Le Scat Noir Encyclopædia offers “All human knowledge in a single volume.” It contains entries from Acrostic to Zwine, and features contributors from around the world—some of whom are distinguished professors at prestigious universities. Others are Nobel Prize winners, while a few have been arrested on felony charges. Discover rare factoids, flash fiction, nubile moon spew, mythological arcana, cabalistic pathogens, pataphysical detritus, scatological schemata, crypto-heuristic scripture, and radical homomorphism. Over 100 pages of profusely illustrated weirdness.

Featuring contributions by Mark Axelrod, Jeff Bagato, Jacques Bekaert, Doktor Bey, Paulo Brito, Adam Levon Brown, Theodore Carter, Brendan Connell, Norman Conquest, Sean Coolican, Catherine D’Avis, Farewell Debut, Edith Doove, Paul Forristal, Ryan A. Forsythe, Peter Gambaccini, Eckhard Gerdes, Amelia Gorman, Thomas Gresham, Charles Holdefer, James R. Hugunin, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kostelanetz, Rachel Kushner, Terri Lloyd, Harry McCullagh, David Macpherson, Opal Louis Nations, Andy O’Clancy, Peter Payack, Caleb Puckett, Jason E. Rolfe, Paul Rosheim, Stephen Silke, Mercie Pedro e Silva, Doug Skinner, Seth D. Slater, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Robert Wexelblatt, Tom Whalen, Gregg Williard, Carla M. Wilson, and D. Harlan Wilson. Edited by Norman Conquest.

My contributions include entries on asemic acrostics, iambic centameter, inflatable prosthetics, quadratic syllogisms, oxymoronic onomatopoeia, and other subjects. It’s published by Black Scat Books, and available on Amazon!

Some more piano music. The opening arpeggio kept nagging at me, so I finally spun it out further.

Long Live Life is now available! It’s my seventh translation of the peerless French humorist Alphonse Allais, a favorite of Surrealists, ‘Pataphysicians, and astute readers everywhere!

This is the first publication in English of the master’s 1892 collection, Vive la Vie! — stories culled from the pages of the legendary Bohemian paper Le Chat Noir, packed with madcap (and bawdy) tales of love, adultery, the supernatural, military life, and fake news. These texts are quintessentially Allaisian, spiked with absurd digressions, parenthetical asides, footnotes, puns, jokes, military jargon, Parisian slang, neologisms, dog Latin, literary quotations, and other unmentionable forms of wordplay. This special Black Scat edition features four additional short stories not included in the original French volume, as well as a lively introduction, illustrations, and fascinating notes on the text by Doug Skinner. Explosions of laughter guaranteed.

You can find it on Amazon, or from Black Scat Books.

I don’t see the point of sitting through a movie, so I wrote a song about it. I hope I made my position clear.

I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but here’s a little song for those who do.

Le Scat Noir #229 is now out, and you’ll probably enjoy it. It’s overflowing with artistic delights, including my parody of Longfellow and Baudelaire, “Hiawatha and the Carcass,” and my usual page of musical instrument drawings. You can get a PDF for a dollar, and it’s over here.

A song about the free wine at gallery openings. There was originally a second chorus about the free wine once offered in Chinese restaurants, but the chorus was removed when the practice was abandoned.