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

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.

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.

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

A reverie, tinged with understandable concern.

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.

A clangorous sort of chorale, from 1992.

In 1980, Bill Irwin and I did a show for the Baltimore International Theatre Festival; it contained many of the bits that later became The Regard of Flight. Murdoch was the name of our putative theatrical company, which also included Michael O’Connor.  He was elsewhere for this gig.

For “Murder in the Library,” Michele Larsson and I wrote a half-hour radio detective show, by scrupulously following the formulas in a writers’ manual.  We recorded it with a fine cast, and Michele choreographed a solo dance to it.  This was in San Francisco, in 1980.