This bustling prelude is taken from the music I wrote for Bill Irwin’s show The Courtroom, back in 1985. And it starts out like this.

I am intrigued by the hapax legomenon, a word that appears only once in a given work, author, or language. For a musical equivalent, I placed one F♯ against randomized 4-pitch diatonic arpeggios in C.

For many years, I’ve made pictures and collages on index cards. They were never meant to be shown; they’re a combination of sketchbook, waste of time, and insomnia therapy. They’re also a quick way to combine images and see what happens. However, I have projected some of them on “Carousel,” and on those occasions when I’ve been called on to lecture at art students.

A three-part palindromic round, modeled on everyone’s favorite mythical reptile, the hoop snake.

I had forgotten about these, and rediscovered them while going through some old papers. Eight riddles are set diatonically, traveling through the circle of fifths. My notes said that I planned to double them with violin. That might be nice.

In 2007, I was an artist in residence at NYC’s venerable downtown theater Dixon Place. I put together a program of musical curiosities, based on similar shows I’d done for the INFO FortFest and the Fortean Times UnConvention.

The program included music by Rameau’s Nephew, Lewis Carroll, and the Count of Saint-Germain; an odd tune by the Rosicrucian and sex magick pioneer Paschal Beverly Randolph; Rosemary Brown’s channeled Liszt; a Lawsonomy hymn; music from the Masons and Oddfellows; a Hungarian Esperanto cabaret song; Athanasius Kircher’s realization of the music of the spheres; and more. I was joined by violist Corrina Albright for the first show, and David Gold for the others.

André Breton once said that he wasn’t interested in music, because he couldn’t imagine representing the world with sound. I do disagree; and find diatonic cluster drones as good a symbol as any. This organ piece is one example; here’s how it begins.

“Boris Vian for Anglophones” appeared in Strange Attractor Journal 2 (2005), edited by Mark Pilkington. Vian is one of my favorite writers, and his work is still largely unknown to English speakers. I tried in this article to give some idea of his astonishing output, including the less familiar works — such as his songs (484 0f them!), cabaret sketches, film scenarios, music criticism, and opera libretti.

I posted an excerpt over on the Ullage Group site, over here.

My slide show on a curious NYC street artist, who called himself Pantuso, appeared on the former webzine “Word.” I also performed it at the Brooklyn Museum, the gallery Four Walls, Dixon Place, and other fine venues.

The “Word” version is archived here.

This rather exuberant waltz was written for a performance with Bob Berky at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) in 1985. Here’s the way it starts.