Athanasius Kircher gave a brief realization of the music of the spheres in Musurgia Universalis (1650). Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars correspond to the soprano; the sun to the alto; Venus, Mercury, and the moon to the tenor; and the earth to the bass. I expanded his four measures to a hundred. He suggested that the […]

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My less-than-first string quartet collects a few pieces from my teens that I thought worth saving. Here, for example, is a rollicking polytonal number I wrote when I was 16 (recopied for legibility).

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A piano piece that requires a lot of jumping around the keyboard. I used it in some of my shows with Bill Irwin in the ’80s.

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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 […]

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

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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.

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

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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.

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You can now obtain the 228th edition of Le Scat Noir, over here. This one contains another page of my musical instrument drawings, the full score of my song “Buenas Noches, Little Roaches,” and my translation of Alphonse Allais’s story “Shocking.” There are many other things in it too, I might add. And it’s now […]

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The Doug Skinner Songbook is now available! This elegant oversized paperback contains 46 of my songs, including such favorites as “Buenas Noches, Little Roaches,” “Love Me Unconditionally,” “My Pal Satan,” and “Bloated Plutocrats on Parade”! They’re “chillingly zany” (New York Times); they’re “scathingly witty… lullabies etched in acid” (Metro Magazine), and now you can add […]

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