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 […]

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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.

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

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A reverie, tinged with understandable concern.

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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.

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A clangorous sort of chorale, from 1992.

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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.

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It’s a piano piece; it’s rebarbative; play it!

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The Regard of Flight was produced at Lincoln Center in 1987.  Since the Vivian Beaumont is classed as a Broadway house, this was officially my Broadway debut, as Mel Gussow noted in the New York Times (5/10/87).  

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A bit of quiet three-part counterpoint.

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