“The Muscatel Suite,” three movements of it, often showed up in my shows in the ’80s. Here’s the beginning.

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I celebrate the New Year in a bilingual waltz. I had never written a song with French lyrics before; it was a pleasant exercise. I usually perform this song with a viola obbligato; it’s also been covered by one of my favorite bands, Les Chauds Lapins.

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My fifth string quartet is based on the “trowie tunes” of the Shetland Islands. I set them diatonically, embellishing them with scordatura, hocketing, harmonics, and other techniques. According to tradition, these tunes are to be played only once, out of respect for the trowies; the quartet is therefore brief.  

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I found this injunction in an old ukulele instruction book, and made it into buttons for my students. Don’t.

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I joined Brian Dewan and Nina Katchadourian in this collection of songs about Roosevelt Island. The island has a long and colorful history, and has had many names over the years: Hog Island, Manning’s Island, Blackwell’s Island, Welfare Island. For much of the 19th and 20th century, it was used as a prison and hospital. […]

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The Regard of Flight was a bit short, so we rounded out the evening with some of Bill’s shorter pieces, under the title of The Clown Bagatelles. The last of these was a dance piece called “The Marionette.” I played this piece hundreds of times, and always approached the final cadence with relief: we made […]

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I teach ukulele classes; here’s a brief clip of my students and me at a recital, at Brooklyn’s Jalopy Theater. (The clip has subsequently been removed.)

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Back when I was a composition student at Oberlin Conservatory, I wrote some songs and incidental music for a puppet production of Brecht’s one-act The Elephant Calf. The score was ebullient and dissonant, with cartoonish cues, and a few mocking quotations (B-A-C-H and a scrap of Mahler). It was performed in May 1973. The puppets […]

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My occasional cartoon character Red Telephone tunes his uke, from the March 1980 issue of Ear. I signed it with his name, since I sympathized with his plight. And I redrew it a few years later, to make it crisper.

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Bill Kartalopoulos and Mark Newgarden organized a program of songs about comic strips, back in June 2009. I sang several of them, some in duet with Peter Stampfel, which was a treat.

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