Here’s another song from White Knuckle Sandwich, giving me a chance to sing gloomy lyrics in my lower range. I’ve also performed this with David Gold adding an obbligato on viola and duck call.

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A keyboard version of a bit of my String Quartet 15: harmonizations of two street vendors’ cries notated by Friedrich Weber in 1887.

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My 16th string quartet consists of arrangements of some of the piano music I’ve written over the years. Here’s “Radio Valentine,” written for a radio show in San Francisco long ago.

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In the course of my miscellaneous musical reading, I found an article by the organist and composer Friedrich (or, in England, Frederic) Weber, “On Melody in Speech,” in the Feb. 1887 issue of Longman’s Magazine (pp. 399-410). Weber notated the pitches and rhythms of the cries of several animals (dogs, birds, donkeys), and added some […]

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The world is none too rosy at the moment. I might as well write some piano music.  

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The 2oth issue of “Black Scat Review” is now available from Black Scat Books! This one is devoted to black humor, 106 pages of it. I contributed a squalid fairy tale, “The Fisherman’s Wish,” a misanthropic song, “We Are Not a Pretty People,” and a translation of Alphonse Allais’s classically tasteless story “The Rajah Is […]

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Some piano music, rumbling in the bass, using a C minor scale with an F-sharp in it.

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The notes do-mi-si-la-do-ré spell domicile adoré, a phrase often cited in real estate ads and framed in happy homes. This is a little canon on the theme.

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There are many things I don’t understand. In fact, I don’t understand anything at all. This song can be found in The Doug Skinner Songbook and on That Regrettable Weekend.

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The nightingale is obviously a loser, since it makes no money from its song. Let’s all join in and ridicule it. The complete song can be found in The Doug Skinner Songbook.

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