A three-part round. Everyone wants to be remembered.

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This song appears on my album That Regrettable Weekend, available on Bandcamp. I also performed it once with the Dixon Place Ukulele Ensemble, way back when. Here’s the first page, plus the first page of the arrangement for voice, melodica, Tremoloa, and baritone uke.

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I set this short poem by Ezra Pound when I was 19. The poem is one of Pound’s Provençal translations, from an anonymous troubadour; my setting favors fourths and fifths.

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Instrumentarium is now available from Black Scat Books! This delightful volume collects the drawings of imaginary musical instruments I contributed monthly to Le Scat Noir, plus many previously unpublished. Among the 180 selected here are such inventions as the Painpipes, the Sprinkler Trombone, the Sponge Marimba, and the Calfbell. As our culture grows ever more reductive […]

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A five-part round, setting a French proverb on the danger of eating eggs.

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I’m currently collecting my cartoons of imaginary musical instruments, which appeared in the PDF magazine Le Scat Noir, into a book. I also drew some new ones. Here are a few.  

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A musical cryptogram is written like a substitution cipher, by assigning another pitch to each pitch. The result has the same rhythm and repetitions as the original, but with different pitches. I chose the minuet from Bach’s third French Suite because I like it, and because it uses all twelve pitches. Here’s the first page.

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I’ll be part of the lineup for Profane Illuminations, a day of talks at NYU organized by Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Press. I’ll present my talk “Music from Elsewhere,” discussing and playing music attributed to fairies, trowies, banshees, aliens, spirits, and angels; as well as music from alchemists, occultists, Cathars, cryptographers, secret societies, and […]

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My talk on anomalous music, “Music from Elsewhere,” was recorded by Morbid Anatomy, and is now available on their Patreon site, here. I’ll be doing another talk, with different music, April 27 at NYU, as part of the Profane Illuminations series organized by Strange Attractor Books.

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A cheerful little song about antisociality. I often performed it in the ’90s, with Carol Benner playing a lively pizzicato obbligato on viola.

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