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2006 was a bad year for me.  I commented on it in this piano piece, in which a melancholy theme deteriorates.

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I carried this strip in my head for years.  I finally drew it for a Valentine’s Day edition of R. Sikoryak’s “Carousel.”  

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These are four brief pieces written for the piano-zither, a 3/15 diatonic chord zither with a simple keyboard mechanism — a sort of miniature table-top piano.  They can also be played on other keyboard instruments, of course.  Here’s a sample of the first piece.

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This little tune was written to accompany some business in Bill Irwin’s Clown Lecture; it was later revamped for use in the PBS show Bill Irwin: Clown Prince. Here’s a bit of it.  

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I wanted to demonstrate the artificial musical language Solrésol for my show The Musical Underbelly.  I decided that one of the famously smutty sonnets of Pietro Aretino would make an interesting example.  I later expanded this for my third string quartet, which is based on several Solrésol translations of Aretino. Here’s the first part of […]

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“How Unusual” appeared in Nickelodeon Magazine in 1993.  It was meant as an expansion of my Zuzu strip, “It’s Fortean,” but turned out to be a one-shot.

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This alphabet was devoted to interjections. ah boo caw duh eek feh gulp hey ick jeez kachoo la mmm nah oops pshaw quack rah sh tsk uh vroom whoa x!@*%! yikes zzz Here are some samples.  “Zzz,” by the way, was based on a photo of me taken the day I was born.  

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Lewis Carroll inserted a tune into his novel Sylvie and Bruno, for the song “Ting Ting Ting.”  It’s a fine little tune; so I wrote a set of variations on it.  And this is how it opens.

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