Beats | Home | Links | Moondog | Nico
Moondog had some strange ideas, some of them discussed in an interview held in the mid-nineties. Some of these are so bizarre as to be leg pulls. But there is no doubt that he was a highly serious, albeit unclassifiable, musician. He usually composed his music in his head rarely using an instrument. He also had many of his bizarre instruments - including his drums - made for him by a cabinet maker.
Moondog's work frequently features Canons....
Over the years he worked on a grand piece called Overtone Tree.
"That's one of my symphonies that I've been working on for twenty years. I finally got it finished now. I've been doing a lot of other work but this is a major work. I don't expect that it'll be ever played. It'll probably be buried with me. It's written for four conductors- one main conductor and three assitants because at one time, there may be as many as sixty or seventy parts going and one conductor can't hanlde that. It's all counterpointal. So each conductor would have his own score and be in charge of a certain section of the orchestra. It's based on the first nine overtones and I tried that as a theme in '73 on the northwest corner of 55th Street and Sixth Avenue- that's where I got the idea to use overtones as a theme. After I worked on it, I went to Europe. I was in Hamburg in '75 and I was working on the overtones and I finally realized that I had something interesting here. It was a code."
It was this discovery of a code that produces one of his most eccentric theories. He believed that there was a mega-mind created the universe and wants us to know it exists. If this sounds a bit like L Ron Hubbard then read the interview which gets worse. Any way he went on to say that the universe expands and contracts in such a way as to prove..
"...... that contraction must come before expansion. It also proves that a cause can become an effect and an effect can become a cause. It proves the two-directionality of time. It proves that the past is the future and the future is the past. All this flys in the face of what Hubble did, saying that there was a big bang and an expansion of the universe. His is a theory but mine is a fact. A fact incontrovertable, as I call it. They talked about these theories of mine on National Public Radio."
Moondog even produced a diagram of expansion and contraction to "clarify" matters. Not content with this he also evolved an alternative calendar to correct the traditional christian one. It conveniently ends at the year 10000 so we have a nice alternative round number.
"Wagner made such an impression. Every Saturday afternoon, I used to listen to the operas on the radio from Iowa back in the '30's. I'm very friendly with Glass and Reich- at least we have tonality in common. I love Bach but he never analyzed his pieces- I'm sure he realized that there were a lot of mistakes in there. I'm sure he would have corrected him if he had the time but he had kids and wives to take care of."
Moondog's music is unclassifiable. Often it is placed in the jazz section in record shops but many of his pieces have a classical feel. Moondog, himself, did not mind where they were placed in music shops provided they were placed somewhere. Why not amuse yourself by trying to place him in this fluxus table of avant garde musicians.