Sidewalk Hero, on the Horns of a Revival By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH Published: October 28, 2007
Plenty of chamber music festivals have featured works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Or Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner.
But a festival that includes music by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ives, Carter and Kirchner, all playing second fiddle to the classical works of Moondog.
“Moondog Rising,” which takes place on Friday and Saturday at Advent Lutheran Church in Manhattan, is surely the first. The Viking of Sixth Avenue, as he was known, would be proud.
Moondog was born Louis Thomas Hardin in Marysville, Kansas on 26 May 1916. His youth was spent, always in the company of his father, an Episcopal minister, in various parts of the American west. His earliest memories are of the rectory in Plymouth, Wisconsin, where his father preached and his mother taught school and played the church organ. After his parents wrote a novel that satirized the conservative clergy, Archdeacon Prettyman in Politics, the Reverend Hardin was sent, along with his five year-old son, to "Episcopal Siberia": Wyoming. There the young Louis attended a Sun Dance ceremony at the Arapaho reservation, sitting on Chief Yellow Calf's lap and beating on a big tom-tom, a memory that colored his music for the rest of his life: you can always hear the slow walking beat and the fast running beat in his madrigals and canons, whether he is writing for piano, organ or orchestra, bracelli ensemble or big band.
After Wyoming, the Hardin family moved to Hurley, Missouri where, at the age of 16, on July 4, 1922, Independence Day, Louis decided to tinker with an object he had found at a railroad site. It was a dynamite cap, which exploded in his face, blinding him instantly and permanently. He had been a rather undisciplined young man before that day, but once he recovered from the trauma he attended the Iowa School for the Blind, where he received his first serious musical training, studying counterpoint and harmony and learning how to play the piano, pipe organ, violin and viola. After he graduated he studied privately with Burnet Tuthill at the Memphis Conservatory of Music.
Then, in 1943, with a small allowance and little beyond his growing self-confidence, he took a bus to New York City, which would become "his mother and father" for the next three decades.
In 1947, after he wrote his earliest pieces, he announced that he was now "Moondog," and soon became a fixture in the city's cultural life. For a while he was befriended by members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and its conductor, Artur Rodzinski, meeting the aging ArturoToscanini and the young Leonard Bernstein, attending rehearsals and learning how the finest musicians made music.
By the 50's, after his first cross-country tour, he began to compose and perform in earnest, becoming known as the most famous street musician of his time. He started to write canons and couplets, his mainstays for the rest of his life, on single sheets of Braille paper, often at his "walking office" on the street.
By 1953, he was a married man, a father and a recording artist, famous for his unconventional metrics, intricate and rigorous canonic structures and powerful, evocative melodies drawn from influences as diverse as jazz and latin models as well as the classics. He also used the city he had come to love as an intimate partner in his compositions, incorporating traffic noise, tugboat whistles, the sound of the surf and various creatures.
By the end of the decade, no less than six major albums of his music had been released, several recapitulating his earliest efforts, one starring Julie Andrews at the outset of her career. By 1960, he was separated from his wife and once more living on the streets. Fittingly, Janis Joplin's recording of his most famous madrigal, "All is Loneliness," seemed to capture what was his mood at the lowest point in his professional life.
But Moondog was not down for long: the 60's saw the emergence of one of the most splendid personas in recent memory: while he worked for his living and composed more than ever before, he also created a new identity to "underwrite" the direction of his ideas and yearnings.
He became the Viking of Sixth Avenue and a hero to the counterculture. In 1969 and 1971, Columbia issued two elaborate albums of his music over which he had complete artistic control. He became an even bigger celebrity overnight, but he also became somewhat disenchanted and restless, as if his time in New York was coming to an end.
He made another cross-country trip and settled for a while at his upstate New York land, yet something was missing. His frequently repeated words -- that he was "a European in exile" -- were prescient.
In 1974 he was invited to give two concerts in Frankfurt and visited Germany for the first time. He was so comfortable in the land of his musical ancestors that, despite having little money and less German, he decided to stay a little longer. Soon his visit extended indefinitely into the future when he was taken in by the Goebel family and found, at long last, a true home.
He retuned to the US once, in 1989, for a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but that was the last time he visited a world that was no longer his home. Once Managarm Musikverlag was up and running, the years which for other men might be called "twilight" were something of a creative rebirth for him. Many albums and CDs were released, and he led concerts of his music in Paris, Stockholm, London, Salzburg, Vienna, Munich and other locations too numerous to mention.
He was, to the very end of his life, vital, active and creative. In some ways, he seemed to get younger with age.
Moondog always considered himself a "classicist," even during his earliest, most assimilative stages. He has been admired by musicians of all kinds and from all disciplines, being considered, at various times in his career, as a jazz composer, a minimalist, a song writer - the list goes on.
He is, of course, all of these - and more. In addition, he revealed his devotion to traditional models in his writing. As soon as he started to compose canons, for instance, he also started to compose couplets. His various poems over fifty years, from isolated observations to the "historic myth" of Thor, were usually written in rhymed, 14 syllable lines. Often, as in "Canons and Couplets" or "Navigators of the World," the tight, defined forms of music and language danced together.
First and foremost, however, he will be remembered as a strict adherent to the laws of counterpoint, avoiding atonality and electronic enhancement of any kind. Like any great composer in the western tradition, he finds his greatest freedom in formal rigor.
What appears to be contradictions are actually resolved in his work: he is an American with one foot in Europe, an avant-garde experimentalist who is both melodic and harmonic, a cultural liberal who is also an historical conservative.
Like one of his artistic fathers, Moondog contained multitudes.
Robert Scotto 2007
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