Sidewalk Hero, on the Horns of a Revival

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Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:59:07 -0400

The New York Times, USA
Sunday, October 28, 2007

By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH

Caption: Moondog on the street in New York in the 1960s (with a passer-by).
Many mistook him for a homeless man. Walter Karling

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.

From the late 1940s to the early '70s Moondog was as recognizable in the New
York City landscape as the Empire State Building, and nearly as striking. A
tall blind man with long hair and beard, wearing a handmade Viking helmet and
primitive cloak, he regularly stationed himself at Sixth Avenue and 54th
Street, which cops and cabbies knew as Moondog's Corner. Dispensing his poetry,
politics, sheet music and recordings (some on boutique labels, some on majors),
he was sought out over the years by beats, hippies and foreign tourists, but
also by the media and celebrities, from Walter Winchell and "Today" to Marlon
Brando, Muhammad Ali and Martin Scorsese.

"Everybody who was anybody met Moondog," Robert Scotto, author of "Moondog," a
biography published this month by Process Books, said recently. "And everybody
had his own Moondog."

Even after he moved to Germany in 1974, where he remained until his death in
1999 at 83, he was remembered in New York as an emblematic street character,
though not as a serious classical composer. As the British music critic Kenneth
Ansell observed in the mid-'90s, while jazz greats like Count Basie and Charlie
Parker admired Moondog's idiosyncratic forays into their world, "the classical
orthodoxy has not rushed to embrace him."

Robin Boomer, a cellist and the organizer of Moondog Rising, said: "Most of the
people I know from the classical music world don't know Moondog at all. He
hasn't made it into the canon."

Part of the problem is that Moondog was so prolific and eclectic. Working in
Braille, often composing under his cloak on the sidewalk, he wrote in an
impressively wide range of styles: percussion-driven exotica (he made his own
triangular drum-and-cymbal instrument, the trimba), avant-garde jazz, folkish
madrigals, Bach-like neo-Baroque rounds and canons for chamber orchestra,
symphonies for full orchestra, and a layered minimalism that influenced his
young collaborators Steve Reich and Philip Glass. (They can be heard playing
with Moondog in the 1960s on a sampler CD included in Mr. Scotto's book, for
which Mr. Glass wrote the preface.)

He released more than a dozen recordings, and his music was used in films and
television commercials. His songs were sung by Janis Joplin (on "Big Brother &
the Holding Company") and Julie Andrews (a children's album); he once shared a
bill in a Greenwich Village club with Tiny Tim and Lenny Bruce, and much later
performed on a festival stage in London at the invitation of Elvis Costello.

Still, acceptance as a modern classical composer has eluded him. The atavistic
streak symbolized by the Viking helmet can be heard in the work, which was
melodic and tuneful at a time when atonality and dissonance often ruled. Mostly
it sounds more like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart than Ives, Carter or Kirchner.
Ms. Boomer said that was why music by those composers would be played along
with Moondog's at the two-night festival, so audiences can compare and contrast.

Born Louis Hardin Jr., in Kansas, the son of an Episcopal minister, Moondog was
raised in various Plains states. At 16, he was blinded while tinkering with a
blasting cap. He became a voracious autodidact of music, literature, history
and philosophy. He renamed himself Moondog for a howling bulldog he had loved
as a boy, and developed a worldview that embraced Norse mythology and Viking
culture as the pinnacles of European civilization.

He was 27 when he came to New York in 1943 and quickly established his
eccentric status. Although often mistaken for homeless, he always had a room
somewhere (he lived for a year in the '60s with Mr. Glass and JoAnne
Akalaitis), and was married for a period and raised a daughter. His many hours
on the street were his way of connecting with the sounds, voices and rhythms of
the city.

That's where Mr. Scotto, a professor of English at Baruch College of the City
University of New York, first met him as a college student in the mid-'60s. "He
was the avant-garde figure par excellence, the ultimate hippie," Mr. Scotto
recalled. "He was a pilgrimage that all college students made."

Mr. Scotto sought out Moondog again in Europe in the mid-1980s. Moondog's
German friends had convinced him by then to set aside the Viking helmet and
cloak, which they scoffingly referred to as his "amateur Odin" costume,
referring to the figure from Norse mythology.

Ms. Boomer first heard of Moondog in the '80s from a jazz musician who "was
aghast that I didn't know him." Pursuing a master's degree in arts
administration at Columbia University last year, she began to research
Moondog's life and works. What she originally planned as a small lecture and
performance grew into "what I refer to as the Exploding Moondog Festival," she
said. "It just got bigger and bigger," with her own 20-piece Eupraxia Players
joined by musicians from around the country and Europe.

In his preface to "Moondog" Mr. Glass writes that he and Mr. Reich "took his
work very seriously and understood and appreciated it much more than what we
were exposed to at Julliard."

Ms. Boomer said she hoped to spread that appreciation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/arts/music/28stra.html?_r=2&ex=1351224000&en=031a3d50e94bb36f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
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Sidewalk Hero, on the Horns of a Revival

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