Mr. Moondog

The Musiphilosoph, Explained; The First In A Life-Long Series.

“If I kept a hotel room, then I wouldn’t have enough money to hire a copyist to copy the music or to go up to my place (near Ithaca), because to make a trip up there would cost $50, including carfare and food for a few weeks. I couldn’t have the room and the music copying and the trips up there, so I had to make a choice: either keep a room and not go up there, or not have a room and go up there once and a while. So some of the time I would just sleep on the streets to save money.”
Mr. Moondog,
From Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers by Cole Gagne.

“When I wrote the words I didn’t know they would come true – I ran away from all the noise I so abhor. Before I left they told me I’d be back for more… etc. So right they were.”
Mr. Moondog on the piece New York,
From Mr. Byrne’s programme notes for the New Music America concert, Nov. 1989.

Whether escape from the complexity of modern living is a necessity for some or merely much desired is a question pinned for debate elsewhere in these volumes, but the invention birthed by it is indisputable. Mr. Moondog’s invention lies not so plainly in his orchestral music – grammatically-applied counterpoint is only refinement and one-thousand part canons mere ambition – although, it is for this that he hoped to be remembered. Rather, his inventive contributions to music were made in the pieces he composed for the streets of New York. However, the life that called for the construction of his strange, new instruments and alternative modes of notation was so singular (if one’s singularity can be greater than anyone else’s) that his innovations may not be transferable. Mr. Moondog created such a definite image for his self, through the adoption of hand-made, Nordic clothing and mystic philosophising, that the music may be inseparable from the composer, which, in the classical tradition, guarantees death. If the time and place of creation are discernable, the pieces may be left to languish then and there.

However, Mr. Moondog always looked out of time and very much out of place. He eschewed the problems of The Global Citizen by claiming citizenship in a country that did not exist. He imagined his self “A European In Exile,” an idea that should have found resolution when he moved to Germany in 1974, aged 58, but it did not, for the Europe from which he was exiled was one untouched by Judeo-Christianity or the millennia that have passed since it was actual. Through the construction of this philoso-identity, he ensured his position as the eternal outsider, which is a nice spot from which to be a Musiphilosoph. When German admirer and henceforth assistant, Ms. Goebel, took him in, he was given a home, which is not quite the same as being at home, but it was close enough for him to disrobe from the Viking garb without losing his identity. In New York, however, the identity had to be externalised and taking a home was impractical.

Thus it was the streets of New York that made Mr. Moondog the icon with whom we are familiar. Where else but New York could a street performer become an internationally-recognised figure? And where else but New York could forge a figure so recognisable? New York is the focus of such global curiosity that any person who gains recognition there receives it again across the world, which is why Mr. Moondog became a tourist attraction almost as soon as he had taken his Spartan stance on 6th Avenue. New York is also a metropolis with the capacity to grind down the lives of the poor, unless they can find mechanisms by which to cope with it. However, it was through these inventive means that Mr. Moondog refined his persona, allowing it to survive passed his own life-time. By rejecting New York as a home in actualtude, he made his self inseparable from it, in much the same way that his music threatens to be inseparable from him.

A case in point is his recording career, which began with Mr. Moondog drumming in the doorway of Mr. Oller, owner of the Spanish Music Center and studio facilities. Had Mr. Moondog taken to conventional living and followed the more comfortable paths to money open to a musician, Mr. Oller would never have offered to record the three 78s that started the documentation of the musician’s life. Similarly, the sounds central to On The Streets Of New York, Mr. Moondog’s first release, are the percussion-heavy ‘Snake-Time’ rhythms of his Oo and Trimba, instruments designed for their ease of carrying around busy avenues and playing, squat-legged, on stoops and street corners. It was these conditions that required his compositions be short: they were written out of doors, where he was continually interrupted by well-and-woe-wishers; he could barely afford to finance the transcription of his Braille sketches into musical notation (for which he had to invent a new system of minimal scoring that he called ‘Stock Scoring’); and, as they were played in exchange for the pittance that kept him alive, they had to be concise, like jukebox records, to guarantee replay. It was this pop-like brevity that made the pieces perfect for 45s, human interest spots on television news and adoption by counter-culture figures, like Ms. Joplin and her group, Big Brother & the Holding Company. He received no royalties, of course, but whatever improved his visibility on the streets increased the income he could make from busking. This money, in turn, would finance trips to Candor, his acreage upstate, where he lived for weeks on end in a make-shift, tarpaulin grotto, fine-tuning ideas and constructing giant drums from holes in the ground. Occasionally, he would hold jamborees with travelling hippies or risk death walking through the snow from the bus station. This, perhaps, was the closest he came to the imagined home of “The European In Exile,” but it was not a self-sustaining existence, even when he went into a quasi-retirement there in the late 1960s. To fund living in Candor, he had to spend most of his time not living in the big city.

There is no doubting, of course, that Mr. Moondog came to New York with ambition, but he took an odd approach to achieving it. Only an unfair person would suggest that his appearance and ideology were purely to ensure attention, but to imagine that he ignored such effect would suggest that he was mad, which he was not. His lifestyle must be read as part principle and part self-mediation, the results of which were mixed good and ill. It was certainly because of his appearance that Mr. Rodzinski, then head of the New York Philharmonic, granted him unique licence to the orchestra’s rehearsals, where he met Mr. Bernstein and became known within wider classical circles. A shtick, even if not intended as such, will always help a young(ish) composer move up in the world. However, the same Mr. Rodzinski later rescinded contact with Mr. Moondog when the latter refused offers of clothing and other help made by the conductor and his wife – where the religiously-maniacal Mr. Rodzinski had seen Christ in the composer’s face, Mr Moondog had intended Wodin. It is self-creation, perhaps, to wear a horned helmet and carry a spear, but it is principle, or worse, stubbornness, to suffer frostbite on shoeless feet. It was the former that brought him to recognition, but the latter that prevented him being taken too seriously, when, surely, it should have been the other way around.

Transferring to Germany, when the good Ms. Goebel offered to house him, was not the realisation of his European fantasies, but the natural resolution of his New York reality. By the 1970s, he was too old and the streets too dangerous for him to live that way anymore. He admitted, his self, that the unpredictability of drug addicts, more prominent in New York towards the end of his tenure than ever they were before, made him uneasy about sleeping rough. However, there seems only scant difference between this incident and the campaign to house Mr. Moondog that The Village Voice started in 1968, a campaign that resulted in the composer living for a year with the now famous Mr. Glass. As his global renown increased, the more likely it was that persons from further a field would take an interest in him. But, as his renown was based on his image as the blind, eccentric, homeless musician, it is natural that much of this interest manifested its self in attempts to take care of him, many of which attempts he ignored. His ambition was to play such a role as that of Mr. Bach or Mr. Wagner, which he achieved in later life and by the same means as they: patronage. In a Western world, where we are each expected to make, at least, a meagre existence and where most art can be commoditised and sold at small profit, patronage in the old sense is extended only, if at all, to those who cannot seem to do either. Thus, the patronage granted by Ms. Goebel’s was based on the myth that Mr. Moondog had cultivated about his self, the same myth that the terms and conditions of her patronage required he give up. It was what he deserved at that age, rather than the harsh patronage of New York City tourists.

If, towards the end, Mr. Moondog could content his self with wearing only black cloaks and sleeping in an actual bed, these changes would do little to affect his reputation. The myth had already been set and no conversation about his music would ever avoid mentioning it, even though one can discuss Mr. Bach without bringing up that composer’s poverty or talk of Mr. Handel and not his opulence. Because, despite his efforts to seem both timeless and European, Mr. Moondog really existed in America in the time of rock’n’roll, a time and place that emphasised myth even moreso than pre-Christian Scandinavia. His philosophy of escape was defined by the society from which he was trying to flee and the elements of which his aesthetic was composed were the necessities of his counter-intuitive, counter-cultural life.

He composed prolifically because, as a freeman, his time was his own and because his busking commissioners paid for performances and not compositions. It is telling, then, that the majority of his orchestral works remain unplayed, due to his still-moderate reputation and the ambition behind some being too great, while, in drips and drabs, some of the smaller street pieces and shorter works have passed into the repertoires of others. As Dr. Scotto writes in his excellent biography of Mr. Moondog: “For his music to survive his presence it will need interpretations by diverse hands in other venues; it will have to be gently but firmly weaned away from its creator.” It is the creator, created his self, who betrays time and place and, if not left to languish then and there, may at least become a side note. For musically, Mr. Moondog bridged rock’n’roll, which loves the myth of impurity, and classical, which loves the pure ideal, and, perhaps, where he stands between the two, the myth of the man and the ideal of the music can be gently separated so both may live.