Jerusalem Premier

“He was such an imposing figure, about 2 meters tall if you count his Viking headpiece, and he was so confident in his walk you wouldn’t think he was blind. I wondered how, as a blind man, he managed to cross the street without an instant of hesitation until he showed me how he listened to the traffic lights; I had never heard them before in this way.”

(Phillip Glass about the time Moondog was living at his place in New York).

Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin) recounts a significant moment in his childhood: His father sat him in the lap of a Native American who was playing a large drum, and the rhythm was deeply engraved in him. Moondog’s tribal approach to rhythm set him apart from other minimalist composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who belong more clearly to the Western musical tradition. In their work, the “groove” was reduced to a single pulse constantly repeating itself, while Moondog’s approach resembles folklorist drumming where the groove unit is composed as a sentence with beginning, middle and end.

Correspondingly, and again – unlike in the work of his minimalist colleagues – the melodic unit in Moondog’s compositions is not a small cell of several notes, but a whole discerned tune (often combining elements inspired by folklore, Jazz and Baroque). His texts combine Nordic mythology, personal mythology, nonsense, nature and ideological poetry; and are always written following a simple structure: one repeating line, or a verse with variations. Moondog is considered a part of the tradition of American Outsider composers, alongside Harry Partch and Conlon Nancarrow. His Primitivist-Naive approach, his humor, his Anti-Avant-Guardist tone and his unique appearance, all those made Moondog hard to place in the linear narrative of Western Concert music. His early albums from the 1950’s, beyond their musical content, serve as a sort of documentation of his creative life, and are compiled of musical fragments interlaced with improvisations, recitations, field recordings, casual conversations and more. Our concert takes inspiration from the vitality of those albums.