Moondog

A largely self-taught composer, Louis Hardin entered the world in Marysville, Kansas, on 26 May 1916. The household later relocated to Wyoming after his father, formerly an Episcopalian minister, established a trading post at Fort Bridger and acquired a pair of ranches. Hardin attended classes inside a log cabin at Burnt Fork, where he also fished, hunted, and trapped; he later rode horseback to a cattle-community school in Lonetree. At five he fashioned his initial percussion from a cardboard box. Accompanying his father to an Arapaho Sun Dance, the boy sat on Chief Yellow Calf’s lap and beat a buffalo-skin tom-tom; in 1949 he again played tom-tom and flute at a Blackfoot Sun Dance in Idaho. That persistent pulse later surfaced in such works as the intricate marimba canon “Wind River Powwow: Arapa-Host, Arapa-Home, Arapa-Hope.” He drummed for Hurley High School in 1929, yet lost his eyesight in his early teens when a dynamite cap detonated. He completed musical studies and high school at the Iowa School for the Blind, then, in 1933, learned braille at the Missouri School for the Blind in St. Louis. “I write all my music in braille. When I write for orchestra, I do not write scores any more, but just write out parts, for the score is in my head and just writing out the parts cuts the time and cost in half … anyhow, if my pieces were ever in demand, a score to each could be made from the parts. I call this process ‘intracting’, as opposed to the opposite, having a score and ‘extracting’ parts from it. From the braille I dictate every slur, tie, expression mark.” The notation was first penciled by an assistant, read back for corrections, and finally inked by a second person—“double trouble.” Hardin resided in Batesville, Arkansas, until 1942, when a scholarship took him to Memphis; there, as before, he acquired ear-training and theoretical knowledge chiefly through braille texts. Arriving in New York in autumn 1943, he encountered Artur Rodzinski, Leonard Bernstein, and Toscanini; legend holds that Hardin attempted to kiss the latter’s hand, “whereupon he pulled it away, saying, ‘I am not a beautiful woman.’” In 1947 he adopted the pen name Moondog after a dog “who used to howl at the moon more than any dog I knew of.” Constructed from concise gestures and modal themes elaborated through refined counterpoint, his language earned the later tag “minimal” or pattern music, yet had already defined his output since the late 1940s, thereby anticipating that postmodern approach. While in Manhattan he befriended Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman, weaving jazz inflections, witty philosophical couplets, and ambient sounds into his work. Prestige’s 1956–57 sessions captured such miniatures as “Up Broadway/The impressions of Moondog as He Passes Birdland and the Palladium up the Great White Way (a) Broadway and 52nd St., the Jazz Corner of the World. A dog Trot in 1/4 Time (b) Broadway and 53rd St, the Afro-Cuban Corner of the World—A Bumbo in 4/4 time,” together with a duet for the Queen Elizabeth’s whistle and a bamboo flute. Hardin also peddled scores and discs while busking on city sidewalks. His compositions embodied a panoramic outlook informed by the finest American musical instincts. Moondog died in Germany on 8 September 1999 at the age of eighty-three.