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about this album
Pindemonium (“The Zippy Opera”) (1989) Pindemonium was a work I could get performed very easily. Its inception began one day when I thought, “I’m going to write an opera, with 14 offstage xylophones and 23 bass drums and cymbals.” The work is a “comic opera” and was originally entitled "Pindemonium ARE KING PIN" but eventually got shortened to “The Zippy Opera”. The material is based on the comic strip Zippy the Pinhead (the lovable microcephalic hero created by Bill Griffith) and had been introduced to me by my roommates the year before. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but my percussionist friends, in particular Ted Atkatz, encouraged me to write a musical work centered around the comic strip. At the time I was composing "The Zippy Opera", John Cage was delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in Poetry across the river at Harvard University, which I attended. I was also first coming into contact with the ideas and art of Marcel Duchamp, and much of the musical material for The Zippy Opera was written inspired by John Cage’s and Marcel Duchamp’s ideas. In a review at the time by Michael Bloom in Boston Rock, the work was described as “a student production, but it was easily the equal of a lot of allegedly top flight New York stuff, not to mention a lot more fun." The instrumentation ended up being more modest than my original intentions: three percussion playing toy piano, toy trumpet, toy saxophone, slide whistles and barnyard animal sounds, and one
