photography: Harry Peronius
Benjamin Lehmann interviews Stefan Lakatos, foremost exponent of the Moondog style of drumming.
Louis Hardin died ten years ago in September this year. Known as Moondog for the later part of his life, the story of Hardin is almost impossible to tell without reference to his adopted appearance and the cultural rags-to-riches narrative that saw a street musician and vagrant befriended by New York’s musical elite. Robert Scotto’s biography, entitled The Viking Of Sixth Avenue, tells this story well and gives a deep insight into Hardin’s upbringing and the genesis of his identity. Of the outward shadows cast by Hardin, though, none is more striking than the music he left behind.
The aspect of Moondog’s opus that has perhaps made it most pertinent to a new generation of musicians is his concern with the democratizing of experimental music. That is to say, his experimentation with rhythm was driven by a desire to create a new dance to replace the waltz, his use of repetitive drums to invoke a lost war-like spirit amongst men, and his poetry to communicate in as pure and simple terms as possible his thoughts, where others sought to generate complexity and elitism.
Recently I had the opportunity to talk to Stefan Lakatos, the foremost exponent of the Moondog style of drumming, following the concert, about how Moondog’s musical style evolved, where it might have gathered its influences, and the experience of working with Moondog. By the end of his life, Hardin had entrusted percussive duties to Lakatos Let’s start by talking about the 1950’s recordings, and let’s talk a bit about the Oriental influences and how these were combined with classical counterpoint.
Nobody had really heard Indian or Gamelan music at that time, and it was the unusual sound of the instruments that interested Moondog. It’s unlikely that any scores were around in those styles. When you hear it though you can imagine the mathematic composition of slower patterns within faster patterns, forming a larger pattern overall and so on, until all the patterns converge on the downbeat like a canon.
The canon, a composition that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration, seems to be central to his music.
Rounds had been already written in France and in Italy as part of a very folkish music. Moondog was not really interested in ‘upper class’ music, he was interested in folk music. His father had been a priest, but he renounced the church when he was blinded as a young boy. (Later he discovered a dead religion to believe in, partly thanks to hearing the influence of myth and norse tradition in Wagner’s operas.)
In Western music at the time of Bach, music was dominated by the church. The ‘dangerous syncopation’ of folk music was frowned upon. Beats weren’t fashionable either because they were too ‘folkish’. For Moondog this offered the opportunity to become a rebel against the religious thinking of music.
Counterpoint, in his mind, was not a religious point of style, it was a mathematical phenomenon. Moondog always decided how long his piece should be before he wrote. So if he decided to write a short round, he’d decide first “this will be a four-part round, then it will be 8-bars long, then it will repeat, and it repeats always on the fifth or on the octave.” So he knew how long the piece would be before he started writing.
The canon itself, where the new voices come in repeating the motif after a set delay, is scored by numerals, then you have a repeat sign at beginning and at end. The first voice and the length of the cannon dictates how long the piece will be.
Did he develop this technique into something more complex?
In Voices Of Spring (Moondog, 1969) the score is much bigger than elsewhere, and you have many more lines. He starts the motif and then it repeats right in the middle of the song, twice. Here you have 16 voices and the song repeats itself 3 times. So you have the effect of 48 voices. That’s amazing
However, the goal was not to become more complex, but to become more simple. He once said to me, “any composer can write a melody but to write a 2-part canon, then you have to fit them both together, it must be perfect.” If you have 3 or 4 or 6 or 8 or 10 or more parts which have to work together, you have to really understand how to write a motif. This is what gives the music it’s ‘transparent’ sound.
How do you mean ‘transparent’?
The music is absolutely transparent. it’s like looking at a rainbow, it’s full of colours and there’s no muddiness in it. Everything fits together. There are no muddy chords, they go strictly into each other, and out of each other. You can really breathe in it.
What was the role of the Trimba, the most important instrument he invented, in his composition?
The Trimba is the ‘king’ of the instruments Moondog invented, and it was one of the only instruments he kept throughout his creative life. He conceived of it at the end of the 40’s. To begin with he made them square, but the angles start to loosen after a while so he reduced it to the more stable triangular shape. When the instruments were square they weren’t even known as Trimbas.
Take me thru the Trimba, how it works
In total you have 5 sounds you can make with the maraca (the four places you can strike the Trimba with the maraca, and in addition the sound of the maraca independently), and four sounds with the stick. So it can make 9 different sounds in total.
The bass part of the instrument always plays the downbeat on the 1st beat of the bar. And that’s where the accent is.
Then you hear the maraca all the time on the 8th notes. It maintains the 8th. notes all the time and it has to make way physically for all the other beats you play on the Trimba. This instrument, to me, is the basic thing in his music, not only in his old music but also in his later music. When I play the Moondog music today, if i even play the sax pax I don’t use a bass drum, I use the Trimba for the sax pax. And it fits very well. I think it sounds much better than the one-beat bar that he had on the bass drum.
There’s a characteristic rhythm to the way the Trimba plays, can you explain it?
The basic pattern of the Trimba is 3 beats + 2 beats. The accent always falls on the 4th beat. And sometimes he starts the rhythm on the 2nd beat instead of 1st beat. At first it was difficult for musicians to play, but nowadays it’s easier because they have so much more influence from different music today than what they had in the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s. When I started playing Moondog music and invited musicians to play it, they didn’t know how to play. When i meet people today they are more likely to have heard it performed, they can make it swing, which is very important.
So is the Trimba also responsible for the characteristic Snaketime rhythm?
The fixed pattern, the 5/4 is the fundamental basis of his trademark ‘Snaketime’ rhythm In those days he was one of the few Western composers who was dealing with that rhythm, it was an undiscovered area that he chose to explore.
In Fog On the Hudson (Moondog On The Streets Of New York, 1953), it feels like the city is very important to the sonic quality, the timbres, he employs. How did he make artistic decisions about which instruments to use?
He was always looking for unusual sounds. And the Trimba was unusual in itself. And then he invented other instruments, like Tuji and Uni. They were only used once or twice. The Uni is a series of strings in unison. This instrument is really an old Greek invention. When you start tuning strings in unison they sound interesting together. Moondog was very interested in the overtones they produced, and he hated it when they started to sound muddy. That’s what I meant by transparency.
His interest in overtones became more and more pronounced later in his life. He started to compose only for the 9 first overtones initially because he discovered that the 10th overtone on any instrument is ‘out of tune’. With the 9 first overtones, if you make patterns with them in the composition – turn them backwards and forwards and start on different places in the melody - then they become contrapuntal in themselves. He said that the musical piece is composed itself by this fact.
Taking a series of tones and retrograding is quite in tune with the rest of 20th c. but it sounds so different to what anyone else was doing at the time.
Other composers wanted to show off, they wanted to break all the rules, while Moondog was committing to the rules.
Remember also that Moondog was blind. When you are writing in braille you are always writing backwards, so these kind of ideas come quite naturally perhaps.
You can turn the compositions upside down, they have a balance, it’s a reflection at every angle… It has a beginning and an end. Everything is always equal mathematically… I think that’s what he meant when he said “my music is square.” It’s a perfect square. In his canonic writing, you can fit the music into a square, like a picture. His life was square also. All the clothes he made, all his ponchos you see, are made from squares, perfect squares, his trousers, his shoes, his caps, everything made from squares. It is 90 degrees of the square. Everything that Moondog did was more or less symbolic and deliberate. There’s a picture where he is sitting (in the 50s), he didn’t have horns yet, he only had a hood that was pointing down and there were small ears sticking out. He looked like an owl. Of course an owl is an animal that can see in the dark. That’s very symbolic. And, although he was blind, perhaps he felt he could see in his own personal darkness with his music.
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