Louis Hardin was born in Kansas in 1916. At the age of sixteen he was blinded when a blasting cap went off in his hands. He finished his schooling at the Iowa School for the Blind where he got his first formal training in music and heard his first classical music. In 1942 he won a scholarship to study in Memphis and a year later moved to New York where he met Artur Rodzinski who allowed him to attend rehearsals of the Philharmonic where he met, among others, Leonard Bernstein and Toscanini.

His music, constructed of direct musical gestures and built mostly from pure modal themes expanded by sophisticated counterpuntal techniques, would now receive the avant-garde label of 'minimal' or pattern music but this sound characterized his music since the late 1940's, and is thus a precursor of this postmodern compositional style. In New York, Moondog began to meet legendary jazz performer-composers, such as Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman, and to incorporate jazz inflections as well as humorous philosophical couplets and environmental sounds into his recorded compositions.

Moondog always stood aside from the main currents of music-making. Fascinated by the canon form and resolutely tonal, his music skirts ground between the classical and jazz worlds, appearing increasingly out of step with both. In his later years, resident in Germany, he produced at least five albums, including a 'sound saga' titled 'The Creation', and regularly performed his compositions with chamber and symphony orchestras before glittering European audiences. He passed away in 1999, aged 83.

Moondog (Louis Hardin)
Sea Horse
Kopf CD