The project was created as a part of the practical course at bang bang education school led by Svyat Vishnyakov. The task was to create a final project on a free topic.
I found out about Moondog by chance, when I was listening music randomly. I was impressed why I hadn’t heard it before. The goal of this biographic topic is to discover and make personal adventure in the musician, composer and person Moondog’s world.
For over 30 years, one of the most sought out, recognizable figures in New York City was Louis Hardin, Jr., a towering Midwesterner, who stood day and night on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, dressed in the early years like a monk, later as a Viking, selling poetry and playing homemade instruments. Blind and handsome, he called himself Moondog. He was one of the true geniuses of his time. And even one of the geniuses of all time, prolific and visionary, capable of linking Bach, jazz and Amerindian rhythms, writing mini-symphonies, madrigals, piano pieces, highbrow makeshifts.
On July 4, 1932, the 16-year-old Hardin found an object in a field which he did not realise was a dynamite cap. While he was handling it the explosive detonated in his face and permanently blinded him.
Arriving alone in New York City in 1943, over the next three decades Hardin reinvented himself as Moondog and perfected the striking Viking persona and unique musical style that would make him famous.
Though Moondog died in Germany in 1999, his music has lived on, rapidly gaining popularity as the years go by.
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