Pub Year: 1989

In 1989, the cellist Jeffrey Krieger commissioned Born Dancin’ to be the maiden voyage for his new electric cello. He recorded the piece in the very early 90’s, and it was released on cassette. I have lost the original DAT master, so the audio below is a low quality transfer from cassette.

The story the piece is based on is called The Baby, and it’s by Donald Barthelme, who everyone forgot about for a while but he seems to be back lately, which is a very good thing. On the recording, my brother Spencer is reading the story.

 

The image I’ve used for this page is by an artist named Yeondoo Jung, who has made a series of photographs based on children’s drawings. I found his photographs via google images, which took me to a blog called Born Dancin’, which has an excerpt from the Donald Barthelme story as its tagline and an entry about Yeondoo Jung’s project. She (I’m guessing Born Dancin’ is a she) writes about lots of interesting and entertaining things.

Some days I really love the internet.

Here’s a score. I think it’s definitely ready to be brought into the 21st century: let me know if you want to work on a remixed version of the piece!