David Woodard

Not to be confused with David Woodward.

David Woodard
Woodard in 2020
Born (1964-04-06) April 6, 1964
Santa Barbara, California, U.S.
Occupation
  • Conductor
  • writer
Citizenship
  • United States
  • Canada
Literary movementPostmodernism
SpouseSonja Vectomov
Children2
Signature

David James Woodard (/ˈwʊdɑːrd/ ⓘ; born April 6, 1964) is an American conductor and writer.

Career

Dreamachine

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Woodard built replicas of the Dreamachine, a stroboscopic lamp created by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville,[1] and he agreed to contribute a Dreamachine to William S. Burroughs' 1996 LACMA visual retrospective Ports of Entry.[2][3] Sotheby's auctioned the latter machine to a private collector in 2002.[4] Another of Woodard's machines remains on extended loan from Burroughs' estate to the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas.[5] In a 2019 critical study, Beat scholar Raj Chandarlapaty evaluates Woodard's approach to reviving the near-forgotten Dreamachine.[6]

Prequiems

During the 1990s Woodard coined the term prequiem, a portmanteau of preemptive and requiem, to describe his Buddhist practice of composing dedicated music to be rendered during or slightly before the death of its subject.[7]

Timothy McVeigh asked Woodard to conduct a prequiem Mass on the eve of his 2001 execution in Terre Haute, Indiana.[8] Woodard consented by premiering the coda section of his composition Ave Atque Vale (Hail and Farewell) with a local brass choir at St. Margaret Mary Church, near USP Terre Haute,[9] before an audience that included the following morning's witnesses. Archbishop Daniel M. Buechlein and later Cardinal Roger Mahony petitioned Pope John Paul II to bless Woodard's full score.[10][11]

Nueva Germania

In 2003 Woodard was elected councilman in Juniper Hills (Los Angeles County), California. In this capacity he proposed a sister city relationship with Nueva Germania, Paraguay, which had originally been founded as a "racially pure utopian settlement" for Germans.[12] Woodard, who denies that he is a white supremacist, states that he was "drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle."[12] To research his idea he traveled to the settlement and met with its municipal leadership.[13]

From 2004 to 2006 Woodard led numerous expeditions to Nueva Germania, winning support from then U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.[12] In 2011 Woodard granted Swiss writer Christian Kracht license to publish some of their private correspondence, largely concerning Nueva Germania.[14]

According to Andrew McCann in 2015, Woodard embarked on "a trip to what is left of the place, where descendants of original settlers live under drastically reduced circumstances" and was moved to "advance the cultural profile of the community, and to build a miniature Bayreuth opera house on the site of what was once Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's family residence."[15]

References

  1. ^ Allen, Mark (January 20, 2005). "Décor by Timothy Leary". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 22, 2015.
  2. ^ Knight, Christopher (August 1, 1996). "The Art of Randomness". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on March 28, 2022.
  3. ^ Bolles, Don (July 26, 1996). "Dream Weaver". LA Weekly – via newspapers.com.
  4. ^ Carpenter, Susan (October 31, 2002). "A vision built for visionaries". Los Angeles Times.
  5. ^ "Dreamachine". Spencer Museum of Art. University of Kansas. Archived from the original on August 19, 2017.
  6. ^ Chandarlapaty, Raj (2019). "Woodard and Renewed Intellectual Possibilities". Seeing the Beat Generation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. pp. 142–146. ISBN 978-1-4766-3670-2. Archived from the original on December 20, 2024.
  7. ^ Carpenter, Susan (May 9, 2001). "In Concert at a Killer's Death". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on March 28, 2022.
  8. ^ Siletti, Michael (2018). Sounding the last mile: Music and capital punishment in the United States since 1976 (PDF) (PhD). University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. pp. 240–241. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 6, 2020.
  9. ^ "Composer creates McVeigh death fanfare". BBC News. May 11, 2001. Archived from the original on June 23, 2025.
  10. ^ van der Vloed, Kees, ed. (February 5, 2006). "David Woodard". Requiem Survey. Archived from the original on March 26, 2023.
  11. ^ Wall, James M. (July 4, 2001). "Lessons in Loss". The Christian Century. 118 (20): 37.
  12. ^ a b c Epstein, Jack (March 13, 2005). "Rebuilding a Pure Aryan Home in the Paraguayan Jungle". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on October 9, 2016.
  13. ^ Tenaglia, Francesco (2015). Momus—A Walking Interview. Turin/Milan: Noch Publishing. pp. 39–40. ISBN 978-1-78301-808-6. Archived from the original on June 3, 2025.
  14. ^ Schröter, Julian (2015). "Interpretive Problems with Author, Self-Fashioning and Narrator: The Controversy Over Christian Kracht's Novel Imperium". In Birke, Köppe (ed.). Author and Narrator: Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate. Berlin: De Gruyter. pp. 113–138. ISBN 9783110348552.
  15. ^ McCann, Andrew L. (August 28, 2015). "Allegory and the German (Half) Century". Sydney Review of Books. Archived from the original on October 9, 2016.

Further reading

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