David Woodard

David Woodard
Woodard in 2020
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.

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]

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.[6] Timothy McVeigh asked Woodard to conduct a prequiem Mass on the eve of his 2001 execution in Terre Haute, Indiana.[7] 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,[8] 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.[9][10]

In 2003, Woodard was elected councilman in Juniper Hills (Los Angeles County), California. He proposed a sister city relationship with Nueva Germania, Paraguay, which had originally been founded as a "racially pure utopian settlement" for Germans.[11] Woodard said that he was "drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle" but denied that he is a white supremacist.[11] To research his idea he traveled to the settlement and met with its municipal leadership.[12] From 2004 to 2006, Woodard led numerous expeditions to Nueva Germania, winning support from then U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.[11] In 2011, Woodard granted Swiss writer Christian Kracht license to publish some of their private correspondence, largely concerning Nueva Germania.[13] According to Andrew McCann, Nueva Germania was by this time was a place where "descendants of original settlers live under drastically reduced circumstances" and that Woodard 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."[14]

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. ^ Carpenter, Susan (May 9, 2001). "In Concert at a Killer's Death". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on March 28, 2022.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ "Composer creates McVeigh death fanfare". BBC News. May 11, 2001. Archived from the original on June 23, 2025.
  9. ^ van der Vloed, Kees, ed. (February 5, 2006). "David Woodard". Requiem Survey. Archived from the original on March 26, 2023.
  10. ^ Wall, James M. (July 4, 2001). "Lessons in Loss". The Christian Century. 118 (20): 37.
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ 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.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ 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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