The blind American composer Louis Hardin, better known as “Moondog”, was also a musician, cosmologist, poet, and inventor of several musical instruments. He lived as a street musician and poet in New York City from the late 1940s until 1974. He then moved to his idealised Germany. First in Oer-Erkenschwick, and later on in Münster in Westphalia, Germany. There he spent the rest of his life.

In 1989, on invitation of Philip Glass, he conducted a tribute to his music at the New Music America Festival in Brooklyn.