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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

In Newsday Today

I have an article today in New York Newsday (slightly mis-) titled Rescuing Classical Music, arguing that the emotional rhetoric of 19th-century music may be too distant from the experience of today’s young people for them to relate to it – although they still find modernist and minimalist music compelling. It’s not where you’d think to look for me – in fact, an editor there asked me to write the op-ed piece based on a response I had written to Sandow in his column at New Music Box, so by bringing it back here I close the circle in a way – me and Greg battling throughout the music journalism world the 12-degree divergence in our viewpoints. Or is it a little larger than that?

The problem with daily papers, of course, is that, even in a generous full-page space like Newsday gave me, something always gets cut. I’m not complaining – my editor presumably knows Newsday‘s audience infinitely better than I do, and perhaps found some of my points less colorful than I had hoped. Clearly the interest was due to what was seen as a provocative viewpoint on my part. And so a few sentences that I considered crucial were cut from the last three paragraphs, which would have given the piece a perhaps slightly softer landing. Therefore – what’s a blog for? – I give the original ending here, with the omitted sentences italicized:

I consider Josquin Des Prez (1440-1521) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) composers as great as Beethoven, and how often do we hear their music these days? Sadly, the time is bound to come when we hear Beethoven no more often than that. But the fact that young people are abandoning what we call “classical” music reassures us that music is not meaningless, not just a succession of pretty sounds. Pretty sounds remain pretty; meaning grows more distant, more difficult to unravel.

Of course, I’m just speculating. We don’t really know why listening patterns change from one generation to the next, but change they do, and this generation’s change threatens a system of major cultural institutions. I don’t mean to minimize the crisis. But it is a crisis that one could have seen coming long ago, and that many in fact warned about. Classical music should have remained a living, evolving art form, rather than lapse into a lazy repertoire museum. (Jazz organizations, take heed.)

Moreover, the death of “classical music,” as defined by the eponymous section at Tower Records, is not the death of music, nor is it even the death of instrumental music, lengthy music, serious music, non-pop music, nor even great music. Music will continue to be an important artform, and perhaps a great tradition will grow in the new sunlight that had been blocked by Beethoven’s shade. And this music will speak to us in our own language. In fact, it already is.

What’s going on here

So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This blog will set out to consider that dubious factoid with equanimity, if not downright enthusiasm [More]

Kyle Gann's Home Page More than you ever wanted to know about me at www.kylegann.com

PostClassic Radio The radio station that goes with the blog, all postclassical music, all the time; see the playlist at kylegann.com.

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Sites to See

American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown composer

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

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