Typical unhelpful new-music program note, American Uptown style: Gordon Trustfund-Protégé studied at Harvard, Curtis, and Columbia with Elliott Carter, Roger Sessions, Gunther Schuller, Iannis Xenakis, Mario Davidovsky, Charles Wuorinen, Luciano Berio, Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ned Rorem, and Milton Babbitt. His music has been played by the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Symphony, Los Angeles Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Seattle Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Nevada Symphony, Des Moines … [Read more...]

Well, today’s the day - the one-year anniversary of my blog going public. When Doug McLennan asked me to do this, I promised myself to give it a big push for a year, and as this is my 187th entry (the software keeps track), I’ve averaged about a blog entry every other day. Whether I can continue at that rate I don’t know, and I’m not going to make any more promises. Of course, I also went to New York to work for the Village Voice in November of 1986 and told myself, “All right, I’ll keep this job for three years” - and I’m still … [Read more...]

Patrick Grant Internet Radio is now live and online at Live365, playing the music of... well, of Patrick Grant. Very interesting New York composer, kind of an Indonesian-gamelan-influenced postminimalist, or that’s how I tend to think of him. … [Read more...]

While reading, I was listening to the American Mavericks' "smooth" station on internet radio. Then the music stopped, and didn't come back on. I looked at the playlist window and found that they were playing Cage's 4'33". So I stopped reading and listened to the hum of the refrigerator, the creaking of my recliner, the drip of the air conditioner. I reconnected to my environment. What a great thing Cage did for us! … [Read more...]

I’m slow on the uptake when it comes to technology, but I’ve learned more about Iridian Radio, the station I enthused about a couple of days ago. It’s one of the independent digital stations at Live365.com, which offers you the opportunity, for a monthly fee (though it’s cheaper by the year), to set up a playlist and broadcast your own music selection. Iridian Radio is the audio domain of Robin Cox, a violinist, composer, and director of a new-music ensemble in Southern California. He includes his ensemble’s recordings on his … [Read more...]

Thinking about Anne’s article, referred to (not "referenced," which isn't a word) below: I guess what I took most from the Critics Conversation was that music critics and composers have come to live in much more disjunct worlds than I had realized. I sit around with the composers I know and talk about how the big thing today is that minimalism has opened up this new space which allows for new, less European formal ideas, and for exploration of all kinds of tempo complexity, much more audible and meaningful than the old kind - and they nod … [Read more...]

My colleague Anne Midgette writes in the Times today about Arts Journal’s Critics Conversation we participated in. And she is kind and careful enough to state my views, and those of others, I thought, with accuracy and nuance. My favorite line: “the future of new music and the future of classical music may not be the same thing at all.” Bingo! … [Read more...]

I visited the Village Voice offices today for the first time since the spring, and found a lot of good stuff waiting for me. Perhaps this would be a good forum in which to inform musicians and organizations that I only visit my mailbox at the Voice about twice a year (I'm writing for them less than once a month these days). If you want to send me a press release or CD, e-mail me at kgann@earthlink.net, and I'll send you a current address. It's a shame seeing Federal Express packages five months old. … [Read more...]

I'm listening to the radio station of my dreams. It's on the internet, and it's called Iridian Radio. I swear it sounds like they're going though my CD collection. They sent me the link this morning and I turned it on and immediately recognized Paul Dresher's Channels Passing. I left it on and was startled by my friend Eve Beglarian's voice suddenly coming through my computer in her piece Landscaping for Privacy. I heard Pamela Z before I tuned out, then came back tonight for David Lang's Cheating, Lying, Stealing and a chance to hear the Tin … [Read more...]

Old, conservative, self-indulgent rationale for ignoring new music, ca. 1954: ”I can’t stand the new music, it’s too dissonant and just not nearly as great as Romantic music.” New, hip, egalitarian rationale for ignoring new music, ca. 2004: ”I can’t stand the new music, it’s too consonant and just not nearly as great as pop music.” In the world of music criticism, this passes for... Progress! … [Read more...]

Seattle critic Gavin Borchert has a more-original-than-usual view on the death of classical music. … [Read more...]

When I was a student at Oberlin, my composition teacher Randolph Coleman used to say that from now on, composers would bloom a lot later than they used to, in their 50s or 60s. He felt that there were so many competing influences on a composer’s musical style that it would take a couple more decades to assimilate them and find your own voice than it used to when everyone grew up in a culture with one dominant kind of music. At the time, this sort of went over my head, and to the extent I grasped it, it was a depressing pronouncement for a … [Read more...]

I write a lot of program notes these days - my work as a classical music annotator is replacing my work as a critic, strangely enough. And in the vast repetitiveness of what people say about classical music, you realize that the lives of the Great Composers are myths, bedtime stories that we tell ourselves to stabilize a certain sanitized, comfortingly simple view of the world. Nadazhda von Meck's cutting off of patronage to Tchaikovsky in 1890 was one of the crushing blows of his life. Beethoven's letter to the "Immortal Beloved" brought about … [Read more...]

Composer and loyal correspondent Lawrence Dillon has a formulation for the true relationship of composition and theory that is too admirable to keep to myself: You can drive the car; you can look under the hood; but don't try to do both at the same time. … [Read more...]

Music theory blogging - the continuation of a Critics' Conversation by other means! DePauw University music professor Scott Spiegelberg has posted a feisty but thoughtful reply to the views I quoted from Jean Lawton and Adam Baratz. … [Read more...]

Reader Adam Baratz objects reasonably to my position on terminology: I see where you're coming from on promoting the use of grouping music based on surface similarities, but I think such a course is eventually as dangerous to criticism and history as falling back on abstract, inaudible relationships. Just as it's easy to avoid the emotional meaning of a piece of music through a cerebral system, examining music through arbitrary stylistic groupings can get you into just as many problems.... You can get into all the ideological arguments you … [Read more...]

Reader and like-minded spirit Jean Lawton has written a response to my blog entry “Leave No Term Unstoned.” I e-print it here because it’s not just an answer but a beautifully written article, despite the fact that it says a couple of flattering things about me, and because she makes so many points I wish I had made, and supports them so compellingly. Thanks, Jean - for this and for the Wittgenstein line I had already quoted. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * "What makes a subject difficult to understand... is not that some … [Read more...]

A reader was kind enough to draw my attention to this wonderful quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein: What makes a subject difficult to understand - if it is significant, important - is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not a difficulty of the intellect, but of the will. … [Read more...]

The other day I had lunch with a classical musician friend. She started talking about how sick and tired she is of reading stories about how classical music is dying. What is the purpose of these stories?, she wondered. If a department store found its profits declining and was afraid of going under, would its owners run around shouting to the public that it was in danger of going under? Wouldn’t that shake consumer confidence in the store and make things worse? Wouldn’t that become a self-fulfilling prophecy? We could see how, in private … [Read more...]

An extremely articulate response to the above post from composer Galen Brown, aptly pointing out that in talking terms we're talking about superficialities, and that superficialities are indeed wherein works resemble each other: Since you are expecting unanimous dissent, I feel I ought to make a point of throwing my lot in with the "pro-termists." You make essentially the same argument I've been making for a while now. Genre naming is useful and relatively harmless if used humanely, by which I mean that people need to recognize the fact that … [Read more...]