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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Our Classical Bedtime Stories

August 17, 2004 by Kyle Gann

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 a creative crisis and made him realize he would never find happiness with a woman. Sibelius’s involvement in the pro-Finnish language movement wrested him stylistically away from the Germanic composing style. Told that his First Sonata sounded like Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, Brahms responded haughtily, “Any jackass can see that.”

All probably true enough, I suppose. The books can only report what the primary documents say. But you can’t read virtually the same words, the same phrases, over and over in so many reference books and biographies without beginning to think of these as folk tales developed from writer to writer over the decades – and suspecting that some more subtle truth has escaped us. The artist’s psychological life is not so simple that a few phrases repetitiously used are enough to capture it for eternity. I always wonder how Brahms really said, “Any jackass can see that” – angrily? embarrassed? guiltily? good-humored? We are given the mythic assumption that it was a trivial comment to make to a Great Man, but Brahms was young and just as subject to the anxiety of influence as any of us.

Carl Maria von Weber, hearing the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, declared that the composer was now “ripe for the madhouse.” You’d think that more than a few people in the history of the world had been declared ripe for the madhouse. But Google those four words, and you will find 32 uses on the internet. 31 of them refer to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. And everyone quotes them – including me.

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Kyle Gann

Just as Harry Partch called himself a "philosophic music man seduced into carpentry," I'm a composer seduced into musicology... Read More…

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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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