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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

’80s New Music Resurrected

Merry Christmas: I updated my Postclassic Radio playlist on Christmas Eve – strikes me as kind of a festive activity – for the first time in awhile. Putting new pieces on the station is a cinch, but keeping the playlist current turns out to be the tedious part. I’m streamlining the process to make it easier.

Anyway, I recently got access to an old box of cassette tapes that’s been in storage for ten months, and it’s a cornucopia of new music mostly from the 1980s that never got commercially released: works by Todd Levin, Bunita Marcus, Maria De Alvear, Carman Moore, Elodie Lauten, Diana Meckley, and especially a large cache of recordings by Peter Garland. So Postclassic Radio will start the new year with another influx of commercially unavailable recordings. The sole complaint I’ve received about my timing indicated that I’m taking pieces off too quickly, so I’m actually sitting on a gold mine of material and trying to hold back. But to whet your appetite, I’ve just posted two lovely pieces by Bunita Marcus, her 1987 chamber piece Adam and Eve and her charming arrangement of the Beatles’ song Julia, written for Aki Takahashi’s Beatles project and played by her. Enjoy.

And for those who read me on a phone-line modem, unable to access internet radio, my apologies for writing about so little else lately. Happy holidays.

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.

Recent archives for this blog

Archives

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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