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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Rarest of the Rare on Postclassic Radio

I’ve been absent because of school duties and computer problems. (When I moved from a 4GB computer to a 40GB, I laughed at the idea of ever filling it up – now I’m realizing it’s too small to play fast and loose with aiff audio files the way I need to.) But I stumbled across a cache of my rare cassettes, and I’ve put up some recordings on Postclassic Radio that you’d have a hell of a time finding anywhere else. One is the sole work by Conlon Nancarrow that isn’t commercially recorded: his Trio No. 2 of 1990, for oboe, bassoon, and piano, close to being his last work (at least, the last he composed without ransacking previous material). Another is the Wittgenstein Cycle (1980) of the inimitable Jeffrey Lohn, who was the third leg of the art-rock trio he shared with Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca in the ’80s, but who detoured out of history for a decade or two and is now reportedly composing again. Lohn set Wittgenstein’s entire Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to music, in German, in a bouncy, Stravinskian idiom, and this is an excerpt. It’s wonderful. And on top of that I’m uploading a mystery bootleg recording that I’m not even going to advertise, not having any desire to be visited by disgruntled musicians’ union goons. The Mad New-Music Broadcaster strikes again!

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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