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Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Gann Dances (but Only Privately)

April 12, 2005 by Kyle Gann

I just received an excellent CDR recording of a new piece of mine, Private Dances for piano, played exquisitely by Sarah Cahill – in her hands, in fact, a couple of the movements are more beautiful than I imagined they could be. I wrote the piece because for years I’ve been such a big fan of William Duckworth’s multi-movement pieces like The Time Curve Preludes and Imaginary Dances, and they made me want to write a piece as a series of brief movements, something I’d never done. What Duckworth achieves that I didn’t was a way to link the pieces convincingly as a series, like Schumann; my dances are more self-contained, but I’m happy with them. I’ve posted the piece to my web page and on Postclassic Radio, and I post it here as well. You can listen to the whole piece:

Private Dances (timing – 23:44)

or to individual movements:

1. Sexy

2. Sad

3. Sultry

4. Sentimental

5. Saintly

6. Swingin’

and you can find the scores here as PDFs if you want. Hell, you can take ’em and play ’em on your own piano. [UPDATE: My PDFs, made via Sibelius on a Mac, download and print just fine on some computers, but on others either won’t print correctly or possibly won’t download at all. I don’t know what the problem is, or what to do about it, except that friends have had luck trying it on different computers until they find one that works. Advice appreciated.]

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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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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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