My Rochberg talk out of the way, I am now focused on this week's events. First, as previously noted, the premiere of my microtonal quintet The Day Revisited occurs this Wednesday, November 2, at Bard College's Olin Auditorium. My son Bernard and I will be performing with the Da Capo ensemble, and other Bardian composers are featured, including faculty members Joan Tower and Thurman Barker, temporary faculty Keith Fitch, a very talented student Marcus Parris, and local composer Jonathan Talbott. Then I'm giving the keynote address at a … [Read more...]

Some readers have a few issues with the "comments" option, and I have a couple of disappointments about the new format myself - or rather, with what the new format does to the old entries. I thought that rather than post them as comments I'd forward them to Doug McLennan and post them here. First, my issues. Somehow, in moving all my files to the new space, an awful lot of apostrophes and quotation marks got swallowed up, making the posts look a little illiterate. I've been restoring those in the articles I care most about, but it's unlikely … [Read more...]

Robert Ashley's brand new recording of his opera Celestial Excursions is up in its 111-minute entirety on Postclassic Radio. I think it's his most musically beautiful opera ever, even though there's not particularly much more music in it than in the other ones - something about the rhythms of the words, the way the repeated phrases make music. It's his opera about old people: Old people are special because they have no future. The future is what to eat for breakfast, or where did I leave my shoes. Everything else is in the past. Is this … [Read more...]

I neglected to notice that the Village Voice turned fifty this week - the first issue was dated Oct. 26, 1955, and I was born soon afterward. My editor Bob Christgau gives a capsule history of music criticism there. True to form, he doesn't sugarcoat anything: In 1985 I became a parent and relinquished the editorship to a talented series of successors who know why I'm not name-checking them—they experienced firsthand the space cutbacks that have continued for 20 years (and hey, now pay rates are dipping too!). [I came to the Voice in November … [Read more...]

Douglas McLennan calls my attention to a nice review of my new CD, by composer Christopher DeLaurenti in The Stranger, out of Seattle (halfway down the page): "Like Stravinsky, composer Kyle Gann has an astounding ability to forcibly deploy complex rhythms without sounding cluttered or pretentiously convoluted." Woohoo! The West Coast always seems to love me better than the East Coast, and you know what, West Coast? I love you better too. … [Read more...]

As many of you have quickly noticed, this new format allows for the possibility of comments (I can set this option or not set it per individual post). The way Arts Journal’s comments work, the ones you send go into a holding pen until I OK them. Most people, so far, have kept repeatedly sending, trying to get their comments to appear, but they won’t, automatically. This is as it should be - I’ve spent enough time cleaning obscene nonsense out of my web site guest page to know that you don’t just hand total strangers a can of spray paint … [Read more...]

I've been writing quite a bit about the composer George Rochberg since he died last spring, and now, by some amazing coincidence, I've been asked to speak about him this weekend. The Colorado String Quartet, who are, or which is, in residence at Bard College, will perform Rochberg's Quartet No. 6 (1978) at 3 PM this Sunday, Oct. 30, at Olin Auditorium here, at Annandale-on-Hudson off of Route 9G. It's the last of the "Concord" Quartets, with which Rochberg boldly inaugurated postmodernism under the shocked eyes of the classical establishment, … [Read more...]

Thanks to Douglas McLennan, from whom all blessings flow, I have now joined the newer, sleeker ranks of Arts Journal bloggers whose wisdom is couched in the snazzy new format. No longer will I turn from Jan Herman's blog to my own and hang my head in shame! And before, somehow because I'm on a Mac, I could never post images. Now, with the new software, I can! and I celebrate this newfound ability with an experimental post of Erik Satie, the first postclassical composer and patron saint of all who have come since. Coming up soon, I have a lot of … [Read more...]

It seems like every month another young composer shoots out of grad school and starts blogging, brimful of enthusiasm for the musics of Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez. I have nothing against that music. And if I did, what would it matter? Might as well rail against Brahms. What depresses me, and makes me feel trapped in an age of endless musical conservatism, is the ever-renewed enthusiasm, the sense that that old, old, well-known music, music with no more secrets to divulge, music of a past century, needs ever to be championed by the … [Read more...]

I love it when bloggers blog about bloggers. Two of my confréres have written about my interview with Frederic Rzewski at Miller Theater last Thursday, David Adler and Darcy James Argue. As a paid participant of the event, I would consider it unseemly to add my own evaluative comments about the concert - nevertheless I can say that I thought they both captured the evening's atmosphere well. … [Read more...]

I was going to send my mother the poem by W.H. Auden that I quoted recently, which doesn't seem to be on the internet anywhere, so I thought I might as well post it here, where, after all, she's likely to read it. There is an audio file of Auden reading the poem via the New York Times, but it's very late in his life and he seems to make it a little more trivial, so I recommend reading it yourself first. It's one of my favorite poems about music ever, with some sagacious observations about the changes in performance practice wrought by time and … [Read more...]

And remember, if you're going to hear Marilyn Nonken play music by Frederic Rzewski tonight at 8 at Miller Theatre (116th St. and Broadway), you might as well catch an early dinner and hear me interview Frederic onstage at 7 before the concert. … [Read more...]

I have a new work being premiered at Bard College's Olin Auditorium on Wednesday, November 2 - and repeated next January 24 at the Knitting Factory in New York. It happened in this wise. Pat Spencer, flutist of New York's Da Capo ensemble, played in my microtonal opera Cinderella's Bad Magic, which we performed in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Pat is, of course, (with apologies to Walter Piston) an incredible flutist. She has mastered much of the world's most difficult flute repertoire, and is a relentless perfectionist. She once showed me a … [Read more...]

One last post on Charles Ives (previous ones here and here), and if you're tired of the subject, read no further. I got a bug up my ass about his reputation after running across a reference to him on the internet by a composer who casually referred to him as politically rightwing, as though that were something everyone knew about Ives. Of course, Ives was actually a Wilsonian Democrat whose ideas were too radical even for 1930s Democrats, let alone today's: he favored a world government to prevent wars (the League of Nations being a first … [Read more...]

In 1999 Joseph N. Straus published an article in Musical Quarterly entitled "The Myth of Serial 'Tyranny' in the 1950s and 1960s." In it he claimed that, contrary to the common belief, there had never been any pressure on young composers to use 12-tone technique in their music, that the 12-tone composers wielded no power in academia, and that 12-tone music was just a hunky-dory little movement that attracted scads of converts because it was just so damn fun. As I believe I've written about here, Anthony Tommasini took him neatly apart in a … [Read more...]

The myth of a homophobic Charles Ives has gained traction, to the point that it sometimes seems that if a person knows only two things about Ives, one is that he wrote music and the other is that he hated gays. I alluded to this in my post about Ives the other day, and I received the usual questions. Let me set a couple of things straight. The image of Ives as homophobe rests on two pillars: Ives's abandonment of Henry Cowell after the latter was sent to San Quentin on a homosexual morals charge; and his regular use of effeminacy as an insult, … [Read more...]

I'm like a backward berry Unripened on the vine, For all my friends are fifty And I'm only forty-nine. My friends are steeped in wisdom, Like senators they go, In the light of fifty candles, And one on which to grow. How can I cap their sallies, Or top their taste in wine? Matched with the worldly fifties, What chance has forty-nine? Behold my old companions, My playmates and my peers, Remote on their Olympus Of half a hundred years! These grave and reverend seniors, They call me Little Man, They pat my head jocosely And pinch my cheek of … [Read more...]

I went through one of my biannual rituals today. I played my 20th-century analysis class a 1943, war-time recording of Charles Ives - age 69, diabetic, impaired by heart attacks, old beyond his years - singing and playing his song They Are There. Listen to it here. Here are the words, as best as I can make them out: There's a time in many a life When it's do, through facing death, But our soldier boys Will do their part that people can live In a world where all will have a say. They're concious always of their country's aim, Which is liberty … [Read more...]

Next Thursday, October 20, one week from tonight, I'll be onstage at Miller Theatre at Columbia University - not performing, but interviewing formidable composer-pianist Frederic Rzewski. Our pre-concert interview is at 7:00, and at 8:00, expert new-music pianist Marilyn Nonken will play Rzewski's famous classic The People United Will Never Be Defeated. This will be followed by the New York premiere of a new work, Rzewski's Bring Them Home, featuring, besides Nonken, pianist Ursula Oppens and percussionists Tom Kolor and Dominic Donato. I'll … [Read more...]

I hadn't visited Ubuweb in several months. I don't know what I was (or wasn't) thinking. I think what happened was that I gave up on Mozilla as my browser - every so often it would just suddenly erase all my bookmarks, so I switched to Safari, and haven't relocated all my usual watering holes again. But a reader alerted me to the fact that Ubuweb now offers Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether, a series of seven two-hour film interviews with great young composers of the 1970s: David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, … [Read more...]