Ethan Iverson, himself the rather incredible young jazz pianist of Bad Plus, wrote about my CD Nude Rolling Down an Escalator for Downbeat magazine. (Geez, how hip can I get?) Not content to leave the review there, he's blogged it here. Not only that, he mentions another mention that I got from blogger Alex Ross. This is getting blogtastic!! … [Read more...]

During Bard's Janacek festival a couple of years ago, I became rather impressed with that composer's textural and tonal originality, especially upon realizing that I had always thought of him as a 20th-century composer and he was actually born in 1854. So awhile later, browsing at Patelson's in New York, I ran across the sheet music to Janacek's On an Overgrown Path - the piece that the well-known eponymous blog is named for, I suppose - and picked it up. It sat on my piano for months, but since I moved to a new house, my Steinway has developed … [Read more...]

In his [1938] essay, "Paleface and Redskin," the literary critic Philip Rahv claims that American writers have always tended to choose sides in a contest between two camps the result of "a dichotomy," as he put it, "between experience and consciousness...between energy and sensibility, between conduct and theories of conduct." Our best-selling novelists and our leaders of popular literary movements, from Walt Whitman to Hemingway to Jack Kerouac, number among the group Rahv called the redskins. They represent the restless frontier mentality, … [Read more...]

A week from tomorrow, Saturday, December 3, the Other Minds festival is holding a "musical séance" at San Francisco’s Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon Street, at 2pm, 5:30pm and 8pm. The idea is to raise up the spirits of composers from the experimental (or rather, Postclassical) tradition such as Cage, Nancarrow, Cowell, Crawford, Satie, and Rudhyar. I'm not projected to be dead yet myself by that time (unless they know something I don't), but nevertheless their star pianist Sarah Cahill (pictured) will play a piece of mine, "Saintly" from … [Read more...]

I’ve always had a weird fascination - don’t quite understand it myself - with music by famous people who were known for something other than music. I’ve enjoyed a long relationship with the music of Friedrich Nieztsche, own every recording of it ever made (including the old Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau vinyl disc), and savor my Xeroxes of his entire Musikalische Nachlass; I treasure my Wergo recording of the musical works of Theodor Adorno, and enjoy playing for students the hilarious completed bits of his projected opera on Tom Sawyer, Der … [Read more...]

NOTE: This entry has been extensively apologized for and updated. I've always thought I should have moved to Europe decades ago, and never more than in the last five years. But a composer friend who lived in Europe for many years told me this week why he moved back to the U.S. It seems that when he applied for grants there, to foundations which preserved the anonymity of their applicants [emphasis added later], his music was regularly rejected with the comment: "too American-sounding." UPDATE: I have to apologize for so badly misstating this … [Read more...]

That young whippersnapper Alex Ross has taken pity on an old man and mentioned some nice things about my Nude Rolling Down an Escalator CD, namely: "some of the pieces ('Texarkana,' 'Despotic Waltz') draw Chaplinesque comedy from the hyperkinetic action of the computerized piano, while others summon clouds of Ivesian mystery ('Unquiet Night') or simply make you happy ('Bud Ran Back Out')." I'm in a wrap-up along with recordings of Arvo Pärt, Mozart, Chopin, Victoria, Michael Finnissy, and my contemporary J.S. Bach. … [Read more...]

Quand j'etais jeune on me disait: Vous verrez quand vous aurez cinquante ans. J'ai cinquante ans. Je n'ai rien vu. Erik Satie Satie's Dream (1975) … [Read more...]

Composer Nic Collins was here the other day. He had an interesting insight that had never occurred to me. He tells his students that between five and ten minutes is the most dangerous length for a piece of music. A piece under five minutes can bore no one. A piece 15 minutes or more seems profound simply by virtue of its length, and generally receives the benefit of the doubt. But in between, a piece flirts with a certain attention threshhold, and can easily seem too long, or not serious enough in content to have gone past that five-minute … [Read more...]

Slate has a series on college education running lately, and in it is this statement about the “liberal” approach to education, as formulated by one Astrida Orle Tantillo, associate dean and associate professor of history and Germanic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago: The assault on liberal education from the left presumes that pedagogy must be "student-centered," with professors no longer "teaching" but "facilitating" or serving as "architects of interaction" who "enable" students to teach one another. The assumptions … [Read more...]

I thought I'd never live to see the day that more than three hours of Julius Eastman's music would be commercially available. But today is that day, for New World's three-disc set of archival recordings (New World 80638-2) - titled Unjust Malaise, an anagram of Eastman's name - is now in my hands. In case you haven't been tuned in to the recent buzz, Eastman (1940-1990) was a gay African-American whose rivetingly powerful postminimalist music confronted issues of race and sexual identity, and who died under rather mysterious circumstances at … [Read more...]

...it pours. After no performances in about a decade, my toy piano piece Paris Intermezzo was played last week in Worcester, Massachusetts, by John MacDonald - a really lovely performance - and it's about to be played again seven times. French pianist Wilhem Latchoumia will play it on November 18, 19 , 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26 with the Compagnie de Danse Stanilaw Wisniewski at the Centre Culturel Charlie Chaplin à Vaulx-en-Velin, near Lyon. If anyone's in the area (I won't be). Space is limited, and reservations are recommended, at 04 72 04 81 … [Read more...]

I’ve written a little keyboard work (for a retuned electronic keyboard, playable by human hands) that I’m proud of for reasons with which the reader has no reason to sympathize. One is that I’ve finally, after years of trying, broken past the barrier of the 11th harmonic to base a piece on the 13th harmonic and its resultant intervals. This will seem a small achievement to some microtonalists, many of whom run wild with 43rd and 79th harmonics and 53- and 72-tone scales, but I have always found myself unable to compose merely … [Read more...]

There are two web sites that I think you should check out - not right this minute, but when you have some leisure time, for they both require and deserve a lot of time to get into: 1. The best paper I heard at the toy piano conference at Clark University last week was by the irrepressibly enthusiastic Helen Thorington, of NPR and radio sound art fame. She came to tell about her Networked Performance blog, a site where she and other bloggers keep track of internet performance projects from all around the world. The stuff she showed us ranged … [Read more...]

The American Composers' Orchestra is performing a transcription of Conlon Nancarrow's Study No. 7 (perhaps the best of his early works) at Zankel Hall on November 11. They asked me to write a little article for their web site about Nancarrow as a person, and it's now posted here. … [Read more...]

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...]