I just now got out of a three-and-a-half-hour rehearsal for the concert I'm presenting next week, of my Open Instrumentation Ensemble at Bard. December 14 at 7:30 in Bard Hall, we'll be presenting the following marathon program: Philip Glass: Music in Fifths Willy Berliner: Persistence of Vision* Samuel Vriezen: The Weather Riots Frederic Rzewski: Attica Brian Baumbusch: Cyclical Counterpoint with Sangse* Rzewski: Les Moutons de Panurge Julius Eastman: Gay Guerrilla Jonathan Nocera: Blues for Julius Eastman* Rhys Chatham: Guitar Trio Terry … [Read more...]

We're having a pretty tedious reversion war over at Wikipedia vis-a-vis the Nancarrow article. I refer to Nancarrow as an American composer who moved to Mexico. I would be happy to call him an "American-born and -trained composer who took Mexican citizenship." But a couple of guys, including Conlon's late-life assistant Carlos Sandoval, insist that he must be referred to as a "Mexican composer." I find this misleading, cognitively dissonant. Nancarrow did take Mexican citizenship in 1955, but he had few friends among Mexican composers, who were … [Read more...]

I have noted here before that I am a fairly notorious introvert. There are periods, such as the present, in which very little in the outer world catches my attention. However, I am not, in person, much given to talking about myself unless asked, and I do, for the record, feel some pangs of conscience when my blog ends up being mostly about myself. So, sorry to be so self-obsessed lately, but I might as well alert you to the fact that Jean Churchill, professor of dance at Bard College, has choreographed two of my Disklavier pieces for faculty … [Read more...]

A student complained that my microtonal music-theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull is currently (if temporarily) out of print, and that it's not available on my MP3 web page either. It's a reasonable complaint, so I've fixed that. The whole thing can now be heard Custer: "If I Were an Indian..." (8:42) Sun Dance / Battle of the Greasy-Grass River (7:59) … [Read more...]

Galen Brown makes an argument that the demise of Tower Records is no big deal. I almost believe him. Still, there's one telling fact no one's brought up. Last spring Tower finally opened a "Kyle Gann" bin. A few months later, the place "goes bankrupt." Coincidence? I think not. … [Read more...]

I played my 20th-century music class several tracks from John Oswald's (in)famous 1990 Plunderphonics CD, in which he took illegal samples from Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Dolly Parton, The Rite of Spring, and other sources, making inventive new works by mixing, subverting, looping, and speed-shifting them. (Even though he gave the discs away for free he was threatened with legal action, and had to destroy 300 of the 1000 copies. I was a recipient of one of the original 700, a rare disc indeed.) As we were listening, I realized, though, how … [Read more...]

Today in three hours I finally finished my setting of E.E. Cummings' My father moved through dooms of love, in which James Bagwell will conduct the Dessoff Choir on March 10. I had quit working on the piece in July because I hit a snag. The setting of the following words just wasn't right, and so the accompaniment (for piano and violin) wouldn't write itself, and I knew it was because I didn't really understand them: then let men kill which cannot share, let blood and flesh be mud and mire, scheming imagine, passion willed, freedom a drug … [Read more...]

I paid to read my one-paragraph review online in the Times Literary Supplement, but you shouldn't have to. Here it is, and much thanks to Wiley Hitchcock, my mentor and guiding angel, for alerting me: "At sixteen," writes Kyle Gann in his book Music Downtown, "I was so enwrapped in John Cage's ideas that I began to feel guilty listening to records when I could be outside listening to traffic". As "new music" columnist for the Village Voice from 1986 to 1998, Gann chronicled the waves of avant-garde musicians filling the lofts of lower … [Read more...]

Ninety-two years ago this week, between Nov. 20 and Dec. 2, 1914, Erik Satie penned Trois Poèmes d'Amour, a trio of brief love songs to poems of his own. At the risk of taxing my reader's browser, I offer the first here in its entirety: One notices right away that the voice sings the same rhythm in all eight measures: six 8th-notes and a quarter-note. This is also true of the other two songs: not only that they use the same rhythm in all eight measures, but that they all use this particular rhythm, six 8th-notes and a quarter-note. Thus not … [Read more...]

I went to the Sequenza 21 concert at CUNY Graduate Center last night, and met in person quite a few people I had known only virtually, including Sequenza 21 guru Jerry Bowles, David Toub, Galen Brown, Ian Moss, and David Salvage. Performances were excellent, and the program divided half-and-half - much like Sequenza 21 itself - between postminimalism and modernism, though the latter was of a refined variety. Composer Dan Goode asked me why Sequenza 21 was moving from virtual existence to real-life events, when most organizations are swimming in … [Read more...]

Taking off several weeks in August to write a new work for pianist Sarah Cahill put me way behind in my work, and teaching five courses this semester made catching up a slow process. But I have just officially caught up tonight. Perhaps blogging will resume. I have been having an unexpectedly good time teaching my course "Populism versus Progress in 20th-Century Music." The students are aggressively thought-provoking. After I gave a long exposition on the origins of minimalism, one asked, "Why do you represent this as somehow a continuation of … [Read more...]

Dutch composer Samuel Vriezen was just here at Bard, supervising a rehearsal of his piece The Weather Riots, which my Open Instrumentation Ensemble is playing soon, and giving a wonderfully lively lecture about his compositional process. (He's in New York for the riotous-looking Sequenza 21 concert happening this Monday at CUNY Graduate Center, where Weather Riots will also be performed, and which you can find out more about here.) Samuel usually writes pieces in which all the performers are playing similar material at the same time, … [Read more...]

Our pianist had the day's best line. Showing up late for a meeting, he said, "Sorry, I was out late last night celebrating the fact that the terrorists won. I burned an American flag." … [Read more...]

Young (relative to me) composer Galen Brown has a musically and visually attractive music video up on YouTube, sort of a neo-geo Koyaanisqatsi for the new generation. Bright, passionate music for a brighter, more passionate new day. … [Read more...]

Gary Kamiya at Salon: So for a lot of us, there's more at stake in Tuesday's elections than simply whether the Democrats will take control of the House or the Senate. It's a question of national identity, of finding out who we are -- and if we're a "we" at all. For six years, we've been waiting for the America we thought we knew to come back. And now, as we wait for the spinning windows in the great democratic slot machine to stop, we're torn between hope that it'll display the country we thought we knew, and fear that it'll show something … [Read more...]

Brian McLaren alerted me to a report by an organization called the Identity Project (at the ominous URL www.PapersPlease.org) that the Department of Homeland Security has proposed that, effective January, no U.S. Citizen be allowed to leave the country unless his or her name appears on a clearance list. As another organization called Friends of Liberty amplifies: Think this can't happen? Think again. It's ALREADY happening. Earlier this year, [Homeland Security] forbade airlines from transporting an 18-year-old a native-born U.S. citizen, back … [Read more...]

Composers Joan Tower and George Tsontakis were in my office today, discussing composition with a student. George, the student's teacher, said, "We've been talking about the problem of how fast you can add contrasting new ideas to a piece without losing the listener and making the piece disunified." Joan replied, "Oh, that's a problem everyone faces." I said, "Adding new ideas? That had never occurred to me." … [Read more...]

Once again, pianist extraordinaire Sarah Cahill will perform my new work On Reading Emerson tonight at 8 at the Berkeley Arts Festival at the Jazzschool, 2087 Addison St., Berkeley - along with works by Rzewski, Polansky, Andrea Morricone, Elizabeth Lauer, and Phil Collins, every one of them written in the last ten months. … [Read more...]

Composer Mark So is helping to organize a publication about James Tenney to accompany an upcoming festival of the great man's music at CalArts. He'd like to include the little tribute I wrote to Tenney here, along with all of the wonderful comments that were left in respose. Does anyone who left a comment object? Please either drop a note to Mark at mark_so@hotmail.com, or else leave a comment below granting permission. And thanks. … [Read more...]

I'm composer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in February and March. I had announced here that the deadline for applying to join me there was October 20, but somehow it got extended until October 27, which is tomorrow. If you're still interested but hadn't made up your mind, or were afraid all those terrible things Ann Coulter is saying about me might be true (they're all false except the online casino addiction), you can still sign up through tomorrow here. I'd love to see you, it's been too long. Tonight's concert of … [Read more...]