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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

It’s All Related, Somehow

Tomorrow night (October 18) at 8, pianist Lois Svard is playing my music in a program at Muskingum College in Concord, Ohio. She’ll play my recent work On Reading Emerson (which is coming out on a New Albion disc with Sarah Cahill any minute now), along with “The Alcotts” from the Concord Sonata, Bill Duckworth’s Imaginary Dances, and George Tsontakis’s Ghost Variations. Gann and His World, indeed.

Thursday, October 25 [note – I had originally listed the wrong date], I’m giving a concert of microtonal and Disklavier works at the Mendelssohnsaal of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, Germany. My solo program will include Unquiet Night, Charing Cross, So Many Little Dyings, Bud Ran Back Out, and my own C#-minor Prelude Custer and Sitting Bull. (Anyone still get that joke?) Address in Hamburg: Havestehuder Weg 12, showtime 8 PM.

In other news, microtonal composer Jarod DCamp (a Henry Gwiazda student from the Fargo flatlands) has started a Live-365 internet radio station for microtonal music called 81/80 Microtonal Radio. Among people who never listen to it, microtonal music often has a reputation for dry convolutedness, a devotion more to theory than to sound. It is and isn’t true: the proportion of lousy music in microtonalia is about the same as in any other genre, but sometimes the inability of people’s ears to adjust to the intonation gets blamed for nonexistent sins. The initial strangeness is what turns me on, and Jarod’s station will prove that there are a million varied reasons to step outside the bland 12-pitch scale, since he’s showcasing all of them. I’m already astonished by all the bizarre new music I’ve heard by composers I didn’t know. Way to go, Jarod!

As for Postclassic Radio, it got an infusion of British music when I visited England and Wales, and as you’d expect it’s about to be flooded with Dutch music. Keep listening, dank u wel. And hey, all you foreign postclassical composers: You want your music played on Postclassic Radio, just invite me to your country and make a big deal out of me!

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

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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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