Everybody Stay Calm

The festival "Voyages: Montréal-New York" runs April 2 through 6 next week at the Theatre la Chapelle (3700, rue St.-Dominique) in Montreal, and my new electric guitar quartet lies smack dab in the middle of it, on April 4, the all-guitar concert. More info at guitarist Tim Brady's web site. 

The new 13-minute piece is titled Composure, after a 1986 quotation from the New York Times by the brilliant essayist-novelist Marilynne Robinson that I've quoted here before:

The literature of expostulation, of Catastrophe, is taken to be very serious. But among people carried along in a canoe toward a waterfall, the one who stands up and screams is not the one with the keenest sense of the situation. We are in a place so difficult that perhaps alarm is an indulgence, and a harder thing - composure - is required of us.

That insight resonated powerfully with my own apostasy against modernism, and composure has been a central aim of much of my music - perhaps all of it. This particular piece does rather go over a waterfall at one point, but it keeps its, er, poise, and comes out calmer, if sadder, on the other side. I'll be there.

March 28, 2008 11:06 AM | | Comments (3) |

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3 Comments

By Scott Unrein on March 30, 2008 2:01 PM

Will you be able to post a recording of this from the performance?

KG replies: I imagine. No one's ever objected yet.

By John S. on March 31, 2008 11:33 PM

Nothing against the calm aesthetic -- nothing at all -- but Robinson's equation of aesthetic preference with usefulness in a crisis is silly. If we're going over a waterfall, teaching creative writing in Iowa isn't going to get us to shore any more quickly than playing frenetic music will. Keeping calm in a crisis is indeed a virtue, one that has very little if anything to do with aesthetic preference. (Speaking of which, I loved Robinson's novel "Housekeeping.")

Polemics shmolemics -- best wishes with your concert!

By matt legroulx on April 1, 2008 12:35 PM

i'll be there as well and if i shoot any clips with my digital camera i'll stick right up on youtube.

KG replies: Hey, Matt, come up and introduce yourself.

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Sites To See

Postclassic Radio! - Kyle Gann's internet radio station that accompanies the blog; see the playlist at kylegann.com

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

Just Intonation Network - a meeting place for people interested in alternative tunings

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

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by PostClassic published on March 28, 2008 11:06 AM.

Zuni Totalism was the previous entry in this blog.

Over at Counter-Critic is the next entry in this blog.

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