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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

No Kelp, Sorry, but Toy Pianos

Having some free time this week (translation: none of the people I owe work to were hounding me), I started revamping my web site once again. The aim is to both streamline and expand it, in imitation of composer web sites I envy like Erling Wold’s, Alex Shapiro’s, and Eve Beglarian’s. I’m obviously not much concerned with graphic sophistication. The Hudson Valley doesn’t provide me with kelp to drape over myself, like Alex has out there on the Pacific Coast (though if I took a walk through the Hudson I’d probably emerge with some pretty picturesque, if carcinogenic, muck). But it bothered me that my mp3s were on one page, PDF scores on another, program notes accessible somewhere else, and I’m remodeling it on Erling’s everything-in-one-table format. My brother Darryl set up my web site in 1996, and for 12 years I’ve been getting by on what HTML tricks were available in the primitive 1990s. I know now I could probably do something cool like make the eyes in my photo blink, but I’m putting utility above aesthetics.

As for the expansion, I took off most of the recordings that you now have to go buy my new CD Private Dances to hear, but I’ve added lots of obscure recordings that no human has heard in years. Like my Homage to Cowell (1994), the piece that got cut for space from my Custer’s Ghost CD, and which uses a single looping, carefully-tuned drum sample to imitate Cowell’s Rhythmicon; Imaginary Isle (2003), the little piece I wrote for Trimpin’s installation of nine MIDI-operated toy pianos; and Snake Dance No. 1 (1991), which I had quit listening to because I like No. 2 better, but No. 1 has some advantages I’d forgotten about. Plus I’ve put up everything from the out-of-print Custer’s Ghost until I can bring it back out in some new format. Clicking on the pieces that are commercially recorded will take you straight to Amazon.com, so have your credit card ready.

I reiterate that I do all this not because I perceive a hue and cry begging for my minor works, but because I’m so physically disorganized that it’s reassuring for me to have everything on my web site, where I’ll know where to look for it and how to find it. I’ve even started keeping documents there to which there is no public access, because I’m weary of losing things in the Bermuda Triangle I call my office.

While I’m at it, anent our discussion of online PDF scores, I had forgotten that Eve Beglarian offers her scores online. And I’ve been meaning to note that Art Jarvinen’s Leisure Planet site has a very interesting collection of scores for modest prices. Music-score culture’s transition to the internet continues slowly but surely.

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.

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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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