• Home
  • About
    • What’s going on here
    • Kyle Gann
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Blogging as Self-Demolition

It is certainly no original insight of mine that writing is a process of self-discovery. Like many compulsive writers, I often write in order to find out what I think. I started out my essay “The Complexity Issue” with a number of points to make, some of which got in and some didn’t, but I mainly started with the first two propositions and attempted to see what would logically follow. I didn’t anticipate mentioning Aaron Copland, though he became the article’s lynchpin; I had some hogwash in mind about the composer’s ethical attitude toward society, but it turned out to be superfluous, so I only included the hogwash I needed. The connection I drew between complex music and grad school surprised me, as did the fact that the article (which I thought would be mostly about complex music) became largely a meditation on how our tastes change with age. When people react negatively to something I say in these long thumbsuckers, I want to react with, “Why look at me? I was as surprised as you are!” My articles in this blog are not policy pronouncements ex cathedra, but a kind of thinking out loud in public. In fact, I said something to that effect in the post with which I initiated this blog, so I hope you were all reading carefully. What I came up with in this case was a phenomenologically accurate explanation for why I haven’t paid much attention to Grisey, Lachenmann, and their ilk in recent years, but it wasn’t a promise that I would never pay attention to them, and the mere act of focusing on them roused my curiosity.

So it will gratify some of you to know that I am now listening to Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil for the second time this evening – if only to nettle the less mature Kyle Gann of two days ago. I was dogmatic in my youth, but at some point many years ago I started a campaign to cultivate flexibility, and I still surprise myself.

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

Archives

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

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license