I’ve kept you too long in suspense about the upshot of Saturday night’s thingNY concert, which took place during a momentous blizzard that must have cut heavily into its audience. The evening consisted, not of pieces by all the composers on the program, but of just about everything the group got back in response to their mass e-mail, including a few “unsubscribe” messages, a Halloween greeting, some jpegs, a description of a piece submitted with way too large an instrumentation, some mp3s, and about half a dozen pieces, like mine, written for the occasion. It was a funny evening, the unsurprising responses often as comical as the surprising ones. And as avant-garde as anything I’ve seen recently – by which term I inexactly mean that it was more focussed on how we live at this exact moment than on the traditional conventions of concert-giving. I was glad to have been involved.
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
