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

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Musicological Manhunt Successfully Concluded

July 8, 2013 by Kyle Gann

My partner in minimalist conference-running David McIntire actually went to San Francisco and visited the elusive Dennis Johnson this week, composer of the five-hour piano piece November and gaining quite a belated reputation recently as a minimalist pioneer. Dennis is self-admittedly dealing with the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but he staves it off via physical exercise and took our musicologist friend on quite a hike. Turns out Dennis was born November 22, 1938, so we have that now for the reference works; and David saw some music, without enough context to make sense of it yet. On a clear day Dennis can see the Golden Gate Bridge from his apartment, and David sent me a few photos of him. I can’t think now why I had pictured him as tall and heavy-set:

Dennis1

Dennis4

Filed Under: main

Comments

  1. Alan Zimmerman says

    July 13, 2013 at 9:33 am

    Another elusive character from that era is hiding just up the road in McKinleyville – Joseph Byrd.

    KG, wielding a torch, replies: We’ll smoke him out!

  2. Doug Skinner says

    July 15, 2013 at 8:31 pm

    This is good news. I hope he’s enjoying this new round of appreciation.

    The bookshelf behind him sparked my curiosity. I zoomed in: he’s boning up on geometry and Clara Bow. Hooray!

    KG replies: I’m told he is, and yeah, I noticed that.

  3. David D. McIntire says

    July 18, 2013 at 9:40 am

    I didn’t actually see any new music when I visited Dennis, but he had a copy of Kyle’s realization in a prominent place among his things. He told me he was beyond delighted when it arrived in the mail. His perception of the recent attention towards his music is quite vague, but he’s very pleased to hear ‘November’ in full, at long last. He did tell me that he still works on mathematics, mainly geometry.

Kyle Gann

Just as Harry Partch called himself a "philosophic music man seduced into carpentry," I'm a composer seduced into musicology... Read More…

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

Copyright © 2019 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in