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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

The Timing of Rhapsodic Outbursts

This comment on the Concord Sonata by John Kirkpatrick, included by him in a July 25, 1937, letter to Ives, is very perceptive, attests to the depth of Kirkpatrick’s aesthetic taste, and is well worth keeping in mind given the occasional charges of formlessness (unjustly) brought against the work:

I don’t know any long work that is so triumphantly sure in the instinctive justness of its timing – and it’s not a piece that has anything to do with nice balances, but the kind of rhapsodic outburst of strong substances that ordinarily makes for disappointing proportion as in Emanuel Bach or betrays the effort of adjustment as in Beethoven. But this treats its subjects in great free round shapes of music that move or plunge into each other with obvious spontaneity, and yet when one gets off at a distance and looks at it in perspective, there is no aspect of it that does not offer an ever fresh variety of interesting cross relation and beautifully significant proportion.

– Tom C. Owen, Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives, pp. 256-7

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

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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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