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Kyle Gann on music after the fact

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November Is Bustin’ Out All Over

March 2, 2013 by Kyle Gann

Via pianist Andy Lee and David McIntire's Irritable Hedgehog record label, Dennis Johnson's November is taking its place in the repertoire. Andy is giving the five-hour, 1959 piano work its European premiere at Cafe Oto in London on March 9 (and I'm thrilled to see that he's playing music by the greatly underrated Paul Epstein there the previous evening). Then he'll give the New York premiere at Issue Project Room on March 16, starting at 2. And Andy's absolutely lovely four-disc recording, which I've been enjoying mp3s of, is now available, … [Read more...]

November While It’s Still November

November 26, 2012 by Kyle Gann

When I moved my web site I didn't re-upload the four-plus-hour recording Sarah Cahill and I made in Kansas City of Dennis Johnson's minimalist piano classic November. Several people have asked me to reinstall it and I keep forgetting, but it's up here now. Andy Lee is recording the piece for the Irritable Hedgehog label, so there will be an excellent commercial studio recording out soon. I'll let you know. … [Read more...]

November Again, in December

December 1, 2010 by Kyle Gann

My article "Reconstructing November," detailing the process of coming up with a performance score for Dennis Johnson's epic 1959 piano piece, has just appeared in the journal American Music. I prefer not to repost it on the blog; it contains hardly any more information than I've already posted here, here, here, here, and here. It's available through JSTOR, or will be soon, I guess, for those who have access to that through their schools. This issue of American Music, by the way, is chock full of experimentalism: aside from myself, Maria Cizmic … [Read more...]

November Already

August 28, 2009 by Kyle Gann

I am not the first person to play through Dennis Johnson's November, but on August 12 I became apparently the first person to listen to an entire recording of it. You can be the second. In honor of the sixth anniversary of this blog tomorrow (Saturday), among other things, I have uploaded a complete performance of November, one of the earliest (1959) major minimalist works. The first public performance of the piece since the early '60s at least will take place in Kansas City on September 6, with myself and Sarah Cahill alternating at the … [Read more...]

Trying to Remember that Kind of November

June 20, 2009 by Kyle Gann

I'm almost done transcribing and analyzing Dennis Johnson's November, the ostensively six-hour 1959 piano piece that La Monte Young says inspired him to embark on The Well-Tuned Piano. I've listed some of November's innovations elsewhere. If it was indeed the first multi-hour continuous minimalist piece, the first tonal very slow work, the piece that pioneered additive process - and it may have been all that - those in themselves are enough to make it worth reviving and getting into the history books. But beyond that, I've become more and more … [Read more...]

Remembering November

October 7, 2007 by Kyle Gann

AMSTERDAM - I'm not over here just turning European musical society on its ear, you know. In fact, I don't seem to be doing that at all. I haven't yet had to place a revolver on the piano to quell potential riots, the way Antheil did when he came to Europe - audiences here have simmered down over the years. But besides performing and lecturing, I'm also working on my book, whose title had already changed from Music After Minimalism to Music After the-Music-Formerly-Known-as-Minimalism, and now may have to be titled … [Read more...]

An Analytical Cornucopia, Wanted or Not

May 26, 2016 by Kyle Gann

Over the last eleven years, I've given at least twenty-two keynote addresses and conference papers, and in recent weeks I've managed to post all but six of them (three of those rather redundant, given my other writings) on my web site. I also didn't put up my keynote to the 2013 Earle Brown conference in Boston, or my analysis of Glass's Einstein on the Beach, since both are coming out in books soon, nor my Geiringer lecture on Ives's First Sonata, which I want to rewrite [UPDATE: now that's up too]. Several have already been blogged here, … [Read more...]

Three New Works

February 2, 2016 by Kyle Gann

I am excited that I'm going to have three world premieres within eight days this month, amounting to some two hours of music. On February 12 and 13 I am the featured composer at the Symposium of Contemporary Music at Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington, Illinois. On Friday, February 12, I give a lecture at 7:30 on the Concord Sonata at the School of Music. The following evening, also at 7:30, my two-piano piece Implausible Sketches (2006/11) and my song cycle Transcendentalist Songs (2014) will be performed at Westbrook Auditorium. I've been … [Read more...]

How Ives Did it

October 27, 2015 by Kyle Gann

Next week I'll be in Santa Barbara giving the Karl Geiringer Lectures, named for a famous musicologist who taught there, one (public) on microtonality, and the other (for musicologists) about what we can learn about Ives's compositional process from his sketches. The latter is mostly about the First Piano Sonata, since we have many more preliminary sketches for that than for the Concord, and there's really only one page I'm discussing at length: the presumptive first sketch written at Pine Mountain, CT, and dated Aug. 4, 1901. But it's a … [Read more...]

There’s Doin’s a-Transpirin’!

October 15, 2015 by Kyle Gann

Gannian events abound. This weekend I'll be in Philadelphia participating in workshops devoted to performing the works of Julius Eastman, run by the Bowerbird Ensemble. Sadly, my teaching schedule precludes my being there for the opening performance of Crazy Nigger tomorrow night. A week from Saturday, on Oct. 24, the NewEar ensemble is playing my 75-minute suite The Planets at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Kansas City, the first ensemble to do so besides Relache, who commissioned it. Lee Hartman is conducting the piece, which I think is a … [Read more...]

An Oxymoronically Postminimalist Improviser

July 29, 2015 by Kyle Gann

Thanks for indulging my mystery pianist contest. I was less interested in stumping the listeners than in collecting a set of comparison pianists to relate the style to. I am grateful to all who obliged. Not surprisingly, my Downtown comrade Tom Hamilton confidently nailed the answer: it's our late friend Elodie Lauten, playing her Variations on the Orange Cycle. Elodie was not only an early punk singer, Allen Ginsburg groupie, and composer of beautiful postminimalist operas, but a phenomenal improvising pianist. I wanted to introduce a … [Read more...]

Unanticipated Claim to Fame

December 30, 2013 by Kyle Gann

Holy shit. Critic Steve Smith of the Times has proclaimed Dennis Johnson's November, which I reconstructed and Andrew Lee recorded on Irritable Hedgehog, as the number one best classical recording of 2013. Of all of the ventures I've taken on in my life, I would not have picked this one to garner as much public resonance as it's received. I was talking to my good friend, radio personality, and songwriter extraordinaire David Garland about it recently, and pointed out that I had also resurrected Harold Budd's Children on a Hill, which is … [Read more...]

Vertiginous Plastic for Sale

October 25, 2013 by Kyle Gann

I received in yesterday's mail several copies of pianist Aron Kallay's new CD Beyond 12: Reinventing the Piano, the first installment of his project of playing microtonal music on virtual pianos. (I love the unmatched black keys on the cover art.) The disc includes my own Echoes of Nothing, which I wrote for him in 2011; also non-12 pieces by Isaac Schankler, Aaron K. Johnson, John Schneider, Tom Flaherty, Vera Ivanova, Jason Heath, and Brian Shepard. It's a disc of remarkably delicate and gentle and colorful music, though ranging from the … [Read more...]

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Kyle Gann

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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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