Kyle

I've been reading Kyle Gann's blog with the greatest admiration, and hesitated to comment only because I thought that -- to do justice to what Kyle does -- I'd have to write something long. But that's not so. I can say it simply. Kyle's blog is the most important one here, because, while the rest of us carry on about issues and opinions in the arts, Kyle writes deeply about art itself. Of course I know that Terry and Tobi talk about arts events, and so do I sometimes, but Kyle does it from the inside.

And not just because he's an artist himself, a composer, though that's surely part of it. He writes from the inside of art, from the center of the kind of attention artists bring to their work. This is rare. I'm tempted to say that he writes with the kind of focus he surely has when he composes, but that would be presumptuous. I don't know what composing is for him. I can only say that when I read him, I'm reminded of how I feel when I myself compose. Art (unlike "the arts") doesn't care what anybody thinks of it. It has no truth except its own, no compusion except the deepest instinct, no concern about what's right or wrong. It doesn't care where it fits in anybody's world; by its own existence, it defines a world of its own. Later that may turn out to overlap with everybody else's world, or (more likely) to invoke a world, and help to bring it into being, that doesn't yet exist, but soon will. But at the moment of creation, none of that matters.

Kyle brings me to this place, more than anyone else I read these days about music, anywhere on the web or in the press. For that I'm grateful. He matches the inner truth of the work he writes about (Feldman, Nancarrow, all the rest) -- music that's just as much worth hearing as Kyle says it is, and which Kyle's strength and fierce purity should drive all of us to hear.