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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

The Unexpected Return of Arthur Russell

If you’ll watch now, I’m going to do something very different, for me: an actual short, informative blog entry referring to something I found on the internet, to prove to you that I don’t always have to write a 2500-word essay wrapped around a sinuous argument emerging in a moral at the end having to do with the heinous superficiality and crass commercialism of today’s world. Watch:

If there were any new music composer of my lifetime whose work I would have thought would be lost to history, it was Arthur Russell. I used to review his performances of his quiet cello songs in my early days at the Voice; he’d sing barely audible lyrics with a Buddhist sensibility over a slight, droning, anti-virtuoso cello part. I found him charming if enigmatic, sort of a shy Downtown Erik Satie. Then he died of AIDS complications in 1992, at 40, and seemed to disappear from public consciousness. Turns out now that he had a whole other career in dance music, and that people who loved that aspect of his work have been busy all these years collecting and preserving his recordings, making sure his legacy isn’t lost. I was vaguely aware of such activities, and today Ben Ratliff wrote a big article on Arthur Russell in the Times. Apparently there are several CDs of both sides of his music coming out.

See? I can be trained!

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.

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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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