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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Thoughts on Attending a New-Music Festival

I’ve attended new-music festivals both as participant and as spectator, and I talk to a lot of composers at them. The composer who isn’t included in the festival sits there thinking, “How did that composer get invited to perform? Who did you have to know to get on this festival? What’s this doing for his career? Why isn’t my music ever taken seriously enough?” The composer who’s on the festival sits there thinking, “I knew I wouldn’t get enough rehearsal. They put that composer in a hotel much closer to the performance space than the one they put me in, why does he rate? My piece is on at a rotten time, no one will hear it, everyone will be out to dinner. That person’s piece got more applause than mine because it’s so superficially trendy. The performance was terrible, no one really got an idea of how good my piece is.”

The latter composer tends to complain more loudly, but the difference between the two experiences is considerably smaller than the former imagines.

(Posted from the Pittsburgh airport after a nine-hour flight from Berlin – now that’s a serious blogger.)

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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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