There’s been some inexplicable problem accessing the playlist for Postclassic Radio, but I think I’ve fixed it. (I could reach it through Mozilla, but not Internet Explorer.) Please let me know if you still have trouble.
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
There’s been some inexplicable problem accessing the playlist for Postclassic Radio, but I think I’ve fixed it. (I could reach it through Mozilla, but not Internet Explorer.) Please let me know if you still have trouble.
In a climactic moment of the wonderful movie Brazil, Robert DeNiro as Harry Tuttle, subversive free-lance electrical engineer, literally drowns, or dissolves, in the bureaucratic paperwork he has spent his career circumnavigating. I’ll die that way too, not in a mass of paper but in an ocean of CDs, as my friends grab up the fallen stacks of discs only to find that I’ve completely disappeared, absorbed into the microscopic pits in the polycarbonate plastic I spent my life obsessed with.
This combination of a blog and an internet radio station strikes me as really potent. Before, all I could do was harangue you – “Why the hell don’t you already know about all this wonderful music I listen to?!†Or, “Go buy this CD, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about!†Now, the music’s there if you want to listen to it (and, admittedly, if you have a cable modem connection; my willing friends with only dial-ups have been regrettably out of luck), and I can keep up a running commentary. In fact, it aids the fantasy I have of myself as the Harry Tuttle of music criticism – get in, get out, don’t wait for the ponderously slow commercial system to bring talent to light, but suddenly expose people to some wonderful music they would never in a million years have heard otherwise, then retreat for the next strike. You have to subvert and bypass all our social structures to make anything good happen today, because society’s arteries are clogged with the poison of money.
So let me tell you about the recordings I’ve got up so far. It seems that whenever I post music anywhere, some worthy instantly responds with, “Hell, I’ve heard that piece before, that’s not so new!†Apparently because I have a reputation as the Village Voice new-music critic, any music I champion had better be no more than 16 minutes old, and to boot made by some 20-year-old hotshot who just dropped out of college and came to New York yesterday, or I will be exposed as a pathetic fraud, and some people apparently derive a curious thrill from the thought that they’re hipper than Kyle Gann. I always have a few choice comments in response to this, and I’ll spare you the first two. Number three, I was active as a New York critic until 1997, when I cut back at the Voice and entered academia, and I have since always happily admitted that I am inevitably not right smack on the cutting edge of the era 1997-2004. I do keep up pretty well with the music of members of my own generation, who inexplicably get a year older every year. Number four – and this was particularly true of the listening page I posted for the recent Critics Conversation – I run into an awful lot of people who can’t name a non-pop piece of music more recent than Akhnaten, and I sometimes feel it is my mission to drag people through the 1980s and 1990s so they can understand what’s going on now. Also, if a truly great piece of music came out in 1988 and made no public impact whatever, and people have still never heard of it, I reserve the right to consider it absolutely now until somebody friggin’ listens to it and pays attention.
That said, many of the pieces on PostClassic Radio are 21st-century, most are post-1992, and I do include four composers in their 20s – Andrew Schulze, Erin Watson, Corey Dargel, and Max Giteck Duykers – so feign a little respect. And maybe Renske Vrolijk, I have no idea how old she is, but she’s Dutch and a major young new talent.
I’ve also performed a public service by resuscitating some music back to 1970 that some people my age may know, but is not available in the CD world. Two such recordings are Terry Riley’s lovely film score Happy Ending from about 1971, and Robert Ashley’s Music Word Fire and I Would Do It Again (Coocoo), a spin-off piece from his opera Perfect Lives that, being only 28 minutes, was never reissued on CD. One of his best discs, disappeared. I also happen to have, because I was in the right place at the right time, tapes of two multiple-piano pieces by the late Julius Eastman, an active underground New York figure of the early 1980s whose music came scarily close to disappearing without a trace when he was thrown out of his New York apartment by the sheriff and ended up living in Tomkins Square Park. There are a few people out there looking for this music, and I’ve got a little more up my sleeve. Plus a fine unsung Midwestern composer now moved to Arizona, Paul Sturm, whose vinyl record of the 1980s Long Distance deserves some 21st-century hearings.
If I were the 17-year-old Kyle Gann of today, I’d be out there with a tape recorder or audio software avidly recording everything on PostClassic Radio, waiting on pins and needles for gems such as these. But perhaps there is no such person. Young people don’t seem to check out music out of curiosity anymore. Just call me “Gramps.â€
Mary Jane Leach’s Ceremony of the Bulls is within spitting distance of Arvo Pärt, and personally, I like it better.
A couple of people seem to appreciate that I’m offering cuts from the legendary Plunderphonics CD of John Oswald, the Canadian sampling-meister whose omnivorous thefts from well-known recordings (though he never charged money for the results) landed him in legal trouble. Out of 1000 printed Plunderphonics discs he was forced to destroy the last 300, and I got one of the first 700. I’m cool. There will be more from this absolutely unobtainable disc.
The music by Florentine Romantic/Postminimalist Giancarlo Cardini is now 20 years old, but it’s wonderful, and I keep pressing him on you, so you might as well listen.
Elizabeth Brown’s Lost Waltz is wonderful, and I go around humming it. She got a doctorate in flute at Juilliard, and started composing afterward. Paul Epstein is another highly underrated postminimalist figure.
My students all go nuts for Bald Boyfriend by Pamela Z and the Qube Chix:
I want a man who’s well-behaved,
Who’s neat and clean, whose head is shaved.
It’s maybe findable, but thrown in here as a teaser.
I recently raved here about Carolyn Yarnell’s The Same Sky, and I am happy to provide it. It’s already won new fans. I got the recording of Jim Tenney’s Song ‘n’ Dance for Harry Partch from Bob Gilmore, and it’s really charming. Also, I’ve put in a hint of Diamanda Galas; I assume her Restless/Mute recordings are very hard to find if not impossible, and I’ll be recirculating more of them.
Enough commentary for now. I’m going for the most obscure, the hardest-to-find as an opening gambit, but I will eventually have to swing a little more mainstream. Remember, the playlist is here on my web page, since Live 365 has room for giganto audio files but can’t be bothered with text information, especially in the quantities classical and postclassical music require. The playlist is also linked from the “Sites I Like†on the right of this page. Give it a listen! Now we’ve got some actual sounds to talk about.
The first chapter in my new-music education came from WRR-FM radio in Dallas. A guy named Stephen Aechternacht used to play some pretty wild stuff there in the ‘60s, and I would run home from school and record on cassettes anything by a composer I hadn’t heard of – and in that way had a fateful encounter with, among others, a piece called In C by an unknown named Terry Riley, that blew my mind and slowly but surely readjusted my course in life. I was the kind of guy who called in to all of WRR’s radio quizzes, and sometimes wasn’t eligible to win the day’s prize because I had won only last week.
From that time on I yearned to become a classical radio DJ. Of course, had I succeeded, I’d be really depressed now, given the squelched and diminishing state of classical radio. Also, I’m not nearly as polished a speaker as I am a writer – I stumble over my words, stop to edit myself, spend half a minute thinking how to say something. And I had a strong Texas accent, still slightly noticeable, which is hardly the image classical stations want to project. I would never have made it on radio, and fate wisely directed me into the print world.
BUT – I’ve just realized my dream in another way. Postclassic Radio debuts today, at Live 365.com. Besides talking, the other half of the DJ job is programming, and on my own radio station I can put together a dream program, and I have, or at least the beginning of one. I decided that my opening playlist would consist entirely of pieces that haven’t been commercially recorded, except for a few that were only on vinyl and never made it to CD, plus a couple of things that are due to come out soon – because the purpose here is not to sell CDs, but to convince you that there’s a universe of great music out there that you’ve never heard. (Actually, I remembered afterward that John McGuire’s A Capella has indeed already been released on the Sargasso label, but it’s a great piece, and I’m not taking it down just on principle.) Here is the initial line-up, five and a half hours worth:
John McGuire: A Cappella (Sargasso)
Beth Anderson: Net Work
Eve Beglarian: Machaut a Gogo
Renske Vrolijk: Voice Over
Julius Eastman: Evil Nigger (I wonder if this great piece has been heard publicly in the last 20 years)
John Oswald: 7th (Plunderphonics)
Belinda Reynolds: Sara’s Grace
Giancarlo Cardini: Lento trascolorare dal verde al rosso in un tralco di foglie autunnali (Edipan)
Mikel Rouse: “Where Are Those Girls†from Music for Minorities (Exist Music)
Renske Vrolijk: Spinning Wheels
Elizabeth Brown: Lost Waltz (Orpheus Chamber Orchestra)
Kyle Gann: Unquiet Night (brand new work for Disklavier, concert premiere in New York next Oct. 17)
Eve Beglarian: The Bus Driver Didn’t Change His Mind
Paul Epstein: Interleavings
Dan Becker: Fade
Belinda Reynolds: Cover
Mayumi Tsuda: Knishtet (this one is really weird, in a crazy scale based on the 13th harmonic, so brace yourself)
Corey Dargel: Antidepressants
Renske Vrolijk: Boiler Plate
John Oswald: Pretender (Plunderphonics)
Eve Beglarian: The Continuous Life
M.C. Maguire: Got that Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin’ (Haro St.) (absolutely obnoxious, but pretty brilliant)
Kyle Gann: Bud Ran Back Out
Renske Vrolijk: Blink Blink
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz: Mantra Canon
Mikel Rouse: “Those Days Long Gone†from Music for Minorities (Exit Music)
Terry Riley: Happy Ending (Warner Brothers, long out-of-print vinyl)
Erin Watson: Inhale
Dan Becker: S.T.I.C.
Andrew Schulze: Dreams and Lullabies (Spiked Punch)
Several of these composers are in their 20s or 30s, and if you’ve already heard more than ten percent of this music, stop following me around or I’ll have you arrested. All of the composers so far are still alive (as far as I know) except for poor Julius Eastman, who died in mysterious circumstances at age 49. Finally, instead of just telling you about postminimal and totalist music, I can play them for you so you can hear for yourself. And by the way, Live 365 has contracts with ASCAP and BMI, and does pay royalties to the musicians. I’ve only filled a third of my megabyte space so far, so I’ll be adding tracks and making substitutions every few days. I’ll keep a list of current and past selections on my web page. Enjoy!
Today’s gem from the reliably wise and brilliant Paul Krugman at the New York Times deserves all possible exposure, even from music critics (this is just an excerpt):
…For many months we’ve been warned by tut-tutting commentators about the evils of irrational “Bush hatred.” Pundits eagerly scanned the Democratic convention for the disease; some invented examples when they failed to find it. Then they waited eagerly for outrageous behavior by demonstrators in New York, only to be disappointed again.
There was plenty of hatred in Manhattan, but it was inside, not outside, Madison Square Garden.
Barack Obama, who gave the Democratic keynote address, delivered a message of uplift and hope. Zell Miller, who gave the Republican keynote, declared that political opposition is treason: “Now, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.” And the crowd roared its approval.
Why are the Republicans so angry? One reason is that they have nothing positive to run on (during the first three days, Mr. Bush was mentioned far less often than John Kerry).
The promised economic boom hasn’t materialized, Iraq is a bloody quagmire, and Osama bin Laden has gone from “dead or alive” to he-who-must-not-be-named.
Another reason, I’m sure, is a guilty conscience. At some level the people at that convention know that their designated hero is a man who never in his life took a risk or made a sacrifice for his country, and that they are impugning the patriotism of men who have….
Nothing makes you hate people as much as knowing in your heart that you are in the wrong and they are in the right.
But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of the people at that convention, for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation’s freedom, diversity and complexity.…. [boldface added]
Why hasn’t this man been tapped to write speeches for Kerry? He’d do a hell of a lot better job than whoever is.
Typical unhelpful new-music program note, American Uptown style:
Gordon Trustfund-Protégé studied at Harvard, Curtis, and Columbia with Elliott Carter, Roger Sessions, Gunther Schuller, Iannis Xenakis, Mario Davidovsky, Charles Wuorinen, Luciano Berio, Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ned Rorem, and Milton Babbitt. His music has been played by the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Symphony, Los Angeles Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Seattle Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Nevada Symphony, Des Moines Symphony, Little Rock Symphony, Charleston Symphony, and Perth Amboy Symphony orchestras. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for music, a Guggenheim, the Grawemeyer Award, a Koussevitsky Award, a Fromm Commission, the Prix de Rome, an Academy of Arts and Letters membership, the Charles Ives Award, a Grammy, a Yaddo residency, a MacDowell residency, a Djerassi Foundation residency, the International Classical Music Awards’ Composition of the Year, the Stoeger Prize, an NEA Individual Artist’s Fellowship, a Bearns Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a BMI Student Composer Award, the Silver Spoon Award, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, the Preakness, and the fifth race at Aqueduct last Tuesday.
Typical unhelpful new-music program note, European style:
Freedom is not so much an existential condition as a never-ending dialectic within oneself. Einohääära Esapëkka’s Second Symphony is committed to demonstrating his belief that the vastest immensities of man’s internal struggle can be embodied in the briefest trill of a flute, and that conversely the most fleeting moment of self-doubt can find expression in the external structure of an entire work. In this music the dichotomy “freedom versus commitment†ceases to be a reality, at least on the unconsious plane, and the ever-assumed historical movement toward greater abstraction turns out to be an illusion that does not so much contradict itself as compound itself on ever higher and higher levels in a reductio ad absurdum. In the presence of the very sonority of this music bourgeois ideology crumbles, not due to its distance from lived experience, but because the urgency of its perceived desires renders the very idea of human autonomy laughable.
Typical unhelpful new-music program note, American Downtown style:
This piece is for Ellen.
Well, today’s the day – the one-year anniversary of my blog going public. When Doug McLennan asked me to do this, I promised myself to give it a big push for a year, and as this is my 187th entry (the software keeps track), I’ve averaged about a blog entry every other day. Whether I can continue at that rate I don’t know, and I’m not going to make any more promises. Of course, I also went to New York to work for the Village Voice in November of 1986 and told myself, “All right, I’ll keep this job for three years†– and I’m still there, sort of. For all my unwillingness to commit myself, I am a creature of great habit and inertia. It’s very difficult to get me moving, and once I’ve started something it’s just as difficult to get me to stop. So I’ll likely plow along as I have, but I refuse to feel as guilty as I used to if I don’t come up with a topic (or am simply too busy with other careers) for a few weeks at a time. Some months I’ve felt like I’m going to the trouble to put my views out there just for people to take pot shots at; other months I’ve been abashed at the expressed gratitude I’ve received for saying things no one else is saying. It averages out. Thank you all for reading, kindred spirits and contrarians alike, and for believing that new music is worth voluminous public discussion. Now, light the candle and everybody sing, each in his own key, of course….
Patrick Grant Internet Radio is now live and online at Live365, playing the music of… well, of Patrick Grant. Very interesting New York composer, kind of an Indonesian-gamelan-influenced postminimalist, or that’s how I tend to think of him.
While reading, I was listening to the American Mavericks’ “smooth” station on internet radio. Then the music stopped, and didn’t come back on. I looked at the playlist window and found that they were playing Cage’s 4’33”. So I stopped reading and listened to the hum of the refrigerator, the creaking of my recliner, the drip of the air conditioner. I reconnected to my environment. What a great thing Cage did for us!
I’m slow on the uptake when it comes to technology, but I’ve learned more about Iridian Radio, the station I enthused about a couple of days ago. It’s one of the independent digital stations at Live365.com, which offers you the opportunity, for a monthly fee (though it’s cheaper by the year), to set up a playlist and broadcast your own music selection. Iridian Radio is the audio domain of Robin Cox, a violinist, composer, and director of a new-music ensemble in Southern California. He includes his ensemble’s recordings on his intelligently mellow playlist, and is expanding, so keep listening.
Live365 doesn’t offer “postclassical†or “new music†as categories, but it does offer “experimental,†and there are a few other similar stations. First of all, I didn’t realize (I’m so obtuse sometimes) that this is the site through which the American Mavericks radio program (for which I wrote the script) streams its “smooth†and “crunchy†listening rooms. I love those “smooth†and “crunchy†labels (which were not my idea) – you know exactly what they mean, and although they divide new music into two types, they’re too down-to-earth to imagine anyone getting into a huffy argument of the how-dare-you-presume-to-decide-whose-music-fits-the-crunchy-category type. Also the record label Innova runs several stations, including Innova-mu.experimental, which plays, as they describe it, “Radical music you won’t hear elsewhere: Harry Partch, electroacoustic, experimental, computer generated, homemade instruments.†Among these evolving playlists, there’s a pretty good range and quantity of new music out there on the new, non-commercial, internet radio format. (And I’m toying with the idea of adding to it. Stay tuned….)
Thinking about Anne’s article, referred to (not “referenced,” which isn’t a word) below: I guess what I took most from the Critics Conversation was that music critics and composers have come to live in much more disjunct worlds than I had realized. I sit around with the composers I know and talk about how the big thing today is that minimalism has opened up this new space which allows for new, less European formal ideas, and for exploration of all kinds of tempo complexity, much more audible and meaningful than the old kind – and they nod their heads and say “of course,†as though I were stating that the sky is blue and the grass green. And I say the same thing to critics and they act as though I’m describing some impossible fairyland where the birds have four wings and the rivers run with chocolate milk and maybe they’d better be careful because the voices I’m hearing in my head may direct me to do something violent. I thought, back in the ‘80s, that almost every composer knew a newspaper critic or two, and that despite differences in viewpoint, we were at least dealing with the same reality.
I suppose what happened was that, from the ‘60s on, a new music scene grew up and vastly expanded that has nothing to do with the orchestra world; and arts editors have a way of keeping classical critics focused on the local orchestra. I once applied for a job with the Grand Rapids Press, if you can believe that (this is obviously a very old story), whose arts section had just been placed under the purview of the sports editor. And in my youthful naivete I incensed him by suggesting that there might, on a given week now and then, sometimes be something interesting to write about that would supercede the Grand Rapids orchestra. This was not acceptable. The orchestra’s every performance would be reviewed. So if you’re not writing for orchestra, your name is unlikely to ever float before the faces of most critics – and as John Adams keeps saying, most of the interesting composers are not writing for orchestra. And the critics never realize that most composers inhabit a completely separate reality, because there are a few composers getting played by orchestras, and they see one take a bow from time to time, and they not unnaturally, but wrongly, assume that it’s the best composers who are breaking into the orchestra circuit. So when I say that those visible composers are just the tip of the iceberg and the rest of the iceberg is more interesting, they think I’m totally off my rocker.
Getting the critics to talk to each other was a neat trick. Maybe we could get the critics and composers to talk to each other – though if you only include the composers of orchestra pieces, you’ll only reinforce the status quo.
My colleague Anne Midgette writes in the Times today about Arts Journal’s Critics Conversation we participated in. And she is kind and careful enough to state my views, and those of others, I thought, with accuracy and nuance. My favorite line: “the future of new music and the future of classical music may not be the same thing at all.†Bingo!
I visited the Village Voice offices today for the first time since the spring, and found a lot of good stuff waiting for me. Perhaps this would be a good forum in which to inform musicians and organizations that I only visit my mailbox at the Voice about twice a year (I’m writing for them less than once a month these days). If you want to send me a press release or CD, e-mail me at kgann@earthlink.net, and I’ll send you a current address. It’s a shame seeing Federal Express packages five months old.
I’m listening to the radio station of my dreams. It’s on the internet, and it’s called Iridian Radio. I swear it sounds like they’re going though my CD collection. They sent me the link this morning and I turned it on and immediately recognized Paul Dresher’s Channels Passing. I left it on and was startled by my friend Eve Beglarian’s voice suddenly coming through my computer in her piece Landscaping for Privacy. I heard Pamela Z before I tuned out, then came back tonight for David Lang’s Cheating, Lying, Stealing and a chance to hear the Tin Hat Trio, whose music I’m not very familiar with yet. It’s an all-new-music station, 24/7/52, with no commercials. They even repeat pieces during the day, as AM radio does, and I like it – even in Landscaping for Privacy, which I was familiar with, I heard things the second time tonight that I’d never noticed before. There are no announcements, and to find out what you’re listening to, you have to look at their playlist window, with the result that I’ve been surprised a few times how attractive some pieces are that I had remembered not thinking much of. This is absolutely postclassical radio as I used to dream we might finally have it someday.
Sometimes I get the feeling that maybe I am the only person who really cares about this music – and I got that feeling a couple of weeks ago from the utter indifference to it of the classical critics in the Critics Conversation, and from Rockwell’s impatience that I still even bother to write about this stuff. And then something like Iridian Radio comes along proving that we do have an audience, that we do have a unified and interrelated repertoire, that this stuff is wonderful to sit around and listen to. I’m enjoying Iridian more than any classical station I’ve ever heard.
They’re playing Dan Becker’s Gridlock!
UPDATE: They played Arnold Dreyblatt’s Escalator, and now they’re playing Belinda Reynolds’ Circa. Who’d have ever thought that I’d hear this music on the radio?!