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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Endless Melody

When I was in high school my best friend Marcus McDaniel was working on an opera about a scientist who generated music from the digits of pi. The crisis in the opera (which sounded to be a very brief work) came when the music came to an unexpected halt, indicating a final digit to this transcendental number. The opera never came to fruition, but a web site just forwarded to me allows you to be that scientist. You can either choose your own pitches to relate to the Arabic numbers, or the program will do it for you.

Marcus also had another opera planned, based on the life of Maurice Chevalier, titled Der Mauricekavalier. The world hasn’t caught up with that one, nor did I ever complete my own contribution to musical punnery, Das Knaben Zauberflöte, though I did eventually write Das Knaben Wunderklavier.

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.

Recent archives for this blog

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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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