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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

February with JLA

It took longer than usual uploading everything, because his pieces tend to be epic, but John Luther Adams is Postclassic Radio‘s February Composer of the Month. Adams is the self-created composer of the Alaskan landscape, a painter of 60-minute-plus continuous orchestral canvases that shimmer and sparkle and hover in the air, often with little or nothing in the foreground. He’s written an astonishing number of pieces that use only “white” notes, no sharps or flats, including his large orchestra piece In the White Silence, which I’ve posted in its gorgeous 75-minute entirety. (If you don’t think there’s any gap between Uptown and Down-, show a 75-minute score with no sharps or flats to some well-established New Romantic or 12-tone composer, and watch the look on his face darken.) I’ve also posted another of my favorite long works, Clouds of Unknowing, Clouds of Forgetting, and there are a few more selections to come, some of them not commercially available.

By the way, if you’re ever looking for a way to distinguish the Nixon in China John Adams from the one described above, his middle name is Coolidge. (There’s also an electronic composer John D.S. Adams, who got his start working in David Tudor’s famous Rainforest installation. Surely it’s time for some innovative entrepreneur to organize a festival of Adamses?)

UPDATE: Richard Friedman urges that I re-mention John Luther Adams’ new book Winter Music, from Wesleyan Press, which I am all the happier to do since I wrote the introduction to it. I had written about it in September here.

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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