• Home
  • About
    • What’s going on here
    • Kyle Gann
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Invading the Ivory Tower

Composer Galen Brown has posted a very sympathetic response to my “Downtown Music and Its Misrepresentations” post. His sentence, “So Downtowners should at least seriously consider mounting an invasion of the ivory tower, not for dominance but for real inclusion,” is practically a one-sentence biography of me. At a young age I realized that academia was only vulnerable to shots fired from within the walls. Of course, there are some problems with this formulation, since lots of Downtowners don’t really have college teaching qualifications – but a lot more do than you think, and many have spent decades trying to get teaching positions. Between 1984 and 1997 I applied for more than a hundred academic positions before finally getting one.

UPDATE: David Toub has also added his thoughts. In light of some of the comments made over at Sequenza 21, I have to express regret that I used above, in haste, a word I hate: “qualifications.” I clarify that I did not mean a doctorate. One of the things I’m proudest of about Bard is that we do hire faculty, especially practicing artists, without doctorates. One of the best musicians I’ve ever known, cellist Luis Garcia-Renart, just retired from Bard: he had no college degrees at all, but he studied with Casals and Rostropovich. Cage never got a college degree, nor Feldman. By “qualifications” I meant something simpler and perhaps rarer: knowledge of history, and an ability to deal with music from multiple perspectives. Experience. A gluttony for “qualifications” (in the sense of credentials) is one of academia’s great diseases.

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

Archives

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

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license