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

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Long Night Again, After 25 Years

As of this evening, I have a new compact disc out: Long Night, on Cold Blue, with the formidable Sarah Cahill playing all of three pianos. It’s a CD single, which means I’m really cool – only 25 minutes, and Jim Fox designed a beautiful cover that is perfect for the piece, a pastoral field at twilight with some kind of barn or house burning in the background. It even looks better in person than it does here. Sarah’s playing is beautiful, and it was recorded at Bard College’s Fisher Center, where the acoustics are like ice cream.

I’m really proud of this disc. Long Night dates from 1980 (revised in 1981), written when I was 24, and I always thought it was one of my better pieces, a template for what would come later. Back then I used to call my music a cross between Harold Budd and Morton Feldman (said that to Steve Reich once), but this piece also has some early-totalist qualities in the fact that the three pianos are at different tempos, repeating loops of different lengths against each other. (The piece was also written under the spell of Cluster and Brian Eno, back when ambient was quiet music.) Sarah overdubbed the three parts, which is a nice effect because the pianos aren’t affected by each other’s tempos, and the notes pulse in independent waves in a way that I’ve also sought in my music for Disklavier. Also I wrote some music back in the early ’80s that I still like, long before I moved to the East Coast, and no one knows it. Now they will. The piece will go up on Postclassic Radio post-haste.

Coming soon, another disc: Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, on New World, all Disklavier music.

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