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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Music Education’s Catch-22

I had a meeting with an editor from a major publisher today, as happens frequently. They want to know what textbooks I’m looking for, and are polite enough to ask what books I’m planning to write. My esoteric plans don’t generally thrill them. But this one asked what kind of textbook I’d like to see. I told her that I’d love a beginning music theory text that isn’t so exclusively classically oriented, one that would have examples from Broadway tunes, folk music, and pop music, like maybe some musical examples from the Beatles, so that I can connect the theory to music that my students, of whom only about half are classical musicians, already know. And she told me that, the way things are legally right now, nobody, but NOBODY is allowed to quote Beatles songs in a textbook. She said that her company even published a book on pop music, and were prevented from using a single example from the Beatles. This explains a lot – how can you have a theory textbook that includes pop music if the stuff’s all under copyright, and pop musicians won’t let you use their work? Thus we end up with all-classical music textbooks. Very interesting. How do we get past this impasse, Sherlock?

UPDATE: Carl Voss writes to inform me that Robert Gauldin’s Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music “liberally cites folk, pop, and jazz tunes along with the classical repertoire,” including a passage from the Beatles’s “Something” to illustrate the use of bVII. I will check, it, out!

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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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