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Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Making the World Safe for Seduction

I’m writing a piece for piano four hands. The first four movements are already 25 minutes, and I’m adding at least one more. They’re sort of sketches for pieces I’ve been wanting to try, and because they’re not particularly related, I’m using the generic title A Book of Music. It’s for a couple of students who have a piano duo, but it’s also a project I’ve wanted to work on for more than a decade. I’ve always had a soft spot for two-piano, or four-hand, works, and it’s rather remarkable the number of such works that are either my favorite, or near-favorite, work by that composer:

Ligeti’s Monument – Selbst-Portrait – Bewegung

B.A. Zimmermann’s Monologe

Stockhausen’s Mantra (my favorite pieces by all three composers)

Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica

Satie’s Trois morceau en forme de poire

Wallingford Riegger’s Variations Opus 54

Kevin Volans’s Cicada

Tenney’s Chromatic Canon

Bach’s The Art of Fugue

Years ago I wrote a two-piano piece, I’itoi Variations, which was a huge, ambitious, take-no-prisoners monument of tremendous ensemble difficulty, not the sort of thing that two pianists can sit down and breeze through in an odd moment. Since then I’ve always wanted to write something more approachable, closer in spirit to Trois morceau en forme de poire. It’s a great medium. It shares with solo piano music that you can set tone color aside for the moment, yet it also frees one from the limitations of ten fingers, and opens up the entire range of the instrument for simultaneous use. No wonder it’s the chosen medium to substitute for the orchestra in a thousand transcriptions.

Book.jpg

My students will premiere A Book of Music this fall, and then I’ll make it generally available. It’s refreshing to write a little gebrauchsmusik, thinking at least as much about the enjoyment of the performers as that of the audience. I love playing four-hand music myself, and one of the best things about it is that it offers such opportunities for seduction. What better association for musicians to have with my melodies than that they were prelude to an evening of unexpected passion?

UPDATE: That working title was too dull to impose on a piece I’ve come to like as much as this one. The new title is Implausible Premises.

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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