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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

The Bandleader Career Resumes

I’m directing, this semester, a student ensemble for works of unspecified instrumentation. It’s above my accustomed course load, and takes up a chunk of my time, but I took it on out of guilt. I’ve felt terrible for years that our students graduate thinking that the sole available mode of modern music performance is faithful reading of scores elaborated in every detail of articulation and dynamics. Among the pieces we’re looking at and may perform are Riley’s In C (of course), Rzewski’s Attica and Les Moutons de Panurge, Glass’s Music in Fifths, Barbara Benary’s Sun on Snow, Christian Wolff’s Snowdrop, Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio (we have a lot of guitarists), and Samuel Vriezen’s The Weather Riots. (I directed the Dallas premiere of some of these pieces in 1976 at SMU.) It’s been a blast. Every music-reading level is accommodated, and people love working on In C and Music in Fifths. Plus, tonight we had our first read-through of Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla, for electric guitars (it can be played by multiples of any instrument). I wonder whether the piece has been played since New Music America 1980, or whether it’s ever been played on guitars. The performance, at Bard, is December 14. I’ll keep you posted.

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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