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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Archives for July 2007

Return of the Wild Composer

I’m late with this, having regressed through space and time (lifetime-wise) for a small home-town vacation in Dallas. But every Sunday, wherever I am, I click on the Times music section with a pessimistic sigh expressing the unlikelihood of their ever mentioning any music that might actually interest me. And this week I was encouraged by Daniel J. Wakin’s and John Schwartz’s article about composer Joseph Bertolozzi, who is writing a piece to be performed, percussively, on the Mid-Hudson Bridge in Poughkeepsie. This looks like the kind of crazy, creative, innovatively public new-music project that composers used to pursue in the halcyon days of the New Music America festival: electronic sounds on the subways, music in the form of a baseball game, singers and instrumentalists drifting on boats, and like that. I’m thrilled to see Mr. Bertolozzi (to refer to him Times-style) pursuing it, and I look forward to driving down to hear his piece. What’s less gratifying is that this kind of creativity has so receded from our musical life that the authors treat it as whackily out of the ordinary (“bizarre,” “quixotic,” actually playing the bridge). Back in the old days, before Reagan somehow made the entire world conservative, using a bridge as a musical instrument – however newsworthy – would have hardly raised eyebrows.

I also failed to bring timely attention to Dennis Bathory-Kitsz’s very impressive article in New Music Box about the hyperrealist music of Noah Creshevsky: hyperrealism being defined as “an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment, handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive.” Dennis offers us a depth of aesthetic thought, about a very good composer, that we rarely encounter in any medium these days.

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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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