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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

The Cruelest Month, Indeed

Among other rites of April I’m heavily involved in faculty evaluations, part of my obligatory committee work – which I grumble about like everyone else, but secretly find rather refreshing. My fellow music faculty are thoroughly predictable, but the contact with faculty from other fields has a bracing effect. While music’s fit within academia is inevitably uneasy, some of these people in religion, classics, literature, biology, et al, are the soul of institutional life, and I find their ethic inspiring. In the course of this work (to change the subject somewhat) I ran across a brilliant teaching statement by my jazz colleague John Esposito, and since it is in the public part of his file, I think I break no rules by quoting it. John talks about his education in the 1970s:

The prevailing wisdom among working jazz artists at that
time was that jazz was an art form that could only be learned on the bandstand
and in the community from which it grew. These musicians held the opinion that
a college education could only give the bare technical bones that form the
structure of the music, and that the expressive qualities in the music could
never be successfully taught in the classroom. At one time I thought that this
argument had some merit….

I don’t think the same environment exists today. It is no
longer possible to play, as Monk did at the Five Spot in NYC, six nights a week
for six months. It is no longer possible to tour for ten months a year. It is
no longer a requirement that we play six fifty-minute sets a night. The typical
gig in any of the New York clubs lasts for two one-hour shows, or may entail
traveling to a European venue for twelve hours, playing for an hour and twenty
minutes, and returning. Therefore the opportunity to train oneself methodically
and thoughtfully on the  bandstand
no longer exists. Young players therefore seldom have the opportunity to play
consistently with older, more experienced musicians for extended periods.

This is enlightening on its own, and could, I think, be generalized beyond jazz. As opportunities have diminished for musicians, the role of college becomes more crucial. We have to compensate for the wider performance world in which composers could have once gained more experience. I myself spend only a tiny fraction of my professional life in rehearsals and performance, and sometimes wish I had gained a more comprehensive education in orchestration and performance practice. I have to assume that many of my students will find themselves in similar situations. And so while forty years ago I might have left them to learn from real-life experiences, I have to explain to them much about performer psychology, audience psychology, rehearsal techniques, that long ago they might have learned on their own. I am moved by John’s words to take my own role a little more seriously.

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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