• Home
  • About
    • What’s going on here
    • Kyle Gann
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Five New (Old) Tunes for Spring

Thanks to the good music faculty of Central Michigan University, I have a number of new recordings of my music up on my web site:

  • Olana for vibraphone,
  • New World Coming for bassoon and trio, and
  • Minute Symphony (kind of a joke piece, a symphony in 80 seconds) for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello.

This was kindly intentional on composer Jay Batzner’s part; he programmed pieces that weren’t on my web site. Also, Contemporaneous’s recording of my string quartet

  • Concord Spiral

is now available, and with Pianoteq I’ve made a nice MIDI realization of my piece for piano four hands Implausible Sketches (2006), which I think is one of my best works, and which has yet to be premiered. The four movements are here:

  • 1. The Desert’s Too-Zen Song
  • 2. The Goodbye Fugue
  • 3. Frigid Azure
  • 4. Don’t Touch My Pint

The first movement in particular, “The Desert’s Too-Zen Song,” is what I think of as quintessential Gannianism. Altogether, it’s about 55 minutes of material not available before. Andrew Spencer plays Olana, MaryBeth Minnis plays the bassoon solo in New World Coming. I always thought bassoonists would pick up on the latter, as a rare jaunty chamber work for bassoon with small ensemble, but that hasn’t happened either. Almost all of my works are now publicly available in audio, with the major exceptions of my opera The Watermelon Cargo, my string quartet Hudson Spiral, and my theater piece Scenario (coming up this summer, I hope), and a few early works.

 

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.

Recent archives for this blog

Archives

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

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license