Archives for March 2012

I love this insight from Slate‘s interview today with Noam Chomsky:

Q: In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable.

A: That’s a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists … and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Awhile back I noted composer Henry F. Gilbert’s response to receiving, from the unknown Charles Ives, a copy of the Concord Sonata and accompanying essays: a friend of Gilbert’s, admiring the essays, had remarked, “Depend upon it, this fellow is a bad composer – good composers are usually non compos mentis on every other subject.” Only yesterday, though, in Jan Swafford’s superb Ives biography, did I notice Ives’s justifiably arrogant yet heartbreaking answer to him:

Your friend, the critic, is wrong again. I am not a bad composer – I’m a very good one though it’s inconvenient to have no one know that but myself!

Next week, March 29 and 30, I will be the featured composer at the fourth annual Open Space Festival of New Music at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Previous composer recipients of this honor have been excellent electronic composer Paul Rudy, Christian Wolff, and French computer composer Jean-Claude Risset, so it’s difficult to imagine where this trajectory is going. They’re planning to perform my Olana for vibraphone, On Reading Emerson for piano, my mixed quartet Kierkegaard, Walking, Siren for five flutes, and my choral piece based on E.E. Cummings My father moved through dooms of love, along with Ives’s Calcium Light Night and works of Cardew and Cage, all my kind of people. If they can procure an 88-key MIDI keyboard, I may play a few microtonal works as well. Hope to see my northern Colorado readers there.

I had to change my e-mail address and web site location. I’ve been using Earthlink for 17 years, paying $62 a month (which I understand is rather high), and last month my rate jumped to $562 – that’s not a typo. So I challenged the charges and the bank got my money back, and, looking around the internet, I see that Earthlink has devolved into a gang of thieves: charging people for things not wanted, refusing cancellation, all kinds of stuff, and if you try to complain you’re talking to someone in India whose English you can hardly understand. So anyway, the web site will still be at kylegann.com, but I’m doing a redirect to Hostmonster, per my brother’s recommendation, so there may be some disruption of service. All mp3s hopefully running again soon. My new e-mail address is reachable via the “contact” link on the web site. UPDATE: If there’s any problem with the redirect, find my web page here. And please let me know of links not working.

New piece: The Unnameable. 12:10

UPDATE: For many years I have been trying to compose using the harmonic series, and in a series of studies for my three-Disklavier piece, including this one, I’ve finally figured out how to do it. The harmonic series in its natural pitch order (high harmonics on top) is a rather thin thing to work with, creating wan parallels. But if in one chord you use the 13th harmonic near the bottom and the 5th on top, and in the next chord you have the 11th on the bottom and the 9th on top, and so on, one can create a wonderful range of variously clear and obscure chords that all make sense, but give subtle tension-and-release patterns analogous to regular tonal harmony, with extremely parsimonious voice-leading. The chords can be almost motionless as the implied tonic zips all over the place. And to do that, I’ve become increasingly reliant on the 13th harmonic; without it, the gap between the 3rd and 7th harmonics made it difficult to keep the melodic intervals consistently small. I suppose it’s the just-intonation version of what beboppers do with the flat and sharp 9, sharp 11, and flat 13. So after years of 11-limit pieces, I’m finding myself ensconced in a 13-limit world, and I can finally really hear that 13th harmonic and anticipate its effects. Don’t know why I’m so obsessed with this paradigm of emotionally fulfilling music that barely moves, it’s just my thing.

 

I keep hearing that people are seeing Facebook photos of me interviewing Phil Glass. I won’t join Facebook again, and I can’t find them. I would be grateful (perhaps eternally) to anyone who might send me a couple. E-mail address at my website.