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Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Oh Yeah, I’m a Composer

After a dry spell, I’m suddenly having eight nine performances in five months, with six world premieres included. (I guess for a lot of composers, nine in five months still sounds like a dry spell.) Two of the premieres slipped by me because I’m not very good at keeping track of dates. On June 23, Aron Kallay premiered my Echoes of Nothing at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. Last Friday, August 17, Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli premiered my Earth-Preserving Chant on a program of American Indian-inspired music by Peter Garland, John Luther Adams, Mort Subotnick, Martin Bresnick, Michael Daugherty, and Huang Ruo. Hopefully recordings of my two pieces will be on my website soon, but don’t have ’em yet.

I’ll try to get the rest straight in case you want to go. Two of them are at Bard College.

Sept.7: Relache premieres the live-performed version of my The Planets with video by John Sanborn in Philadelphia at the Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway 6 PM. I can’t be there, dammit.

Sept. 9: Johnny Reinhard and I are sharing a concert in New York City at Spectrum, 121 Ludlow St. I’ll play some microtonal keyboard works. Lord knows what Johnny’ll do. Play pitches even closer together than mine, probably.

Sept. 13: Relache repeats the Planets-with-video performance in Olin Auditorium, at Bard College, 8 PM.

Sept. 19-21: I give the keynote address for a Harry Partch conference at Northeastern University, and my piece The Unnameable will be played. Don’t know the schedule yet.

Sept. 27: Nicolas Horvath will premiere my Going to Bed: Homage to Glass at the Variety Theater in Monaco, in a Glass concert with the Nice Instrumental Ensemble.

Oct. 5: Aron Kallay will play microtonal keyboard works, including Echoes of Nothing, and soprano Martha Herr will sing American and Brazilian new music including my S.J. Perelman-based electronic mini-opera Scenario, in Blum Hall at Bard, 8 PM. I wrote Scenario seven years ago, and hadn’t been able to get a singer to perform it, but I think it’s one of my best works. And very funny. S.J. Perelman is a hero of mine, and Martha (who premiered Feldman’s Beckett-opera Neither) is one of my oldest friends.

Oct. 19: My orchestra piece Serenity Meditation, based on two songs by Ives, will be premiered at the Bowling Green State University new music festival.

Need to get more attentive to my PR.

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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