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

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Edge of a Slippery Slope

My surviving musical output (first half of it, anyway) from 1962:

GoWalking

I must have quickly decided that two-part counterpoint was too much work. I’d love to know, though, how seriously I meant that A-flat key signature in the bass. I’m sure I thought I should fill out the end of each line with rests rather than leave it blank. The piece ends with a V6-I cadence in whole notes. Seven years later, at age 13, I still didn’t know what a fugue was, but I embarked on a career in music with a tritone-filled imitation of the Bach inventions I’d been playing:

GannFugue

 And four years after that, at the end of high school, I had not only discovered quartal harmony, but attempted (and maybe succeeded) to exhaust its fertility in a single piece, titled “Impacts,” which I played at my senior recital:

Impacts

Note the fractional meter, an Ives inheritance. You’ll notice I kept lengthening my name – afraid I’d be confused with all the other Kyle Ganns around. Were time travel possible, I would go back to Dallas, August 1969, and tell the young me, “Kyle, I know it looks like fun now, and you imagine that people will pay favorable attention someday, but don’t even get started.” I surely would.

 

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