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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

A Difficult Genius

111409_Fred_Ho__048.jpgI’m terribly sorry to read in the Times that saxophonist and composer Fred Ho died, at only 56: I knew he had been fighting cancer for years. He gave me a splendidly colorful interview in 1997 that’s reprinted in Music Downtown, beginning, “Fred Wei-han Ho knows how to cut your carotid artery with his hands….” What he learned at Harvard, he said, was that “privilege doesn’t equate with talent, ability, intelligence, or hard work. Privilege is simply privilege.” Fred could be a difficult guy, and no matter how much I tried to support him, I couldn’t quit representing the white power structure in his eyes. Once I published an interview with black violinist Leroy Jenkins in advance of Jenkins’s opera The Mother of Three Sons. I ran into Fred at Leroy’s performance, and volunteered an apology that I was going to have to miss an upcoming concert of his that I had hoped to hear. He shook his head and muttered, “New music is a white man’s game.” Another time I wrote an enthusiastic review of a concert of Fred’s, but took him lightly to task for some rhetoric that I thought was over the top. Almost two years went by, and the next time he saw me he handed me a multi-paged typed rebuttal – as we were backstage at the Kitchen and I was poised to walk onstage to give the New York premiere of Custer and Sitting Bull. Once his back was turned, I did him the profound favor of throwing it away, because I knew if I had let him upset me before that performance I would have never forgiven him. But Fred was a phenomenal performer and a very original composer, with a take on protest music that came from way outside the feckless bourgeois platitudes of academic political music . He died way too soon. (As sometimes happens, it may be easier to give his music its due now that he’s gone.)

 

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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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