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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Working in My Sleep

This morning I dreamed, honest to god, that an editor was coaxing me to write an online music theory text. So I started mapping out, on paper, a starting point and an endpoint, and a tree diagram of ways to get from one to the other. At the point where you study triads, both classical and jazz terminology would be given. Then, to go to seventh chords, if you click on classical it will take you to a page on the five standard classical seventh chords, or if on jazz, to a page with the seven or eight or nine (depending on who I’ve been taking advice from) jazz seventh chords. The jazz links eventually ended up in modal improv, and the classical links in set theory. The pop/folk route had a shorter trajectory. But it was a complete multicultural approach  to theory through which one could ultimately learn pop, jazz, and classical theory.

Not that I ever want to write any such thing. I have no (waking) interest in packaging information that’s already common knowledge, and I think writing theory texts is deadly for a composer’s reputation (think Piston and Kennan). I much prefer telling people things that no one already knows. But I certainly wish I had a resource like the one I dreamed.

 

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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