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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Part of a Targeted Audience for Once

Powers-OrfeoAt Robert Carl’s urging I finally read Richard Powers’s novel Orfeo. He told me it was a lifelike novel about a composer, but it’s more than that: I think just to understand the novel you’d have to be a composer, or at least an inveterate new-music fan, because the contemporary music references fly thick and fast. One whole long scene takes place within a played recording of Steve Reich’s Proverb. The protagonist, Richard Els, is a composition professor who studied at the University of Illinois in the 1960s, and actual people I knew like Ben Johnston, Sal Martirano, and James Tenney make cameos as characters. Cage is quoted frequently. I don’t want to review the book, except to say that it is indeed a gripping read. But I do want to quote two passages that show how elegantly Powers limns the trajectory of a composer’s life within the vicissitudes of aesthetic fashion. The first is a scene from Els’s early college period:

In the sixth week of his twentieth century formal analysis class, he arrived breathless over the previous night’s performance of Barber’s Hermit Songs. The class hooted. A stunned Els appealed to the professor.

It’s a great piece, don’t you think?

The man stifled his amusement and looked around for the hidden camera. Sure, if you still dig beauty.

Els sat through the session humiliated. He raged against the man at the grad student Murphy’s happy hour, but no one backed him up. When he checked out a recording of Hermit Songs from the music library the following week, he found them banal and predictable.

He’d learn the truth from Thomas Mann later that semester: Art was combat, an exhausting struggle. And it was impossible to stay fit for long. Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste. [pp. 90-91]

Later in the book, several decades later in Els’s life, he’s giving a composition lesson to a precocious student named Jennifer, a lesson described so realistically in its details that I felt like Powers had been watching secret videos of lessons I’ve given:

Jen’s duet swings upward into a sequence of stunning chords before settling into a cantabile. Then the cantabile broadens. He once put something similar into an ancient octet – the apprentice piece that won him the chance to work with Matthew Mattison. Back then he still clung to the vestiges of Neo-Romanticism. Now Neo-Romanticism, unkillable vampire, is back with a vengeance. His student outpouring was reactionary, anachronistic; Jen’s is hip and current. Other than that, the gestures are much the same. [p. 316]

Sure-fire Christmas gift for the composer in your life.

 

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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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