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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

An Embarrassment of Nancarrovian Riches

Several people have noted that I am mentioned in connection with the Nancarrow festival at the Whitney Museum this week. (I’ve been quoted in the Times and the New Yorker.) I will indeed be present for it next Wednesday, the 24th. At 1 PM and again at 4 I’m supposed to give an informal talk on Nancarrow, and bring up my favorite Player Piano Studies, which will then be played “live” on an Ampico player piano like Conlon’s. Sounds like a fun gig, but I can never decide which studies to play. The ones I wouldn’t play are easy to pick, but I always want people to hear nos. 3, 4, 6, 7, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, and 48 and the unofficial roll M. It’s too much. I never know how to choose. No. 3 is so fun for the uninitiated, 4 is lovably cute, 6 is fun to explain, 24 is perfect, 25 is a riot, 40 is transcendentally exciting, 21 is a crowd-pleaser, 36 is a miracle, 37 is a modernist classic, 48 is hugely ambitious. I could do it all given enough time, but I never know where to start or stop. And I’ll have a dozen friends there to catch up with, including Luis Stephens, Nancarrow’s stepson by his second wife, who’s been an invaluable font of information about Conlon in the 1940s.

And to bring up another important composer, my friend John Luther Adams has a long excerpt from his upcoming memoir in this week’s New Yorker, in which he was kind enough to mention me. Good reading. John says I once told him, “John, you’re always so earnest, but I like you anyway.” John and I have been sober for a modest percentage of our times together. He greatly heightened my appreciation of expensive single-malt scotch, and I’ve never recovered.

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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