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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Cribbing from Frankie

I have never been one to post lists of what I’m listening to lately, for quite a number of reasons. One is that it would often be embarrassing. Right now I’m driving around listening to old Frank Sinatra records from the fifties. I feel like my music needs occasional infusions of vernacular music, specifically music that was tremendously popular at some point, music that people paid for because it was attractive and entertaining. I can supply the complicated cross-rhythms and microtonal voice-leading myself, but I need some DNA from the mainstream: a jaunty rhythm, even just a tempo, a surprising harmonic twist, a melodic quirk. A few minutes ago one of Nelson Riddle’s arrangements ended with a big brass cadence, and then immediately repeated the cadence in the strings, so quietly that it sounded like an echo, and I shouted, “Yes! I’m gonna do that!” What a temptingly style-independent gesture.

In the early 1990s a meme made the rounds downtown that new music, in order to be authentic, must be based in the vernacular. I remonstrated, pointing out that there’s plenty of great music with no vernacular connections: Feldman, Varèse, Tenney, Xenakis. The only reason to ever say music must do something is so that the next day some genius will write a great piece that doesn’t do that. (“Must follows music only in the dictionary,” I wrote in the Voice.) But I am so lacking in the common touch myself, raised in such a rarefied atmosphere, so deficient in street smarts and folksy charm, that I have to steal it from somewhere, and so little sound-shapes from Swing Era jazz, Waylon Jennings, Edith Piaf, Jimmy Buffett, even Strauss waltzes show up here and there in my music, probably unnoticed by anyone but me. I’m sure I have some bizarre blind spots in my appreciation of the world’s musics, but I’m no snob.

 

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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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