Over the last eleven years, I’ve given at least twenty-two keynote addresses and conference papers, and in recent weeks I’ve managed to post all but six of them (three of those rather redundant, given my other writings) on my web site. I also didn’t put up my keynote to the 2013 Earle Brown conference in Boston, or my analysis of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, since both are coming out in books soon, nor my Geiringer lecture on Ives’s First Sonata, which I want to rewrite [UPDATE: now that’s up too]. Several have already been blogged here, though some of those were afterward altered or expanded. They include:
My keynote address for the 2012 Harry Partch conference in Boston, which I am proud of as one of the few statements on Partch’s elegantly intricate rhythmic innovation;
Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser, which I delivered at the 2015 minimalism conference in Helsinki, and which I think is the first academic paper on someone who was a leading female postminimalist figure;
Robert Ashley as Minimalist (already blogged here), which I delivered at the 2013 minimalism conference in Long Beach;
Silence in the Rearview Mirror (also already blogged here), which is my criticism of Cage’s rhetoric in Silence, delivered at the 2012 Cage110 centennial symposium in Lublin, Poland, and subsequently published in Polish;
A Pre-Concert Talk on Ives’s Concord Sonata, written in 2015 for a general audience;
The Boredom of Eventfulness, my keynote address for the 2011 Minimalism Conference in Leuven, Belgium;
Regarding Ben (already blogged here), my keynote address for the 2010 microtonal conference at Wright State University;
Reconstructing November, a paper on my process for creating a performance version of Dennis Johnson’s six-hour, 1959 piano piece November – first delivered at the 2009 Minimalism Conference in Kansas City and subsequently published in American Music (and overlapping in content with several blog posts here);
The Longyear Lecture (already blogged here), my critique of Americanist musicology delivered at the University of Kentucky in 2008, and subsequently published in American Music;
How the 13th Harmonic Saved My Sorry Ass, a paper on my microtonal methods for the Beyond: Microtonality conference at the University of Pittsburgh in 2015;
A Talk on John Cage’s 4’33”, delivered at the New World Symphony’s John Cage Festival in Miami in 2013 – largely drawn from my book, but with a few added ideas that occurred to me afterward;
The Uneasy, Unarticulated State of American Music (somewhat expanded from the version blogged here), delivered at the 2013 ISCM conference in Vienna;
From Hits to Niches (already blogged), my keynote address for the Canadian New Music Network in 2007;
My keynote address for the Extensible Toy Piano Conference at Clark University in 2005; and earliest and possibly least,
The Percussion Music of John J. Becker, my first scholarly article (1984), published in Percussive Notes journal.
In addition, I’ve been moving some of my more substantive blog essays to my web site, since I have no control over what goes on at Arts Journal, and didn’t want them vulnerable to potential disappearance. In short, the amount of Gannian verbiage on my web site is now well more than twice what used to be there. The collected writings are catalogued here. I hope some of these extra tens of thousands of words, with many score examples and audio examples (eat your heart out, books), will be of some interest to students of the more radical side of American music.
I peer-reviewed all of these papers myself, and enthusiastically recommended that they be web-published as submitted. That sure as hell saved a lot of time.
Michael Robinson says
May 27, 2016 at 1:16 amWhat I like most about your writing is that regardless of whether or not I’m in agreement there are key issues of our time touched upon. For example, this from your Robert Ashley interview: “The only thing that’s interesting to me right now is that, up to me and a couple of other guys, music had always been about eventfulness: like, when things happened, and if they happened, whether they would be a surprise, or an enjoyment, or something like that… And I was never interested in eventfulness. I was only interested in sound. I mean, just literally, sound in the Morton Feldman sense…. There’s a quality in music that is outside of time, that is not related to time. And that has always fascinated me… A lot of people are back into eventfulness. But it’s very boring. Eventfulness is really boring.” This is certainly an unusual and unexpected concept. At first glance, I found it ridiculous, but then, actually thinking about Ashley’s thrust, I found a connection with my own music. That is, I use the timbres of acoustical instruments, or semblances of those timbres depending upon how close or far those tone colors are from the original source, but the paradox is that these sounds are not played by live musicians. Rather, they are performed by a combination of software and hardware I’ve named the Meruvina, which is really a souped-up player piano. Getting to the center of my epiphany, I recognize that the musical expression is non-eventful in a traditional sense because the gestures and emotional associations typically associated with my timbres have been removed, and the listener is left with somewhat disembodied voices detached from their customary musical realms. And this is where my musical journeys begin because the actual musical substance in terms of melodic, rhythmic, textural strata and yes, a new form of expression, asserts itself from virginal beginnings. So, Maestro, thanks again for the creative stimulation towards what I believe the great gurus of India have held as an ideal: Self-realization. (I’m still in Maui typing at an unfamiliar keyboard, but so what.)
Jim Dalton says
May 27, 2016 at 8:29 amExcellent! Nice to have these easily accessible. I’m looking forward to revisiting your Partch keynote among others.
I can relate to your thoughts on peer-review. I have a number of things I have been trying to wrestle into publication for years. Even when the peer-review process is over, there are still years of waiting for actual publication.
KG replies: The logic of peer-review, it seems to me, is based on old professors checking the work of young professors to make sure they haven’t fallen into the many kinds of mistakes we’re aware of. But we old professors all disagree with each other, and in practice it’s just a chance for your colleagues to take potshots at you anonymously. After a certain track record we should be allowed to opt out, which is why I’m through writing anything that needs to be peer-reviewed. Hope the school merger is going well – smoothly is probably too much to hope for.
Lyle Sanford says
May 28, 2016 at 8:52 amThanks so much for doing this. A few months back I read your American Music in the 20th Century and really enjoyed it. Dozens of times I would stop reading for a while after a paragraph, just to let it all sink in. Sometimes it was to fully take in something talked about in detail, and sometimes to get my head around the larger issues about music and music making you framed in ways I’d never thought of before. I especially appreciated not once encountering academic jargon in need of translation to regular language. You really do have a gift for writing about music for the non-specialist, which is probably not unrelated to the knee-jerk negative response you seem to engender in a lot of academical types.