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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

On Bristow’s Arcadian Symphony and Being Snubbed by Bridge Records

Bridge Records has just released a recording – the first full recording – of the Fourth Symphony, “Arcadian,” by 19th-century American composer George Bristow. This recording would never have happened without me, but you’d never know that from the CD itself.

In college I studied with Delmer Rogers, who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on Bristow (1825-1898). He introduced me to the “Arcadian,” and I kept the piece in the back of my mind for decades. In 2020, in preparation for teaching a course on American symphonies, I photographed Bristow’s messy manuscript of the Arcadian at the NYPL, and began preparing a publishable edition. I mentioned it to Leon Botstein, my boss and a conductor, who took an interest in performing the piece, and subsequently recording it. I spent five or six months inputting the symphony into notation software from Bristow’s sometimes difficult-to-read manuscript, extracting the orchestra parts, double- and triple-checking everything against the original score, and then sat in on rehearsals to listen for mistakes. (Of course, I received not a cent for any of this, so Bridge is making money off my unrecompensed, now uncredited work.) Consequently, Maestro Botstein and The Orchestra Now were able to present the first performance of the piece in decades, at Bard College and at Carnegie Hall, and then record the piece for Bridge Records.

Naturally, I was asked to write the liner notes. Along with them, as usual, I submitted a brief bio, including the fact that I had prepared the edition of the symphony that made this recording possible. The Orchestra Now, in their submissions, also included a statement that this performance was based on a new performance edition by professor Kyle Gann. But for some reason the Bridge Records people didn’t want to give me credit. They nixed the paragraph from the orchestra, and, even more inexplicably, rejected the bio I had sent them and substituted another one from my web site. And so on the published compact disc I am credited only as the author of the liner notes – on a CD that wouldn’t have existed had I not devoted half a year to the mammoth job of making it possible.

Why did the people at Bridge not want me to receive credit? Old grudge? Disliked me as a critic? (In twenty-five years as a critic you make more enemies than you’re aware of.) Ungenerous and unprofessional, to say the least. The score to the Arcadian Symphony will be published soon by AR Editions, on which publication I will be listed as co-editor (with Bristow scholar Katherine Preston). So I can document that I did the work to bring this fine symphony back from the grave and into the repertoire, despite the people at Bridge not wanting you to know I did it.

Richard Fleming on Homer, Joyce, and Cage

My good friend the philosopher Richard Fleming has written a wonderful, long essay called “Want of Sense” – or, alternatively, “homerjoycecage” – and I return to the blog after a long absence to draw some attention to it. In it, he draws an epic historical thread from the Iliad and the Odyssey to Joyce’s complex use of them in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and further to John Cage’s use of Joyce in Muoyce and Roaratorio. It’s a wonderful celebration of how language can accrue layers and layers of meaning as words are fused together to allow a multiplicity of references. As always, Richard makes me hear Cage differently, and makes him seem like a glorious next step in a centuries-long process. You can read it here.

Another Do-It-Yourselfer

Thanks to an unencumbered and rather inspired summer, I am more than halfway through an evening-length collection of pieces for three microtonally retuned Disklaviers. I’m calling it Hyperchromatica, because a melodic reliance on intervals smaller than a quarter-tone is about the only stylistic constant. 33 pitches to the octave. Most of the pieces have polytempo structures, several are polytonal as well, which I had always wanted to try doing in just intonation. I’m unveiling the nine movements I’ve finished, which total 83 minutes. Scores, tuning, and program notes are here. Three of the pieces I had put up last year, and I finished six more recently.

– Orbital Resonance, 11:31; a meditation on planetary motions, beginning on the 65th and 66th harmonics of E-flat, and ending with the 54th, 55th, and 56th.
– Futility Row, 8:53; my sly Western noir movement, but with more subtlety of large-scale harmonic structure than I’ve yet achieved elsewhere.
– Pavane for a Dead Planet, 9:04; a thoroughly Romantic take on a Baroque form, but with some interesting intervals and rhythms.
– Star Dance, 6:40; a self-indulgent immersion in melodies of the smallest feasible steps.
– Dark Forces Signify, 8:17; this is my tribute to Black Lives Matter (matter being a difficult verb to synonymize). The bass motive is from Julius Eastman, and the simplicity sets off the hyperchromatic voice-leading well.
– The Lessing Is Miracle, 9:36; the title is an enigma found in all capitals in one of Julius’s scores, and the texture was initially inspired by one of his pieces. This one makes my wife nervous. It is odd.
– Romance Postmoderne, 8:36; a nostalgic ballad, and the first piece I wrote in this tuning.
– Liquid Mechanisms, 13:19; a big Jackson Pollock mural of various panels, the complexity of each clarified, hopefully, by internal (and nonsynchronized) repetition. Nested tuplets are a recurring motif.
– Galactic Jamboree, 7:15; the gonzo finale to the whole set.

I’m planning another five or six movements, but who knows if I’ll stop then? The size of the project serves two purposes: one to put out a two-CD set for my own vanity, the other so that, in the unlikely case anyone is ever foolhardy enough to want to stage the entire series with actual Disklaviers, it will at least be a large enough event to justify the expense and trouble. But for now I can do it all on my computer. As Lou Harrison said to John Luther Adams, “We’re the do-it-yourself composers.” I should also report, though, that living so long inside this elegant tuning keeps revealing more and more of its facets and capabilities.

An Analytical Cornucopia, Wanted or Not

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.

Me and My World

Bari – Pianist Emanuele Arciuli, director of the “Embracing the Universe” festival that ended yesterday, likes to casually mention that America is currently producing the best music in the world – and he doesn’t mean pop or jazz. He means postclassical. I didn’t know the whole program when I first wrote about it last week, but here’s a list of all the pieces performed on two concerts and during the conference:

Bernadette Speach: Embrace the Universe and Viola

Michael Gordon: Romeo

Mary Jane Leach: Prospero’s Sigh and Bach’s Set

Eve Beglarian: Fireside and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Philip Glass: Etude No. 13

John Adams: American Beserk

Andrew Thomas: So Far Beyond the Faint Edge of the World

David Lang: Before Gravity, After Gravity

Julia Wolfe: Believing

Larry Polansky: Ensembles of Note

me: Serenity Meditation; “Faith” from Transcendental Sonnets; Earth-Preserving Chant; and Sang Plato’s Ghost

With one exception, they’re all friends of mine, all people I’ve written a lot about, and all postminimalists or totalists. (The exception, Andrew Thomas, was chosen by the performers, and his thoughtfully virtuosic percussion showpiece fit in well.) The concerts, well attended and well-received, consisted of the kind of repertoire that would be ubiquitous today had my plans for world domination worked out successfully. The conductors, Giovanni Pelliccia for the orchestra and Filippo Lattanzi for the chamber concert, are both dynamic visionaries. It is so common in the US for me to show up and find the performers not really understanding the piece, that I sometimes fear I don’t capture the idea in the notation well enough; but here, each conductor had a compelling vision for the piece that was obvious from the first notes, and I needed add only the tiniest cosmetic touches and check the occasional questionable note. It was the most thrilling week in my life as a composer.

One of the papers was on the important Italian jazz figure Giorgio Gaslini (1929-2014), who promoted a concept called “Musica Totale,” which involved a blending of classical and vernacular styles. I told Emanuele that if I could prove that totalism originated in Europe, America would start to take it seriously.

Below: the ancient city of Matera, kind of an urban Grand Canyon, and where we ate there:

Matera1

Nancy at Matera

And the Bari Conservatory Orchestra rehearsing my Transcendental Sonnets:

BariOrchestraTS

Dream Gig for Totalists

Bari-shoreNext week, May 9-12, Bari Conservatory in southern Italy, on the Adriatic, is hosting a totalism festival, titled “Embracing the Universe.” It was organized and is directed by pianist Emanuele Arciuli, who is perhaps Italy’s greatest advocate for recent American music of a more populist bent. (I had announced the festival for last September, but it was postponed.) You may remember totalism. Emanuele and the Conservatory Orchestra will play four of my works – Serenity Meditation, Sang Plato’s Ghost, Earth-Preserving Chant, and excerpts of Transcendental Sonnets, along with music by friends of mine: Bernadette Speach, Mary Jane Leach, and Michael Gordon (see poster below). Bernadette, whose ancestors are from that part of Italy, is finally getting a premiere of her 2001 chorus and orchestra piece Embrace the Universe , and, since it ties in with the idea of totalism, thus the festival’s title. I’m giving a lecture on totalism on the 11th, and since I have to miss a week of teaching anyway, my wife and I are spending the weekends as well. I may eat a lot.

unnamed

The Rampant Generation of Audio Files Continues

It’s remotely conceivable that you’re sitting around with nothing to do, and in case you’re in that enviable position, I have two hours’ worth of new recordings of my music up to entertain you. Most consequentially, my Ezra Pound song cycle Proença (2015) received its official premiere Saturday night in Kansas City; Michelle Allen McIntire and her Proença Band will recap the piece at Bard College next Wednesday, March 2, at 8 in Bito Conservatory Building.

Of six songs in the cycle, “Na Audiart” and “Near Perigord” are settings of Pound poems about Bertan de Born, the 12th-century warrior/poet; “L’aura amara” and the Alba are settings of Pound’s translations of troubadour poetry; and the other two are settings in Provençal of original troubadour poems. You can read the lengthy program notes if you want texts and background, and here are the recordings from the premiere:

1. Bem.pac d’ivern
2. Na Audiart
3. Alba (En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi)
4. Estat ai en greu cossirier
5. L’aura amara
6. Near Perigord

[UPDATE: I have just (March 3) replaced the Kansas City recording of Near Perigord with a much tighter March 2 performance from Bard College.]

Michelle Allen McIntire did a beautiful job singing them, and she was backed by Virginia Backman on flute, Jennifer Lacy on electric piano, Jennifer Wagner on vibes, and Brian Padavic, bass. As you can tell, they did a ton of rehearsal.

The previous weekend two of my works were premiered at Illinois Wesleyan University. Nancy Pounds and William West finally played my Implausible Sketches for piano duo, four of whose movements were written in 2006, and the second one in 2011:

1. The Desert’s Too-Zen Song
2. Mediating Daydream
3. The Goodbye Fugue
4. Frigid Azure
5. Don’t Touch My Pint

The remaining project is almost more historical and literary than compositional: my settings of poems by the American Transcendentalists, Transcendentalist Songs (2014). Of these, Ingrid Kammin sang “Enosis,” “To the Face Seen in the Moon,” and “I Slept and Dreamed,” accompanied by Larisa Chasunov; Robert Mangialardi sang “The Rhodora,” “The Columbine,” and “Questionings,” with composer David Vayo on piano, also the symposium director who had invited me; while tenor William Hudson, with pianist Kent Cook, performed “In the Busy Streets,” “Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell,” and “The Garden.” “In the Busy Streets” and “I Slept and Dreamed” were written in the 20th century, and I include them as a kind of appendix. “Enosis” and “Questionings” are rather the grand philosophical statements, while “The Garden” is perhaps the most conventional thing I’ve ever written, and everyone seems to love it. “To the Face Seen in the Moon” is the torch song I thought history has owed poor Margaret Fuller. The piece can be seen as an expression of regret that there was no American composer in the 1840s as musically adventurous as the Transcendentalists were spiritually adventurous.

Enosis (Christopher Pearse Cranch)
To the Face Seen in the Moon (Margaret Fuller)
The Rhodora (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
In the Busy Streets (Henry David Thoreau)
The Columbine (Jones Very)
Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell (Henry David Thoreau)
I Slept and Dreamed that Life Was Beauty (Ellen Sturgis Hooper)
The Garden (Christopher Pearse Cranch)
Questionings (The Idealist) (Frederic Henry Hedge)

I am deeply gratified by all the time and attention. There’s nothing so inspiring to new composition as having some of one’s unplayed works go public at last.

Three New Works

Proenca-crowd

Proença Band: Jennifer Lacy, Michelle Allen McIntire, Jennifer Wagner, Brian Padavic, Virginia Backman; photo: Manon Halliburton

I am excited that I’m going to have three world premieres within eight days this month, amounting to some two hours of music. On February 12 and 13 I am the featured composer at the Symposium of Contemporary Music at Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington, Illinois. On Friday, February 12, I give a lecture at 7:30 on the Concord Sonata at the School of Music. The following evening, also at 7:30, my two-piano piece Implausible Sketches (2006/11) and my song cycle Transcendentalist Songs (2014) will be performed at Westbrook Auditorium. I’ve been waiting years for the premiere of the two-piano piece, which I consider one of my best works. The symposium dates back to 1952, and previous honorees include Roy Harris, Shulamit Ran, Stephen Paulus, Arvo Pärt, John Corigliano, David Diamond, Karel Husa, my Oberlin teacher Edward Miller, George Crumb, Wallingford Riegger, and quite a wild variety of composers with whom I do and don’t identify. Crazy.

The following Saturday, February 20, will see the official premiere of my new song cycle Proença, based on Ezra Pound and a few troubadours, written for and sung by Michelle Allen McIntire. She’s put together the Proença Band, with Virginia Bachman on flute, Jennifer Lacy on electric piano, Jennifer Wagner on vibes, and Brian Padavic on bass (above). They’re actually giving a pre-premiere performance this Saturday, February 6, at Vinyl Renaissance in Overland Park, Kansas City, at 2pm, on a bill with the Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes. The official world premiere, which I will attend, is at the Bragg Auditorium in the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City on February 20 at 7:30. This is the same beautiful space in which Sarah Cahill and I gave the re-premiere of Dennis Johnson’s November in 2009. They’ve put a ton of rehearsal into the piece, and I can’t wait to hear it. Next, they’ll be playing it at Bard College on March 2, in Bito Auditorium.

A Gangster for Capitalism

Just became aware that Sarah Cahill’s recording of my piece War Is Just a Racket is up at YouTube with John Sanborn’s video for it, which I hadn’t seen since the premiere in 2009.

Needle Found in Haystack

A correspondent named Tim Scott has found a typo in the Tableau Comparatif des Intervalles Musicaux, Alain Danielou’s encyclopedic 1958 catalogue of all even marginally significant intervals within an octave. On the right-hand bottom corner of page 48, the interval listed as 569/512 should actually be 567/512, as 3 to the 4th power times 7 is, of course, 567:

DanielouTypo

And as Tim points out, this is one of the intervals used in The Well-Tuned Piano. All fanatical microtonalists please mark your copies accordingly. That is all.

UPDATE: The day that Amazon extended its reach into the nation’s used-bookstores was one of the greatest days of my life, and has compensated for many of the indignities of living in the 21st century. I first saw Danielou’s Tableau Comparatif des Intervalles Musicaux in La Monte Young’s apartment, and lusted after it mightily. More than a decade later, once the used-bookstores went online, I found it over the web in a little store in Oregon. The nice lady who sent it to me had no earthly idea what it was, but said, “I knew someone was eventually going to know what that was and want it.”

FURTHER UPDATE 2.5.16: In response to this post, over at Disquiet, the ambient/electronica site,
Marc Weidenbaum has posted a series of pieces exploiting the difference between the 567th and 569th harmonics
. It seems his internet group, The Disquiet Junto, posts a compositional challenge each week, and everyone has four days to come up with a short piece in response. This is really cool!

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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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