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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

New Dutch Developments

Vriezen.jpgDutch composer Samuel Vriezen was just here at Bard, supervising a rehearsal of his piece The Weather Riots, which my Open Instrumentation Ensemble is playing soon, and giving a wonderfully lively lecture about his compositional process. (He’s in New York for the riotous-looking Sequenza 21 concert happening this Monday at CUNY Graduate Center, where Weather Riots will also be performed, and which you can find out more about here.) Samuel usually writes pieces in which all the performers are playing similar material at the same time, unsynchronized. As we learned in rehearsal, it takes more virtuosity than you’d think from looking at the scores. His music has an interesting relationship to serialism (in the types of angular gestures he uses), to minimalism (since those gestures, all in 8th-notes, tend to get repeated and echo from instrument to instrument), and to the kind of experimental performance tradition of Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff.

In the ’70s versions of such music, no one was much interested in controlling the results, and the pieces tended not to have a recognizable identity. Samuel, however, with his incisive mathematical mind, has figured out ways to base all his gestures on a finite number of formulas (a postminimal practice) in such a way that certain echoings among players are pretty much guaranteed to happen. That’s what’s so fun about rehearsing Weather Riots – you’re playing without regard to the rest of the ensemble, you’re even choosing your own route through the material, yet you invariably hear echoes of your own notes popping around elsewhere. He can even write multi-movement works like Panoramic Variations (scroll down) in which the movements, though based on identical techniques, are quite distinct from each other. My favorite piece of his so far is an epic two-piano work called 20 Worlds – a “world,’ in his terminology, being defined by a particular combination of gesture types. I gave up this kind of incompletely notated performance practice twenty years ago because the results seemed so hit-or-miss. He’s completely solved the problem: pieces whose details are different in every performance, but whose overall aura is remarkably consistent, recognizable, and quite lovely and lively. Brace yourself for a Vriezen onslaught on Postclassic Radio soon.

Samuel and I had a lot of great discussions too, and I learned some things. He says that, just as Schoenberg became an overwhelming influence in American musical academia in the ’60s and ’70s, the influence that flooded Dutch practice, and thus the composer whose exalted status young Dutch composers have most learned to resent, was Stravinsky. He also told a story about Cage I hadn’t heard. Cage’s 74, one of his late “number” pieces, is a ten-minute piece for 74-piece orchestra in which the bass instruments all read from one part, and the treble instruments from another. It seems that Cage received a fax one morning commissioning the work, wrote it in two hours, and faxed it back that afternoon. That’s the kind of compositional technique I’m looking for.

Quip of the Day

Our pianist had the day’s best line. Showing up late for a meeting, he said, “Sorry, I was out late last night celebrating the fact that the terrorists won. I burned an American flag.”

Music for a New World

Young (relative to me) composer Galen Brown has a musically and visually attractive music video up on YouTube, sort of a neo-geo Koyaanisqatsi for the new generation. Bright, passionate music for a brighter, more passionate new day.

Whether We’re a We

Gary Kamiya at Salon:

So for a lot of us, there’s more at stake in Tuesday’s elections than simply whether the Democrats will take control of the House or the Senate. It’s a question of national identity, of finding out who we are — and if we’re a “we” at all. For six years, we’ve been waiting for the America we thought we knew to come back. And now, as we wait for the spinning windows in the great democratic slot machine to stop, we’re torn between hope that it’ll display the country we thought we knew, and fear that it’ll show something else.

We thought America was conservative enough not to trash its most cherished traditions just because of one terrorist attack. We thought America was liberal enough to try to understand why others might hate us, not just to lash out self-righteously. We thought America was wise enough not to start an unprovoked, immoral and highly risky war. We thought America had enough self-respect not to let itself be ordered around by a shameless, lying bully.

We were proved wrong. But we haven’t given up. Now our hopes are more modest. Now we’re simply hoping that those of our fellow citizens who let us down so badly two years ago throw the bums out. That good old American common sense will prevail. In short, that we haven’t completely lost it.

To Secure Something Can Mean to Fasten It Down

Brian McLaren alerted me to a report by an organization called the Identity Project (at the ominous URL www.PapersPlease.org) that the Department of Homeland Security has proposed that, effective January, no U.S. Citizen be allowed to leave the country unless his or her name appears on a clearance list. As another organization called Friends of Liberty amplifies:

Think this can’t happen? Think again. It’s ALREADY happening. Earlier this year, [Homeland Security] forbade airlines from transporting an 18-year-old a native-born U.S. citizen, back to the United States. The prohibition lasted nearly six months until it was finally lifted a few weeks ago. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are two countries in recent history that didn’t allow their citizens to travel abroad without permission. If these regulations go into effect, you can add the United States to this list.

Yesterday, I tried to ignore this and write it off as paranoia. Today, there are banner headlines over the Times’ web pages from the State Department warning that starting January 7, U.S. Citizens will need passports to visit Canada and Mexico, and directing us to the State Department for more information.

Meanwhile, speed traps in the Hudson Valley are suddenly more numerous lately, spreading like Kudzu even on the remotest rural roads. A friend and I, in separate incidents, were each pulled over and given breathalyzer tests, which we passed, not based on any evidence of drunkenness. At every gas station I see big signs detailing newly increased ID levels for the purchase of alcohol and cigarettes. There’s a creepy sense of a heightened police presence in my life.

When does it stop being paranoia?

Composers Think Differently

Composers Joan Tower and George Tsontakis were in my office today, discussing composition with a student. George, the student’s teacher, said, “We’ve been talking about the problem of how fast you can add contrasting new ideas to a piece without losing the listener and making the piece disunified.” Joan replied, “Oh, that’s a problem everyone faces.” I said, “Adding new ideas? That had never occurred to me.”

On Reading Emerson Tonight

Once again, pianist extraordinaire Sarah Cahill will perform my new work On Reading Emerson tonight at 8 at the Berkeley Arts Festival at the Jazzschool, 2087 Addison St., Berkeley – along with works by Rzewski, Polansky, Andrea Morricone, Elizabeth Lauer, and Phil Collins, every one of them written in the last ten months.

Honoring Tenney

Composer Mark So is helping to organize a publication about James Tenney to accompany an upcoming festival of the great man’s music at CalArts. He’d like to include the little tribute I wrote to Tenney here, along with all of the wonderful comments that were left in respose. Does anyone who left a comment object? Please either drop a note to Mark at mark_so@hotmail.com, or else leave a comment below granting permission. And thanks.

Florida, Dresden PSAs

I’m composer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in February and March. I had announced here that the deadline for applying to join me there was October 20, but somehow it got extended until October 27, which is tomorrow. If you’re still interested but hadn’t made up your mind, or were afraid all those terrible things Ann Coulter is saying about me might be true (they’re all false except the online casino addiction), you can still sign up through tomorrow here. I’d love to see you, it’s been too long.

Tonight’s concert of Disklavier music in the Leonhardi Museum at the Carl Maria von Weber Hochschule in Dresden boasts the following program:

György Ligeti: Etude 3, Touches bloquées

Conlon Nancarrow: Study No. 24

Ligeti: Etude 8, Fém

Nancarrow: Study No. 4

Michael Jordan: RANKEN (UA)

Nancarrow: Study No. 31

Kyle Gann: Petty Larceny

Gann: Texarkana

Nancarrow: Study No. 18

Ligeti: Etude 13, L’escalier du diable

Nancarrow: Study No. 26

Ligeti: Etude 9, Vertige

Nancarrow: Study No. 11

Wolfgang Heisig: Ringparabel

Heisig: Opus 70

Nancarrow: Toccata for violin and piano

Luc Houtkamp: Duo for Man Alone

Nancarrow: Study No.33

Ligeti: Etude 11, En suspens

Nancarrow: Study No. 20

Ligeti: Etude 14A, Coloana fara sfarsit

Wish I could be there, hangin’ out with György, Conlon, Wolfgang, and Alexander Plötz, who organized it.

Creeping Slowly to the Rescue

Does anyone still listen to Postclassic Radio? I wouldn’t blame you if you’d quit, having heard everything on the long-stagnant current playlist over and over, but actually, according to my stats, listeners logged in 567 hours in September, at an average of 37 minutes per listening session, and the rate seems to be continuing for October. I’m teaching a five-course load this semester instead of my usual three, preparing for sabbatical, and in over my head, but I have lately been finding time to add some new tracks. If you’re the guy who’s listening, you’ll notice some new pieces by the Southern-born Boston microtonalist Ezra Sims (including his lovely Sextet of 1981), and piano music by the cogent and brilliant Hartford postminimalist James Sellars. Other additions will be made very soon, I promise.

UPDATE: Promise kept. Home sick with a cold today, I uploaded more than 20 percent new material. The official composers of the month – at my current rate, they’ll be around until March – are Linda Catlin Smith and Raphael Mostel, with several works each. Plus, new recordings of music by James Tenney and Jo Kondo, a rare vinyl disc of Zygmunt Krauze (Fete galante et pastorale), and Annea Lockwood’s Thousand Year Dreaming. I’ll try to keep it up, so that if you’ve been tired of Postclassic Radio, there’ll be reason to come back. Don’t make me start a pledge drive!

UPDATE AGAIN: With new pieces by Chiel Meijering, Chris Brown, Beata Moon, Reinhold Westerheide, Arvo Pärt, a couple more by Ezra Sims, and several installments of Alvin Curran’s intermittently astonishing piano cycle Inner Cities, the playlist has been a good 40 percent updated, and the complete listing on my web site is momentarily up-to-date, too. After the hundreds of hours’ worth of music I’ve programmed with virtually no repetitions, I still feel like I’m pulling things out of the top drawer.

UPDATE AGAIN AGAIN: And perhaps best of all, a deliciously strange and thrilling new work for three microtonal vibraphones, Orenda, by Kraig Grady.

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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]

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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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