This Saturday night, December 16, at 7:00 PM at Bard College’s Bard Hall, my son Bernard Gann will present a concert of his music. Much of it will be by his rock trio, Architeuthis. A piano piece will be played by, coincidentally, student Ming Gan. And a new work called Two Organs will be performed by myself and Joan Tower on electric keyboards. Joan and I have never performed together. It is highly unlikely that we will ever perform together again – I’m not much of a performer, except possibly of my own music, and Joan has retired from anything but conducting. I half think Bern wrote the piece to get us onstage together. So if it ever occured to you that it would be fun to see Kyle Gann and Joan Tower play a duet, this is, in all probability, your one shot. A cofounder of the Da Capo ensemble, Joan is, of course, an incredibly more experienced pianist than I am, and it’s fun playing with her – she’s so good at signaling her intentions, and completely easy to follow. The piece itself is kind of a moment-form postminimalist piece, Glass crossed with Stravinsky, and here and there a Terry Riley echo, enlivened by some totalist rhythmic complications (pictured) that have had me tearing my hair out. Later I’ll put up some Architeuthis music on my web site, because I’d be curious about your opinions.

Tonight, of course, my Open Instrumentation ensemble performs at Bard Hall from 7:30 to 10:30. The description here will refresh your memory.

The ever-vigilant Jon Szanto draws my attention to an admirably insightful summing-up of James Tenney’s output by Mark Swed, in the form of an LA Times review of the recent Tenney memorial concert. Wish I’d been there – it sounds splendid.

American expatriate composer Nancy van de Vate (or maybe we should call her “Austrian composer,” we can argue about that later) kindly informs me that pianist Iris Gerber, famous for her toy piano work, is giving a concert this Friday at 7 at the Alte Schmiede in Vienna, titled: “Down Town New York: Kyle Gann und Tom Johnson, die Komponisten-Kritiker der Zeitschrift Village Voice und ihr Schaffen.” I don’t know which of my Schaffen she’s playing, but I’ll list a program if I get it. She would have needed to include Carman Moore and Greg Sandow, though, to get all of the Voice‘s composer-critics.

YouTube offers an incredible Oscar Peterson performance. Make sure you go past 2:44, when he goes crazy. Peterson received an honorary doctorate at Northwestern the year I got my regular doctorate there (1983), so I was once on a stage with him. But not playing.

Compliments are something I’m inured to, and I’m well aware that everyone in every public field receives them for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. But I am particularly touched by Time Out‘s mention of my new book Music Downtown. In an article reviewing New York’s critics they don’t include me, of course, since I haven’t written in the city since last December. But they do include my book in a list of anthologies of criticism, with the very kind comment:

One of the cruelest cuts of the ongoing reorganization at the Voice is the loss of Kyle Gann, the paper’s unparalleled chronicler of contemporary music and the downtown scene in particular. Like [Virgil] Thomson, Gann is a composer; his best pieces are informed by a sense of being in the trenches that no bystander could hope to achieve. As a memento of New York music in the ’80s and ’90s, this anthology is indispensable.

What a gratifying notice.

I just now got out of a three-and-a-half-hour rehearsal for the concert I’m presenting next week, of my Open Instrumentation Ensemble at Bard. December 14 at 7:30 in Bard Hall, we’ll be presenting the following marathon program:

Philip Glass: Music in Fifths

Willy Berliner: Persistence of Vision*

Samuel Vriezen: The Weather Riots

Frederic Rzewski: Attica

Brian Baumbusch: Cyclical Counterpoint with Sangse*

Rzewski: Les Moutons de Panurge

Julius Eastman: Gay Guerrilla

Jonathan Nocera: Blues for Julius Eastman*

Rhys Chatham: Guitar Trio

Terry Riley: In C

The pieces with asterisks are by Bard students, written for the ensemble. The historical highlight is Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla, which is scored for multiples of any instrument; he always performed it with pianos, and we’re giving what is, as far as I know, the world premiere of an electric guitar version. The students love the piece (you’ll note one of them wrote a piece dedicated to Julius), and they did a dynamite job of playing it tonight. When they started echoing the hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” back and forth, which Julius subverted as a gay manifesto, it was a goosebump moment, and I suddenly felt his sardonic spirit fill the room. To be an audience of one at such a performance (since the other players had gone home) was a humbling privilege. I hadn’t directed an ensemble since 1976 – the year I gave the Dallas premieres of some pieces by Reich, Glass, and Riley at Carruth Auditorium at SMU – and I have little experience to remind me how fulfilling it is.

I’m also very proud that these students will graduate free from the academic fallacy that a score must be a complete and detailed reflection of a predetermined sonic image; that they’ll always know that compelling music can be made with repeat signs, gradual processes, and considerable performer latitude, and that it can be a real blast to try out the same music with a variety of different instrumentations, and with diverse dynamic shadings. The student pieces allow lots of performer decisions, and the composers have had fun experimenting with different rules and combinations in rehearsal – so utterly different from the classical experience in which they’re expected to notate every nuance for professional players who will execute their notation with computer-like precision. The students’ enthusiasm and dedication have astonished me, and made me proud that I have this important Downtown repertoire, and attitude, to pass on to them.

We’re having a pretty tedious reversion war over at Wikipedia vis-a-vis the Nancarrow article. I refer to Nancarrow as an American composer who moved to Mexico. I would be happy to call him an “American-born and -trained composer who took Mexican citizenship.” But a couple of guys, including Conlon’s late-life assistant Carlos Sandoval, insist that he must be referred to as a “Mexican composer.” I find this misleading, cognitively dissonant. Nancarrow did take Mexican citizenship in 1955, but he had few friends among Mexican composers, who were more oriented toward European than American music. I once asked him if his music had been in any way influenced by Mexican music or culture, and his characteristically laconic response was a flat “no.” Conlon spent his life working out ideas he had found in Cowell’s New Musical Resources, and he was championed and lionized by American composers (Carter, Cage, Garland, Amirkhanian, Reynolds, Mumma) long before the Europeans discovered him; his tiny influence on Mexican music has been mostly posthumous (one might cite the Microritmia duo).

This is a trivial fight, surely. But can you feel comfortable talking about “Alfred Hitchcock, American film director”? “Isang Yun, German composer”? “T.S. Eliot, British poet”? “Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, American composers”? Is an artist’s country of upbringing and training, the crucible in which his artistic vision was formed, to be so lightly cast aside because, for whatever political or personal reasons, he later in life had to live somewhere else?

I have noted here before that I am a fairly notorious introvert. There are periods, such as the present, in which very little in the outer world catches my attention. However, I am not, in person, much given to talking about myself unless asked, and I do, for the record, feel some pangs of conscience when my blog ends up being mostly about myself. So, sorry to be so self-obsessed lately, but I might as well alert you to the fact that Jean Churchill, professor of dance at Bard College, has choreographed two of my Disklavier pieces for faculty dancer Maria Simpson, who will perform to them this weekend, December 8, 9, and 10 at the Fisher Center. Also, December 12 at 6:30, I will give a reading from my book Music Downtown, at Bard Hall on campus.

And while I’m at it, I might as well divulge the rest of my future plans. I have received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to complete my book Music After Minimalism, an analytical/philosophical study of postminimalist music, which means that I will indeed be able to extend my sabbatical an extra semester and be blissfully absent from Bard for the entire year of 2007. I also have the following commissions to work on:

– a piano concerto for pianist Geoffrey Madge and the Orkest de Volharding in Amsterdam, to be premiered next October 31;

– a solo cello piece for Frances-Marie Uitti, for her two-bow technique;

– a quartet for the Seattle Chamber Players to be premiered in January, 2008;

– three more movements of The Planets for Philadelphia’s Relache ensemble, which they will record in summer of 2008;

– an electric guitar quartet for Tim Brady’s “Voyages” festival in Montreal, for a February 2008 premiere;

Рa conventional cello work for Andr̩ Emilianoff of the Da Capo ensemble.

In January I am recording a new disc for New Albion; February 19 to March 11 I am composer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts; March 10 the Dessoff Choir will premiere my new work My father moved through dooms of love at Merkin Hall; and May 15-20 five of my Disklavier works will be choregraphed by Mark Morris at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. This is, at long last, my year of uninterrupted composing and writing, and bloody sick and tired of hearing about it you’ll soon enough be. But with luck, once the semester’s over I’ll have some disposable attention to turn to the outer world, and will also find something more fascinating to blog about than myself.

A student complained that my microtonal music-theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull is currently (if temporarily) out of print, and that it’s not available on my MP3 web page either. It’s a reasonable complaint, so I’ve fixed that. The whole thing can now be heard here, where it will remain at least until Monroe Street brings the CD back out.

UPDATE: Well, heck, in response to a subsequent request, I can put the links right here, if you want:

Custer: “If I Were an Indian…” (8:42)

Sitting Bull: “Do You Know Who I Am?” (8:17)

Sun Dance / Battle of the Greasy-Grass River (7:59)

Custer’s Ghost to Sitting Bull (10:04)

Galen Brown makes an argument that the demise of Tower Records is no big deal. I almost believe him. Still, there’s one telling fact no one’s brought up. Last spring Tower finally opened a “Kyle Gann” bin. A few months later, the place “goes bankrupt.”

Coincidence? I think not.

I played my 20th-century music class several tracks from John Oswald’s (in)famous 1990 Plunderphonics CD, in which he took illegal samples from Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Dolly Parton, The Rite of Spring, and other sources, making inventive new works by mixing, subverting, looping, and speed-shifting them. (Even though he gave the discs away for free he was threatened with legal action, and had to destroy 300 of the 1000 copies. I was a recipient of one of the original 700, a rare disc indeed.) As we were listening, I realized, though, how familiar these techniques are to my students now, how many of them had performed similar tricks on their laptops.

Next day I played Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives video. When I first saw it in 1982, its nonlinear overlays and screens-within-screens seemed like a totally new artform, and no one knew what to make of it. Now I realized that my students were comparing it in their heads with 20 years of slickly-produced MTV.

I’m old enough that the stunning technological advances of my youth have lost all punch as such, and will never have the impact on my students they did on me. Those works will have to survive – as, indeed, they always did have to – on their intrinsic artistic merits, and they get no extra points today for having been first at what they did. One of my students generously said that the audio roughness of Oswald’s techniques made his music seem grittier and more authentic than similar attempts today. And I was wryly gratified by a general complaint that Ashley’s video contained too much information to take in at one sitting. I asked if anyone had ever tried to read Finnegans Wake.

Today in three hours I finally finished my setting of E.E. Cummings’ My father moved through dooms of love, in which James Bagwell will conduct the Dessoff Choir on March 10. I had quit working on the piece in July because I hit a snag. The setting of the following words just wasn’t right, and so the accompaniment (for piano and violin) wouldn’t write itself, and I knew it was because I didn’t really understand them:

then let men kill which cannot share,

let blood and flesh be mud and mire,

scheming imagine, passion willed,

freedom a drug that’s bought and sold

giving to steal and cruel kind,

a heart to fear, to doubt a mind,

to differ a disease of same,

conform the pinnacle of am

(You may think me foolish for finding this difficult, but outside my field I’m not very bright about a lot of things.) Looking at it fresh after four months’ hiatus, I suddenly realized that in “to differ a disease of same” the “same” refers to “mind” in the previous line, and that I needed to separate out the phrase “to differ” as the subject of the rest of the line. Cummings is describing how adept his late father was at negotiating a world in which men kill out of selfishness, in which imagination is turned to the service of schemes, in which to differ is considered a disease of the mind, and to conform is considered the pinnacle of being: a world not unlike the one I live in. “If every friend became his foe,” he says of his father, “he’d laugh and build a world with snow.”

Not having understood this clearly, I had set the words too quickly, relying on only their rhythm. The passage was merely transitional. A “merely transitional” passage is a flaw: every moment of a work has to show the same intensity of care and focus, has to bring its own delight to the listener. So now I set off the words “to differ,” and when I got to the word “conform,” I counterintuitively brought the music to a halt, repeating it over and over, adding five new measures in the process. “Conform” is what I consider the ugliest word in the English language, the most evil, most heinous word ever devised. It flashes at us from every billboard, is the surreptitious motto of every institute of higher learning, is the directive underlying every newspaper review, the unspoken impetus behind every rejection, the veiled urging behind every advertisement. Hardly can one turn anywhere without hearing the world shout “conform!” If you will behave and be one of the good Stepford composers, your orchestra pieces will be celebrated by the bigshots. If you will join the Stepford professors, the administration will shower favors on you. If you will only conform, the powers that be will welcome you into their lower ranks – pending continued good behavior, of course. “The virtue in most request,” wrote Emerson, “is conformity.”

And so what I had missed was that Cummings was offering me an opportunity for supreme irony. Over soothing, undulating chords I reiterated “conform, conform, conform” in dulcet and seductive tones, just like the world does. Suddenly, instead of an undistinctive transitional passage, this became (as I had inchoately sensed it would) the emotional center of the piece, a serenely damning indictment of the world that one nearly has to have a nonconformist streak to appreciate:

You’ll note that “the pinnacle of am” only rises to a medium-range B – not a very high pinnacle.

Cummings wrote the poem in 1926, after his father was killed by having his car hit by a train. My father died last April – I had begun writing the piece in anticipation – and Maestro James Bagwell had lost his father the year before. The piece is dedicated to James, in the solidarity of grief.

I paid to read my one-paragraph review online in the Times Literary Supplement, but you shouldn’t have to. Here it is, and much thanks to Wiley Hitchcock, my mentor and guiding angel, for alerting me:

“At sixteen,” writes Kyle Gann in his book Music Downtown, “I was so enwrapped in John Cage’s ideas that I began to feel guilty listening to records when I could be outside listening to traffic”. As “new music” columnist for the Village Voice from 1986 to 1998, Gann chronicled the waves of avant-garde musicians filling the lofts of lower Manhattan, a tradition inaugurated in the early 1960s with concerts by conceptual artists like Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, in which musicians were instructed to bang their heads against the wall, set fire to the sheet music, or “creep into the vagina of a living whale”. His assembled writings champion that spirit of playful iconoclasm, ranging from established composers such as Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson to neglected pathbreakers like Harry Partch, a Depression-era hobo who devised a forty-three-note scale and a set of Dr Seuss-style instruments (the Quadrangularis Reversum and the Diamond Marimba, each with its own form of notation). While some of the topics verge on the abstruse, all are rendered fresh and compelling by Gann’s passionate commitment to the experimental vision: “no rules, no formulas, no prohibitions, no justifying precedents”.