PostClassic

Ives, Caught Between Two Caricatures

Kyle Gann — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:27:49 +0000

Conductor Leonard Slatkin is conducting all four of Charles Ives’s numbered symphonies in New York tonight. Good for him. Wish I could be there. It’s kind of too bad, then, that he marred the occasion by writing a rather condescending article about the works for New Music Box, with undue but apparently characteristic emphasis on [...]

You Weren’t Doing Anything This Evening Anyway

Kyle Gann — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:44:27 +0000

Sorabji enthusiast David Carter has given me a link to Jonathan Powell’s world premiere performance of Sorabji’s Sequentia Cyclica Super Dies Irae Ex Missa Pro Defunctis (1948-9) – at seven hours, apparently Sorabji’s longest, and some say greatest, work. [UPDATE: Oops - Sorabji's Symphonic Variations for piano (1935-7) is nine hours long, so not true.] (After [...]

Dull Life, Interesting Omission

Kyle Gann — Sun, 05 May 2013 13:49:22 +0000

This time of year I am always preoccupied with getting the students whose senior projects I supervise graduated, and though I am teaching less, I have more seniors (six) than usual (one to three is what most Bard faculty have). In addition to that, this year for the first time, as chair of the arts [...]

Minimalism Invented in England, It Turns Out

Kyle Gann — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:16:43 +0000

With all of the classical prototypes for musical minimalism that are so perennially trotted out – Perotin, the first six minutes of Das Rheingold, Bolero, Vexations and other Satie works – I’m surprised no one ever mentions the duet between Point and Elsie, “I have a song to sing-O,” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen [...]

The Negative Profession

Kyle Gann — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:43 +0000

We don’t often bring guest composers to speak at Bard, and sometimes we feel guilty about that, and make an effort. So a few weeks ago we brought in a fairly well-known composer of my own generation, who told the students that “the problem with minimalism is that it’s self-indulgent to make attractive music just [...]

Name That Tune

Kyle Gann — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:37:55 +0000

I’m a big fan of the comic strip xkcd. I wish today’s strip had been around to include in my 4’33″ book:

Through the Eyes of the Unencumbered

Kyle Gann — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 18:57:42 +0000

If there’s anything I remember about being a grad student, it’s what a ruthless and unobstructed view one has of the world. You are not yet complicit in its ubiquitous ills, you are not yet bought off by its bribes, you have made no moral compromises, and your judgments are made with a relentlessly clear [...]

Tell Me the Meaning of Minimalist?

Kyle Gann — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:28:16 +0000

Andy Lee links me to a lively interview with the resurrected Dennis Johnson. (Wow, I’m blogging this from an Amtrak train to Buffalo, where I’m lecturing on the Concord Sonata for the musicology grad stoonts this afternoon.)

Not Content with Mere Concept

Kyle Gann — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:00:13 +0000

My analysis of Phil Glass’s Einstein on the Beach is now up at New Music Box, thanks to Frank Oteri.

November Is Bustin’ Out All Over

Kyle Gann — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:57:14 +0000

Via pianist Andy Lee and David McIntire’s Irritable Hedgehog record label, Dennis Johnson’s November is taking its place in the repertoire. Andy is giving the five-hour, 1959 piano work its European premiere at Cafe Oto in London on March 9 (and I’m thrilled to see that he’s playing music by the greatly underrated Paul Epstein [...]