kyle gann
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Artist bio
"I'm a composer (since I was 13), a music critic (since I was 27), a musicologist (since I was 32), and a music professor (since I was 39). I was new-music critic for the Village Voice (Greg Sandow's successor) from 1986 to 2005, and I teach music theory, history, and composition at the music department at Bard College. I've published three books: The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press, 1995), American Music in the Twentieth Century (Schirmer Books, 1997), and Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (U. Read more
of CA Press, 2006). About half of my music is microtonal - I feel bilingual in that respect - and lately I've been composing operas. I've performed my one-man opera Custer and Sitting Bull in Australia, Russia, and all over America; Cinderella's Bad Magic, my opera with librettist Jeff Sichel, premiered in Moscow; and I've just finished another part of the trilogy with Sichel, The Watermelon Cargo. I've lived my entire life immersed in and involved with classical music, and started making the transition to postclassical many years ago."
from Gann's influential "Postclassical" blog at
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2003/10/kyle_gann.html#more
Gann doesn't mention that he also writes a blog about serious contemporary music which now qualifies as one of the top contemporary classical music blogs. He also works extensively with MIDI and electronic systems for making music, including his Mac OS X laptop with the Kontakt 2 sampling softsynth microtuned via the Li'l Miss Scale Oven program for the Mac (which is written by X. J. Scott).
So in addition to the traditional-sounding musical activities he mentions above, Gann has also actively pushed the edge of the musical envelope in moving outside traditional tunings (his music just just intonation with between 17 and 30 pitches per octave, typically) and computer-based or computer-assisted systems such as the Yamaha Disklavier and his laptop with various softsynths and the Logic Audio program.
He has also proven notable as a gadfly and persistent critic of some of the least attractive fads of serious contemporary music, including high modernism, serial atonality, the cult of personality centered around the pulitzer prize winners, and the fanatical monomania exhibited by music critics who persist in a rabid swarming idolatory of certain undeserving composers who get canonized as "great names" when young, to the general detriment of more talanted and older composers who fail to cut their musical style to fit the prevailing fashion. Examples include essays such as:
http://www.kylegann.com/postminimalism.html
His home page is:
http://www.kylegann.com/
His comprehensive "Musico-Autobiographical Essay" can be found here:
http://www.kalvos.org/gannkyl.html
Some composers exhibit a single characteristic musical style which develops through their careers (Beethoven, Bach, Purcell, Conlon Nancarrow, Mikel Rouse), while others change their personal style radically and head in a new direction (Iannis Xenakis, Kryzstof Pendercki, Elliott Carter). However, yet other composers refuse to confine themselves to the artificial prison of a single personal style and instead feel free to explore a wealth of different (albeit individually coherent) musical styles -- to this group belong such composers as Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, James Tenney, and Kyle Gann.
Gann's music cane be roughly categorized into 7 different styles.
[1] Electronic instruments (and sometimes acoustic instruments) tuned to microtonal just intonation. (Examples include Superparticular Woman (1992), Fractured Paradise (1995), How Miraculous Things Happen (1997). (These can all be found on the CD Custer's Ghost available from www.monroestreet.com)
[2] Classical minimalism with some updated touchesm, focussing primarily on the rhythmic clashes in some of the pioneer minimalist composers, particularly Philip Glass. I was more fascinated by the rhythmic implications of Glass's Music in Fifths and the voice-leading in the "Bed" scene from Einstein on the Beach. ...These early Glassian phenomena became the groundwork for my rhythmic and contrapuntal conceptions of music. (From "A Musico-Autobiographical Essay" (1997)) Examples include Long Night (1980-81) (Aavailable from www.frogpeak.com) and Snake Dance No. 2 for percussion with optional sampling keyboard (1995).
[3] Different simultaneous tempi, often used in overlapping loops. Gann has described aspects of this musical style as "totalist" (a term coined by Mikel Rouse, who along with Michael Gordon exemplified this musical style). Examples include Nude Rolling Down A Staircase, his set of studies for the Yamaha Disklavier electromechanical computer-interfaced player piano (CD available from www.amazon.com) and Hesapa ki Lakhota ki Thawapi (1984).
[4] Electroacoustic or computer-music compositions, often involving narrated text. Examples include So Many Little Dyings (1994) and Canso (1981).
[5] A style Gann has described as "Naive Pictorialism" (an epithet issued by a derisive music critic, which Gann delightedly appropriated and celebrated as a virtue) which combines " indigenous American sources: the multi-tempo structures of Conlon Nancarrow and Charles Ives, and the dances of the Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo Indians" and ends with "an isorhythmic passacaglia in 41/16 meter" (from "A Musico-Autobiographical Essay" (1997)). The best example of Gann's naive pictorialism style is Desert Sonata, 1994-1995.
[6] Tonal early modernist polyphony of the kinds popularized by early to mid-period Stravinsky, Prolofiev before he returned to Russia, and David Diamond. Examples include Chicago Spiral (1991).
[7] Jazz-influenced postclassical music of the kind represented by Gunther Schuller's "Third Wave" movement. Examples include Drowned City (2007).
Quotes by Kyle Gann:
I never write abstract music. -- from "A Musico-Autiobiographical Essay," 1997.
All the microtonal complexities and humanly unplayable rhythms are a lot of fun, and they keep my brain entertained while my ear is busy composing. But the most important part, the part that empowers music to resonate through society and enables one to `speak truth to power,' that part that will make your work dangerous and threatening to bureaucrats and academics, the part that will make you despised by the keepers of the status quo and loved by generations yet to come: that part is the hardest part to achieve: that part is naive. -- from liner notes to Nude Rolling Down An Escalator.
There are a lot of classically trained composers out there making music that wouldn't be called `classical' by any of the nice people at the Philharmonic concerts. -- Ibid.
from Gann's influential "Postclassical" blog at
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2003/10/kyle_gann.html#more
Gann doesn't mention that he also writes a blog about serious contemporary music which now qualifies as one of the top contemporary classical music blogs. He also works extensively with MIDI and electronic systems for making music, including his Mac OS X laptop with the Kontakt 2 sampling softsynth microtuned via the Li'l Miss Scale Oven program for the Mac (which is written by X. J. Scott).
So in addition to the traditional-sounding musical activities he mentions above, Gann has also actively pushed the edge of the musical envelope in moving outside traditional tunings (his music just just intonation with between 17 and 30 pitches per octave, typically) and computer-based or computer-assisted systems such as the Yamaha Disklavier and his laptop with various softsynths and the Logic Audio program.
He has also proven notable as a gadfly and persistent critic of some of the least attractive fads of serious contemporary music, including high modernism, serial atonality, the cult of personality centered around the pulitzer prize winners, and the fanatical monomania exhibited by music critics who persist in a rabid swarming idolatory of certain undeserving composers who get canonized as "great names" when young, to the general detriment of more talanted and older composers who fail to cut their musical style to fit the prevailing fashion. Examples include essays such as:
http://www.kylegann.com/postminimalism.html
His home page is:
http://www.kylegann.com/
His comprehensive "Musico-Autobiographical Essay" can be found here:
http://www.kalvos.org/gannkyl.html
Some composers exhibit a single characteristic musical style which develops through their careers (Beethoven, Bach, Purcell, Conlon Nancarrow, Mikel Rouse), while others change their personal style radically and head in a new direction (Iannis Xenakis, Kryzstof Pendercki, Elliott Carter). However, yet other composers refuse to confine themselves to the artificial prison of a single personal style and instead feel free to explore a wealth of different (albeit individually coherent) musical styles -- to this group belong such composers as Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, James Tenney, and Kyle Gann.
Gann's music cane be roughly categorized into 7 different styles.
[1] Electronic instruments (and sometimes acoustic instruments) tuned to microtonal just intonation. (Examples include Superparticular Woman (1992), Fractured Paradise (1995), How Miraculous Things Happen (1997). (These can all be found on the CD Custer's Ghost available from www.monroestreet.com)
[2] Classical minimalism with some updated touchesm, focussing primarily on the rhythmic clashes in some of the pioneer minimalist composers, particularly Philip Glass. I was more fascinated by the rhythmic implications of Glass's Music in Fifths and the voice-leading in the "Bed" scene from Einstein on the Beach. ...These early Glassian phenomena became the groundwork for my rhythmic and contrapuntal conceptions of music. (From "A Musico-Autobiographical Essay" (1997)) Examples include Long Night (1980-81) (Aavailable from www.frogpeak.com) and Snake Dance No. 2 for percussion with optional sampling keyboard (1995).
[3] Different simultaneous tempi, often used in overlapping loops. Gann has described aspects of this musical style as "totalist" (a term coined by Mikel Rouse, who along with Michael Gordon exemplified this musical style). Examples include Nude Rolling Down A Staircase, his set of studies for the Yamaha Disklavier electromechanical computer-interfaced player piano (CD available from www.amazon.com) and Hesapa ki Lakhota ki Thawapi (1984).
[4] Electroacoustic or computer-music compositions, often involving narrated text. Examples include So Many Little Dyings (1994) and Canso (1981).
[5] A style Gann has described as "Naive Pictorialism" (an epithet issued by a derisive music critic, which Gann delightedly appropriated and celebrated as a virtue) which combines " indigenous American sources: the multi-tempo structures of Conlon Nancarrow and Charles Ives, and the dances of the Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo Indians" and ends with "an isorhythmic passacaglia in 41/16 meter" (from "A Musico-Autobiographical Essay" (1997)). The best example of Gann's naive pictorialism style is Desert Sonata, 1994-1995.
[6] Tonal early modernist polyphony of the kinds popularized by early to mid-period Stravinsky, Prolofiev before he returned to Russia, and David Diamond. Examples include Chicago Spiral (1991).
[7] Jazz-influenced postclassical music of the kind represented by Gunther Schuller's "Third Wave" movement. Examples include Drowned City (2007).
Quotes by Kyle Gann:
I never write abstract music. -- from "A Musico-Autiobiographical Essay," 1997.
All the microtonal complexities and humanly unplayable rhythms are a lot of fun, and they keep my brain entertained while my ear is busy composing. But the most important part, the part that empowers music to resonate through society and enables one to `speak truth to power,' that part that will make your work dangerous and threatening to bureaucrats and academics, the part that will make you despised by the keepers of the status quo and loved by generations yet to come: that part is the hardest part to achieve: that part is naive. -- from liner notes to Nude Rolling Down An Escalator.
There are a lot of classically trained composers out there making music that wouldn't be called `classical' by any of the nice people at the Philharmonic concerts. -- Ibid.