So Kyle Gann was in the 'classical music headlines' yesterday for complaining that nobody performs his music anymore. On the one hand, revenge is a dish best served cold. I have no idea what Kyle Gann is like in his personal life, but there was a time he was an absolute ass to me. I once left a comment on facebook and using a pseudonym he went after me like a rabid dog, basically calling me a fascist who wants to stifle debate because I made a snarky comment about how pointless it is to have yet another naval-gazing composer debate about the efficacy of tonality vs. atonality. Being who I am... I responded by going after him even more rabidly, telling him that our generation of musicians is basically just waiting for his generation to die off so we can finally get some jobs and stop having to re-litigate the Baby Boomer psychodramas that even permeate classical music. I had no idea it was Kyle Gann until someone told me, and assured me that this relatively famous and powerful composer now viewed me as an enemy for life.
What makes this weirder is that I'd read Kyle Gann's writing about music since college and loved every word of it. He was the music critic of the Village Voice for twenty years and for many years had an extraordinary blog which seemed to wade through the ouvre of every obscure and eccentric American composer. If you read him, you could literally find dozens of great pieces of music that would have completely passed you by. Whatever Gann's reputation as a composer, he may well be remembered as a music writer for hundreds of years.
Is Gann's music as good as his writing? Well... frankly, not a lot of it. But some of it is very good indeed. I can't say I find his microtonal music interesting at all, and he was sufficiently brutal with me that I don't have any problem giving an honest appraisal of what I've heard. Some people are almost too smart to create art in a way that's particularly natural, and Gann's natural intellectualizing gets in the way. He is so erudite, his knowledge of other music so eternally present, that a lot of his music sounds as though grown in a laboratory in an extremely self-conscious attempt to be original. On the other hand, when he stops with the games and writes simply, perhaps reverting to the smart Texas kid he once was, the music can become incredibly compelling. I'm going to link to a couple of his etudes here, which are really remarkable. I don't know if they're meant to be played by a pianist or a piano roll, but these clearly sound played on a MIDI piano.
The first is called 'Texarkana', a kind of Conlon Nancarrow take on saloon pianola music. The second is called 'Petty Larceny', and for those who know their Beethoven, it's a thrill ride. The third, the fantastically named 'Nude Rolling Down an Escalator,' presumably a take on Duchamp painting, can make you dizzy. The final one, 'Bud Ran Back Out' is jazz-inflected, only still more drugged out than any of the great jazz pianists - I don't know if it's supposed to be a tribute to Bud Powell but it wouldn't surprise me. This music is the real musician, a composer who writes with the same personality as his writing - clever, funny, affectionate, and incredibly inspired by other people's music.
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