Kyle Gann cutting new album, writing new book

Composer and writer Kyle Gann reports on his blog that he has just finished a two-day recording session with pianist Sarah Cahill for his upcoming album on the New Albion label. No release date has been announced yet. In the meantime, Gann includes a link to an eight-minute rough edit of a piece from the new album, and a previous collaboration with Cahill, "Long Night" is available on Emusic.

Meanwhile, the Poughkeepsie Journal reports that Gann has received a $40,000 grant for his book, "Music After Minimalism."

"Gann said the funds will enable him to take a semester off to work on the book, which focuses on composers such as Glenn Branca, William Duckworth and John Luther Adams," the news item explains.

Free music: Kyle Gann

I discovered Kyle Gann mainly through my interest in William Duckworth; Gann apparently is the world's leading authority on Duckworth's music (see my Dec. 18 post.) But reading Gann's comments made me curious about Gann himself, and I went from his blog to his official site, and discovered that it contains a great deal of Gann's music, freely downloadable as MP3 files. Gann's site is amusingly unhindered by modesty. I tried some of the files and found out Gann's music is very listenable, indeed. I'll download "Long Night," his only work available at Emusic.com, when my monthly subscription renews in a few days.

I've been reading Gann's book, AMERICAN MUSIC IN THE 20th CENTURY. (By reading, I mean jumping around and reading about various composers who interest me, while skipping over the music theory stuff which I don't understand.) The book includes an entry on one Kyle Gann. My guess is Gann is probably a leading authority on Gann, too, so let's quote the entry:

"Another composer heavily influenced by American Indian music is Kyle Gann (the author, born 1955 in Dallas, Texas) whose works are also drum-driven; specifically, he has developed a rhythmic language of changing tempos from the beat-shifting music of the Hopi, Zuni and Pueblo Indians. In this respect his ensemble music (such as "Astrological Studies," 1994) is similar to Michael Gordon's, but smoother, more consonant, and more melodic, in a style once referred to by the "New York Times" as "naive pictorialism." Oddly (since postminimalism provides such a clear context for microtonal perception), Gann is the only totalist or postminimalist composer working in just-intonation tuning; his electronic works use purely tuned pitch systems of up to thirty-seven pitches per octave. An example is "Custer's Ghost to Sitting Bull" (1995), on a text imagined as spoken by General George Custer after the Little Bighorn debacle."

William Duckworth revealed

I few days ago, I mentioned I had discovered William Duckworth by listening to a piece called "Mysterious Numbers" on an album by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. Not that I'm a music expert, but it was interesting to hear such a wonderful piece by someone I'd never heard of. I tried to find out more about him but had trouble finding useful information on the Internet.

I finally found a weblog posting by composer and critic Kyle Gann provides useful insight into Duckworth's music and a handy list of works to look for. (I downloaded the "Time Curve Preludes" from Emusic a few days ago, and it's just as great as Gann says it is.) Here's a key quote from Gann's posting: "If there is any composer from the 1980s and '90s whose music is sturdy, enduring, and universal enough to go into the standard repertoire, it is Duckworth's."