Email Author Kyle Gann

2000 Stories by Kyle Gann

• Déja Vu Again

  published December 26, 2000

  The Bang on a Can Festival still puts on a good show, but the thrill of continuous discovery is gone. The causes appear to be less ideological... More >>

• Tri-Century Man

  published December 12, 2000

  How many composers can you name who lived in three centuries? Leo Ornstein, whose 90th birthday was celebrated here in 1982, has now entered his... More >>

• Resignating With the Audience

  published November 28, 2000

  Sometimes you walk out of a new music concert just aggrieved for the wasted potential. Pianist Kathleen Supové and flutist Lisa Cella are... More >>

• Eggs and Elephants

  published November 14, 2000

  CINCINNATI—Chimes ring like a doorbell, but with the wrong interval. You hear crunching noises, and then seagulls, though you don't... More >>

• Sawing Through Italy

  published October 31, 2000

  Giovanni Sollima is being touted as "the Jimi Hendrix of the cello." No one ever stops to ask whether the cello needed a Jimi Hendrix. It's... More >>

• I’ll Take Paradise

  published October 17, 2000

  The pressure to sanctify a monumental occasion rarely brings out the best in a composer, at least in recent centuries. Bach and Handel dealt with... More >>

• Blast From the Past

  published October 3, 2000

  My first trip to New York City was in 1981, so I missed the '60s and '70s altogether. I never heard the Theatre of Eternal Music live,... More >>

• Lost Treasures

  published September 19, 2000

  In the Theatre of Eternal Music, tones grew from other tones like branches from a tree. A drone would start, and other perfectly tuned... More >>

• Rattling the Stones

  published September 5, 2000

  If the Brooklyn Bridge seemed unusually wobbly as you drove over it July 20, especially at one end, I think I can explain. In the previous few... More >>

• D’Dark Eyes

  published August 1, 2000

  CORNWALL ON THE HUDSON—Invited to participate in the Storm King Music Festival upstate, I discovered a New York trio I hadn't heard of... More >>

• One-Man Opera Machine

  published July 18, 2000

  Mikel Rouse is the poster boy for composer self-sufficiency. Not that he's the first to achieve it. Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow led careers... More >>

• Words Belied by Music

  published June 27, 2000

  I hope I never become an old curmudgeon, reflexively dismissive of the younger generation. The unsettling truth, though, is that I find a lot of... More >>

• Hendrix From Heaven

  published June 6, 2000

  I had business in Seattle recently, so I visited Trimpin, the German American composer-engineer who last year won the most well-deserved MacArthur... More >>

• The St. Tom Passion

  published May 30, 2000

  It disgusted Friedrich Nietzsche that Wagner would revert to Christian themes in his last opera. "An apostasy and reversion to sickly Christian... More >>

• The Right Two Notes

  published May 9, 2000

  For those who've followed it for years, Bernadette Speach's music sounds like it's in transition. She used to write thickly textured, jazz-tinged,... More >>

• The Key to Letting Go

  published April 25, 2000

  "In the right key, one can say anything, in the wrong key, nothing," wrote Bernard Shaw. "The only delicate part of the job is the establishment... More >>

• Streamlining Chaos

  published April 11, 2000

  What the hell is William Duckworth doing? For 20 years he was a pioneer of the widespread (and woefully unacknowledged) postminimalist movement,... More >>

• Opera Rad

  published March 28, 2000

  I'll never forget, in 1973, coming home from the record store with the old Sonic Arts Union recording of Robert Ashley's Purposeful Lady Slow... More >>

• Master of Mugham

  published February 15, 2000

  The gradual breakup of the Soviet Union brought to world consciousness a number of composers like Gubaidulina and Ustvolskaya, who, previously... More >>

• How Do I Quantize Thee?

  published February 1, 2000

  I have a nodding, amateur's acquaintance with computer music software—people demonstrate it for me, and I try to raise my eyebrows and... More >>

• Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead

  published January 18, 2000

  May I be the only classical music critic in town to welcome the new century with open arms? Hurrah! Hurrah! Twentieth-century music is... More >>

• How to Hear a Face

  published January 4, 2000

  That music is a language of logic is a fact too much emphasized by academics and too little recognized by the average music lover. No one but a... More >>