Browse by Artist: GANN, KYLE

Artist:	GANN, KYLE
Title:	Long Night
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$8.00
Catalog #:	CB 019CD

Cold Blue is an LA-based label, focusing on modern composition in the realms of "West Coast minimalism" and "post-minimalism". Lately it has chosen the medium of CD EPs, (15 to 30 minute short duration releases), allowing the listener to concentrate on singular works w/ o the clutter. It is slowly evolving into one of the most important labels in the history of contemporary American composition. "Long Night is exquisitely drifting, ever-unfolding music for three pianos that sometimes play independently and at other times in synchronization with one another. For this recording, all three piano parts were recorded by Sarah Cahill. Gann calls Long Night 'the most successful piece from my early, Brian Eno-influenced, ambient period, a variable-length piece for three non-synchronized pianos at different tempos.' The composer writes, 'I wrote Long Night very much under the influence of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, impressed particularly by his phenomenology of moods and his disavowal of personality as a unified, linear consciousness. I wanted a piece that was a series of moods, connected neither linearly nor abruptly, but in overlapping discontinuity; and a unity that was not felt moment to moment, but that would leap out in unpredictable motives and reminiscences. These were the days, you know, when ambient music was still soft and unobtrusive. Each piano part is constructed in repeating loops, whose lengths can usually be altered at will by the pianists, and the relationship between the pianos is unsynchronized and aleatory -- which is why, for a recording, only one pianist is necessary." 25-minute EP.

Artist:	GANN, KYLE
Title:	Private Dances
Label:	NEW ALBION
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NA 137CD

Performed by Sarah Cahill: piano; Da Capo Chamber Players: violin, cello, piano, flute, clarinet; Bernard Gann: electric bass. "Kyle Gann (b.1955) is a composer whose music inevitably is structured with an array of metric, harmonic and melodic ideas and strategies that would seem to guarantee it to be beyond listenable in its complexity. However, the opposite is in fact what the listener receives. The work is deeply felt, lyrically clear and driven by song. Gann is also known to the musical world as an author and critic, and teaches in the music department at Bard College. Private Dances (2004) is so hot, so longing with yearning, so lonely with the blues, so salacious in its undressing of the unsuspecting listener, that it could properly carry one a warning sticker. It is a 'listener beware' collection in six movements -- sexy, sad, sentimental, sultry, saintly, swingin'. The pianist, Sarah Cahill (one of the generation's premier 'woman on piano' performers) leaves you, the innocent listener, with nothing; she took it all. This piece is what was going on in the mind of the guy at the end of the counter in the Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks."

Artist:	GANN, KYLE
Title:	Nude Rolling Down an Escalator: Studies for Disklavier
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80633CD

"Like many composers of subsequent generations, Kyle Gann (born 1955) was captivated by Cowell's theories and Nancarrow's music. His book, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, is the essential source for any serious study of Nancarrow's work. Knowing so much about Nancarrow's music, it's hardly surprising that it would occur to Gann to consider the question of how he might make the mechanical piano his own. His answer is the music on this recording. The instrument isn't exactly the same. Nancarrow employed the old-fashioned player piano, driven by paper rolls with holes punched in them. Gann uses the more recent Disklavier, which is controlled by a computer via MIDI data. However, like Nancarrow, Gann employs the mechanical piano for both musical and practical reasons. The musical attraction, of course, is the one Cowell observed: the instrument allows the composer to compose with tempo relationships and rhythmic velocities not readily playable by human performers. The practical appeal is that Gann felt that not enough people were playing his music. So in the do-it-yourself spirit of Nancarrow, Lou Harrison, Harry Partch and so many other American composers, he decided to take matters into his own virtual hands. But although Gann's reasons for working with the mechanical piano are similar to Nancarrow's, the musical results are quite different. Gann picks up where Nancarrow left off, developing his own personal methods of working with multiple tempo layers, and weaving elements of popular and classical music into his vivid and distinctive musical tapestries. Gann's music embraces a wide range of influences but sounds like no other. His fascination with complex tempo structures and microtonal tunings places him in the experimentalist tradition from Cowell to La Monte Young. Yet the directness and accessibility of his music reveal his affinity with American populists such as Roy Harris and Virgil Thomson. In this highly personal blend of experimentalism and populism, Gann's closest musical forebears are Partch and Charles Ives. In the spirit of Ives, Gann's music invokes ragtime, jazz, folk music and Native American music on equal footing with classical music and purely abstract sonic speculations."

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