The End of Music History

11.3.
2015
TheEndofMusicHistory
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
September 8, 2013 by Kyle Gann
Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat?

Because really good teaching is not about seeing the world the way that everyone else does.
Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call counterintuitive, but to the teacher
simply means being honest.
Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, p. 181
At the request of my department chair and he so rarely asks me for anything, I could hardly have
turned him down I am teaching a 20th-century music history survey course, or rather, music since
1910. Ive been dreading it, and my fears are so far confirmed. First of all, I have long been convinced
that you cant do the entire 20th century in a survey course. To me, third-semester music history should
be 1900-1960, and the fourth semester should take over after that. Not only is there way too much
material, theres no unifying idea to the first and second halves of the century. The year 1976 seems to
remain a popular stopping point for many professors and textbooks, and I wonder if anyone (besides
me) has ever taught a 20th-century class in which the last three decades got as much attention as the
first three.
Secondly, while its always easy to know where to start, and has always been tricky knowing where to
end, these days ending is impossible. Forty years ago, when I took this course at Oberlin, you could begin
with Stravinsky and Schoenberg and work your way up, decade by decade, through the various
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2013/09/theendofmusichistory.html
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movements and major figures. It was assumed that the language of music was evolving, and that that
evolution could be traced, with a few detours and parallel streams. But of course, now we know what
happens: past 1970 the idea of a mainstream evaporates, and as musicologist Leonard Meyer so
shrewdly predicted we entered a kind of stasis in which many, many styles compete and continue.
Everything is permissible; a million things have been done, anything we can imagine will be done
eventually, and many things that had been done get done all over again. I suppose if youre a hard-core
traditionalist its easier to draw your boundaries, but the Downtown music I like to focus on blends into
jazz and pop around the edges. I have to argue with students for the right to teach Laurie Anderson,
Pamela Z, and Mikel Rouse as postclassical music. Just deciding what music to include within the
definitions of the course requires a whole separate section on the philosophy of music.
And I am finding that the philosophical difficulties extend into the past retroactively. I know perfectly well
what Im supposed to teach, and in fact, I am quite lucky in my mandated choice of textbook: the new
Taruskin/Gibbs Oxford History of Western Music. The book itself has revisionist leanings and casts its
own sly suspicions on orthodox pedagogy, and so is more in sync with me than any other textbook I
could use. The best thing I can say about it is that its pronouncements never make me wince, which I
consider high praise in this context. We use it for the entire music history sequence because its quality is
so high; the fact that Professor Gibbs is on our faculty is, of course, entirely coincidental (as is the fact
that I am heavily quoted in the final chapter).
But given the sequence of the textbook, I have to start out with Schoenberg, and for me, to start with
Schoenberg already puts everything on the wrong track. (If this offends you, read further at your own risk,
because its only downhill from here.) The assumption of Schoenbergs importance, given the continuing
unpopularity of his music, is founded on the further assumption that what were teaching is the evolution
of the musical language. In fact, the very title of our music history sequence, The Literature and
Language of Music (litnlang in departmental parlance, reminding me of live n learn) presupposes
that there is a language of music evolving through its canonical examples. If you want to trace a certain
absolutist attitude toward atonality, and the development of the 12-tone row as a technical device,
Schoenberg is of course essential to the sequence of events. But does his music, therefore, deserve
pride of place in the literature?
I consider it the most important thing I can teach my students, assuming I ever succeed in getting it
across, that a lot of music that seems nonsensical or off-putting at first is well worth putting the effort
into assimilating. Nothing irks me more than the reflexive resistance they put up against music they
dont like on first listening. When I was their age, any piece I didnt understand represented a challenge,
a gauntlet thrown down to my musical intelligence. There was not going to be any piece I couldnt
fathom. (Many fine conservative pieces I couldsuperficially comprehend, I now realize I dismissed
rather too easily.) And yet, there is now tons and tons of difficult, complicated, obscure music, and after
45 years of deciphering it I am aware that not all of it eventually repays the effort. I was determined to
master the intricacies of theConcord Sonata, Le Sacre du Printemps, Pli selon pli, Turangalila, Mantra,
Philomel, and I love them all, Im devoted to them, thrilled to introduce students to them. Other works
that I committed many, many listening and analytical hours to almost all of Schoenberg, everything by
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Berg except Wozzeck, all but a few pieces of Elliott Carter simply bore me today. I know that Op. 31
Orchestra Variations and that damn Es ist genug violin concerto inside and out, but they strike me as
awkward and pedantic. I listen to them with acute understanding of how theyre made, but never
admiringly. A lot of that music I feel I was brainwashed into taking very seriously, and the effects of my
youthful brainwashing are largely worn off.
So, of the music I cannot honestly advocate to students on account of what I perceive as its inherent
virtues, by what criterion do I urge it on them? If historical importance is the guideline, then one needs to
climb the ladder of influences, but it turns out that that ladder frays into a maze at the top. And actually,
looking back from 1970, any sense of a mainstream had pretty much died as soon as neoclassicism
was pitted against dodecaphony. The moment Scriabin, Ives, Stravinsky, Varse all separately agreed to
use sonorities never heard in music before, everything really became permissible instantly it just took a
few generations to realize the implications. People today still write neoclassic music, still write 12-tone
music. Partch leaped into just intonation only 15 years after The Rite of Spring, seven years after the first
12-tone row, and thats the course Im still on. 433 is closer in time to Pierrot Lunaire than it is to the
present. If weve had a hundred years of multi-subcultural stasis, how much does it really matter who did
something first? My students get a much bigger kick out of Gruppen and Sinfonia than they do from
Webern, and since I agree with them, why not simply detail the pedigree of the 12-tone idea as part of a
discussion of serialism? Why play the first 12-tone music instead of the most rewarding?
In fact, to present 12-tone music as a major movement at all, I have to attempt to explain why certain
composers considered it so crucial to have some universal new system to replace tonality. And the truth
is, I dont understand why they felt that way. Im so much more in sympathy with what Ives wrote: Why
tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I cant see. Why it should always be present, I cant see.
Tonality is so widely evident in much well-regarded music of recent decades that my students and I
share the same incomprehension on this point. It sounds like an episode that belongs in the book
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Some people in my position would make a
countercharge about minimalism, but they would have to contend with the Steve Reich and Arvo Prt
fans among my students; and minimalism never tried to corner the market. (Im also teaching my
minimalism seminar this semester, and the students in there are passionate about the subject, so wellinformed that theyve brought up more obscure pieces than I had planned to address.)
The upshot is that I can no longer teach the canon of early/mid-20th-century music, as it was taught to
me, in very good faith. The only criterion I could defend, if challenged, is how much fulfillment I still get
from the music today, with some scholarly lip service granted to what pieces posed an influence on the
composers contemporaries. Certain composers who dont get much academic attention Milhaud,
Poulenc, Tailleferre, Busoni, Wolpe, Sorabji, James P. Johnson, Vermeulen, Blomdahl, Rochberg seem
to me infinitely more appealing to present than some of the usual suspects. After all, weve already gone
through this revisionist process for 19th-century music: if we hadnt, wed still have to be putting Hummel
and Spohr on the listening tests. At the other end, I have only the flimsiest of rationales for teaching all
the wonderful array of postclassical music I love while still excluding jazz and pop, the ultimate one
being my faulty or nonexistent expertise in those latter fields. I resorted to describing the history of my
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idiosyncratic career as justification for my particular view of recent history, and while Im happy for
student input, I hardly want to surrender my hard-earned historical understanding to the chaos of 22
variously-informed student perspectives.
So its a mess, and an enforced experiment with few visible guideposts. Im afraid I know the last
hundred years of music so well that I no longer know what the history of it is.
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Comments
Virginia Anderson says

September 9, 2013 at 3:25 am
Weird having Music since 1910. Ah, well. Ive taught courses called Twentieth-Century Topics,
Twentieth-Century Problems Twentieth-Century Literature, The Evolution of Music in Europe,
and so on. Theyre all pretty much the same, despite the differences in titles meaning the course
will mean what you intend it to mean. (Leo Treitler once taught a course called Rhythm and
Notation after 1600. When we complained that it was all about rhythm, nothing about notation or
anything after the mid-19th century, he said, Well, I was going to call it Rhythm and Blues).
Dont try for a survey course. Instead, give them the best of what you know and think to be
important in the time they have. Pick out key thoughts and techniques and focus on them in your
lectures and seminars, with a few allusions to other techniques, ideas, pieces. If you have
seminars, give them scores, of course, but also landmark contemporary readings, like bits of
Essays Before a Sonata or Silence, and have them discuss the implications for the music that the
writings present. Lecture topics might include serialism, minimalism, rhythm and meter,
experimentalism (early and late), sonic resources, and so on whatever you think they should go
away with. You can order the students to read the assigned text for context, with the
understanding that theyll be responsible for all of it on the test, using the knowledge youll gives
them on the principles. Then limit what they can do for essays and ban whatever they think is
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easy. Normally this means Brittens War Requiem and pretty much anything by Debussy or John
Adams. (For that reason I ban Citizen Kane and Star Wars in film class and Sgt Pepper in pop
music). If you have a midterm test, do something like the Rite of Spring keeps them from merely
spitting back the copious commentary or another ultra-famous piece, to give you an idea of
what they are doing (the first time I tried this I was shocked to see how many of them could not
identify the Dance of the Adolescents after my very detailed, analytical lecture) and to make them
realise what they need to do to pass. Good luck.
kea says
an interesting point about schoenberghis music is, in fact, relatively popular, and has enjoyed
continued popularity. but were not talking about the twelve-tone pieces here, were talking about
his big late-romantic works (verklrte nacht, pelleas, gurre-lieder, etc). (personally i find them to be
rather dreadful, in common with most of the other austrian & german late-romantics of the fin-desicle, mahler and karg-elert and so forth, but thats neither here nor there.) one would thus be
totally justified in talking about schoenberg via the influence his music had on erich wolfgang
korngold, expressionism in film music and so forth, and only mentioning the twelve-tone system in
passing as something he invented and well hear more about it in lecture five, serialism' (where
youll play a short audio excerpt of a schoenberg piano piece and then move on to the more
interesting composers). his atonal stuff was anyway just late-romantic music straitjacketed into a
twelve-tone matrix (he himself once harmonised the main melody of the variations for orchestra
with syrupy tonal chords, iirc), which is perhaps why a lot of people dont warm to itits all
forced, never directly inspired, just something he felt religiously obliged to write.
that would be an interesting way to design a 20th century music course actuallylecture one
schoenberg, puccini, rachmaninoff and korngoldlecture two film music and the persistence of
common-practice tonality throughout the 20th centurylecture three start moving on to the
canonical stuff. probably superior to the 20th century music course at my university anyway
(where the lecturer spent the first 3/4 of the course outlining various trends up until 1945, then
declared that everything that had happened after 1945 was just repeats of stuff that had
happened before, except for minimalism which was of course cynical commercialism with no
redeeming value. with the last lecture being devoted to what *he* thought was the future, which i
think was musical scholarship or somethingreconstructing lost works or inventing ones that
had never existed, e.g. beethovens eleventh, mozarts forty-secondive honestly blocked most of
that course from my memory)
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Steve Hicken says

Thanks for this, Kyle. It gives me a lot to think about.
Jeff Harrington says

<>
Beautiful!! The future re-writes the past until the past becomes more interesting
Russ Gershon says

September 9, 2013 at 2:05 pm
Fascinating. Thanks.
Tawnie O says
I envy your students! Even if it is a mess, as you say, your course still sounds like a glorious one to
me.
Will Ruth Crawford make it into your course? I rather like teaching her music next to the early
atonal works of the 2nd Viennese School.
KG replies: Yes, thats exactly where I put her. In fact, Im trying to change my approach to
Crawford. Ive always taught her early Two Movements for Small Orchestra because I like the
Scriabin-y side of her early music, but its not a terribly mature piece, and Im switching to the
String Quartet. Hope I learn to like it as well.
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Tawnie O says
Ah, thats fantastic! You know, it may not be the best piece for your course, but Im very
partial to the first Diaphonic Suite (for oboe); its short and not too difficult for students to
wrap their minds around, but I think its very elegantly structured.
Ian Stewart says

A really perceptive post which has helped me identify my own views.
Maybe that Schoenberg invented/evolved the twelve tone system could be considered in the
same way as whoever invented the Alberti Bass. I doubt anyone would say they were as good a
composer as Beethoven who used it extensively.
Mark Anthony Turnage said in a recent interview that students are not interested in exploring the
great post war composers in the way he was. However I believe each generation of composers
has to find its own route through the eons of music written. Recently I have heard two works by
young composers, one influenced by a Sonny Rollins track (although it was not jazz) and one by
The Unanswered Question. When I was a student, the major European composers seemed
obsessed with proving their links with the European tradition, and some condemned outright any
music that did not use total serialist techniques. Now things have changed, younger composers
seem to take what they are interested in an ignore the rest. I am sure they will explore these
composers sometime in their careers but not necessarily at the beginning.
Howard Whitaker says

Thanks. One of the rewards of longevity is the observation of evolving perspectives. A couple of
thoughts:
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Ive often wondered how things might have been different if somebody like, say, Milhaud had
invented serialism, rather than the rather gloomy Schoenberg.
Seeing a recent (sizzling!) performance of Pierrot Lunaire by Eighth Blackbird (with lighting,
memorized music, movement around the stage, compelling virtuosity, etc.) reminded me once
again of the significance of performers in this whole process.
KG replies: Good point. If they want to, performers can make almost anything sound great.
Arthur says
It seems to me that the entire project of attending to or teaching some kind of History of music,
art, literature is reductive and false if the approach has to do with sorting out some kind of linearity
of influence or lists of major minor figures or periodization or selective assessment of style or,
worst of all, the greatest hits of the past or recent present. It simplifies the very idea of music/art,
creativity and and the complexity of the lives of artists, culture and historical forces. It privileges
critical history over exploration of work by artists. I would also argue that the notion of
anthologizing works also sets up a hierarchical system that winds up commodifying artwork, not
to mention such exclusionary practices as separating women, minorities, popular foams artists
and the economic/industrial forces that ARE inseparable from the arts and art making.
When it comes to the arts, we want our students to be literate and knowledgeable, but, exactly,
about what? All of music history? A bunch of great works? Theory or aesthetics? If they are going
to be artists, shouldnt the goal be to provide a sense of how creativity and music is bound as
much to personal psychological choices as to time, place, history, gender, beliefs, even politics?
Schoenbergs music and writing and painting and opera is Vienna then Europe through two world
wars and, later, sunny America. It is Jewish and it is mysticism. The incidental work illuminates
the major pieces and the arc of his life.
How about if consider an approach that teaches artists lives and the corpus of work they produce
as the object of study? I actually teach a course called The Critical Artist in which students chose
one artist to study for the entire semester. They are instructed to find out everything, read, listen,
immerse themselves. When at the end, everyone presents their research, the question of the
meaning of an artists work as a whole and their life and relationship to culture supersedes
ranking of works.
I advocate this also because it is also training in how to think about and live with the arts and
artists of your own time. After all, we rarely experience the work of living artists purely on the basis
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of merely hearing there workCertainly not in the age of the Internet.
mclaren says
Batten down the hatches, Kyle. Strap on your kevlar vest and make sure the ceramic ballistic
impact plate is firmly inserted in the front pocket.
You have stepped outside the groupthink and the consequences will prove severe.
As for using the Taruskin text, the solution seems simple. Just skip over the Viennese Kook and
his unindicted co-conspirators, strip out the Explain nothing chapter about the Geriatic Kook, and
fill the space with significant 20th century composers like Ralph Vaughn Williams, whom Taruskin
inexplicably never even mentions. (Since Vaughn Williams remains the tributary from which all
subsequent 20th century neoclassicism flows, this omissions remains as perverse as it is bizarre.)
The detonation of the historical narrative of a 20th century mainstream post-1976 due to the
brisance of audible reality also runs backward into the past. The detcord full of guerilla
scholarship in the eighties that blew up the post-1976 mainstream also blew apart the pre-1976
historical narrative along with its carefully confected fairytale of alleged musical evolution from
1900 through the 1950s.
You only get a mainstream with so-called evolution from 1900-1960 if you drop most of the
best composers and the most compelling musical trends into an Orwellian memory hole. Lowgrade propagandists like Paul Griffiths tried that particular game of three-card monte, but it failed
permanently by around 1980 because the cards they shuffled around just werent big enough to
cover up all the excellent 20th century composers they tried to marginalize.
Here are 3 alternative musical-historical narratives from 1900-1976:
[1] Start with the intonarumori guys like Russolo and the 1928 Bell Labs voder and the
Thereminvox to show the radical developments in timbre around the start of the 20th century.
Russolos graphic score to Risveglio di una Citta also shows the sharp break in graphical scores
with the musical past.
Use Charles Ives Calcium Light (1915) to show the re-emergence of rhythmic complexity from the
dark ages of the classical era. Crucial highlights? Charles Seegers 1929 Tradition and Experiment
in (the New) Music, Henry Cowells New Musical Resources (1930), with musical examples
Cowells 1915 Quartet Romantic 1917 Quartet Euphometric and Johanna Beyers 1933 Percussion
Suite.
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Stravinskys 1913 Rite of Spring proves useful in bridging the two realms new timbres +
polyrhythms. Haul in Amadeo Roldans Ritmicas (1930) for percussion along with Edgard Vareses
Hyperprism (1930), along with Johanna Beyers Music of the Spheres (1938) and Olivier
Messaiens Oraison (1937) and Cowells Concerto for Rhythmicon and Orchestra (1935) to give a
taste of the explosion of new timbres, and of the polyrhythms unheard since Ars Subtilis in the late
14th century. Anyone who fails to hear a direct line connecting Beyers Music of the Spheres in
1938 with Russolos Risveglia di una Citta in 1913, or Cowells The Tides of Manauanaun (1912)
with Stravinskys Rite of Spring (1913) needs to see an audiologist.
HOME
For pitch explorations,
ABOUT
start
AJBLOGS
with Jacques
ARTSJOURNAL
Halevys 1943 quartertone opera Promethee Enchaine
and move on the Generation Z Russian xenharmonic composers of the period 1910-1930,
including Leon Theremin,
Arseny Avraamov, Leonid Sabaneev, Peter Zimin, Nikolai Bernstein,
SEARCH THE SITE ...
Pavel Leiberg, Boris Krasin, Emily Rosenov, Mikhail Gnesin, Nikolai Garbuzovs harmonic series
harmonium, Sergei Rzevkins cathode valve radio-harmonium of the 1920s, and so on. Then drag
in Percy Graingers Free Music No. 1 and 2, preferably mentioning his Butterfly Piano, his bank of
Solovoxes tuned 1/3 tone apart, his Reed-Box Tone Tool tuned in eighth tones, and his Hills and
Dales machine built with the help of Australian physicist Brunett Cross. (Nary a mention of any of
this in Taruskin, by the way. The Ministry of Truth works overtime for 20th century music)
From these foundations you could zigzag through Bartok and Partch, early Conlon Nancarrow and
Gyorgi Rimsky-Korsakovs quartertone electronic instruments of the 1920s, and Ruth Crawford
Seegers Piano Study In Mixed Accents (1932) along with her dissonant counterpoint pieces with
departures for the folk music composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams (never mentioned in
Taruskin, but clearly the most important composer of the persion 1910-1945) and Bela Bartok and
the industrial brutalists like Alexandr Moslovs Zovod the Iron Foundry (1928) and Prokofievs
Symphony No. 2 (1924) whose Symphony No. 1 (Classical) (1916) neatly encapsulates the twin
impulses twixt modernity and classicism which defined the period 1910-1945. Ralph Vaughn
Williams Symphony 3 and 9 provide a similar contrast, as do Stravinskys Pulcinella or Petroushka
as opposed to Rite of Spring (1913) and Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914), or Bartoks String
Quartet No. 6 compared with his String Quartet No. 4.

The American and European neoclassical tonal composers all come out of Vaughn Williams, from
David Diamond and Howard Hanson to Charles Griffiths The Cairn of Ceridwen (a superb piece of
1915 American music so fantastically obscure that it does not even appear on the internet, and
my CD of it appears to be a mirage because its not listed on amazon.com) to Aaron Copland and
Alan Hovhaness and Lou Harrison.
From this point the alternate narrative becomes clear, with the timbral guys diverging into the
electronic tape composers, the French musique concrete cadre, the computer composers, the big
orchestral extended technique guys (early Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Krzysztof Penedercki), the French
spectralist school, Laurie Spiegel, Tod Dockstader, and so on. The rhythm ninjas like Beyer and
Nancarrow proliferate into the contemporary neorhythmic (you call em totalist) crowd like Mikel
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Rouse and Michael Gordon and Emannuel Ghent and the rest. The xenharmonic crowd diverges
into the current microtonal crew with the usual suspects. The neoclassicists proliferate into the
current New Romantic guys like Aaron Jay Kernis and Henk Badings and Joan Tower and Alberto
Ginastera and Christopher Rouse on the one hand, the cooler more classical composers like
Scriabin and Britten and Colin McPhee (Tabu Tabuhan (1936) and Balinese Ceremonial Music and
the later Henry Cowell, with pieces like Ongaku) which leads to the minimalists and
postminimalists (Reich, Glass, Young, Ellen Fullman, Janice Giteck, John Luther Adams, Louis
Andriessen, William Duckworth, Eliane Radigue, et al.) and eclectic world music composers like
David Lang and Evan Ziporyn as a third stream.
[2] You could instead tell the story of the 20th century from the way technology spurred changes
in musical style. Invention of the phonograph, vacuum tube, rhythmic devices like Lev Termins
rhythmicon, the way early recording turntables and later magnetic tape produced musique
concrete, the influence of computers on rhythm and timbre, the way player piano mechanisms led
to modern digital sequencers, the liberation of pitch courtesy of first analog and then digital
electronics, the influence of digital workstations and DAW programs like Pro Tools on the
practices of current composers in constructing layered compositions, and so on.
[3] You could adapt Harold Blooms literary theory of writers arguing with previous generations to
generate new work (essentially Hegels analysis/antithesis/synthesis scheme applied to literature)
by applying it to 20th century music. Vaughn Williams comes out of his quarrel with the
monumentalist maximalist symphonists like Mahler, Bartok and Stravinsky come out of their
quarrel with the unity uber alles Germanomanic symphonists like Reger, Copland and Prokofiev
come out of their quarrel with the hyperabstract art for arts sake composers, the electronic
composers like Ussachevsky & Luening come out of their quarrel with the music must be
corporeal all-acoustic guys like Partch, the microtonalists come out of their quarrel with the only
12 and always 12 crowd who fetishized that particular number of pitches, the minimalists came
out of their quarrel with the post-competent (misnamed post tonal) crowd, the postminimalists
come out of their quarrels with early highly systematized pure minimalism, the eclectic
composers who mix n match many different styles come out of their quarrels with the way music
gets taught and criticized in contemporary America as a single style for each composers
evolving (code for getting more complex) over time, and so on.
None of these narratives has any recognizable relation with Taruskins. Each of these narratives
mentions a lot of composers Taruskin never bothered to discuss. And each of these three
narratives of 20th century offers a perspective on the development and variegation of 20th
century music at least as valid as Taruskins but entirely orthogonal and largely contravariant to
the issues he raises.
After all, just because the department chair assigns a textbook doesnt mean you have to
genuflect to it.
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KG replies: Brian, I wish I could take *your* 20th-century course.
David Kulma says

This is brilliant.
John Kline says

A great post as always. I wish there were more like you doing regular posting about music,
teaching it in college, thinking about it, etc. Academic and informed yet accessible and dealing
with real issues
KG replies: Thanks!
Susan Scheid says

Kyle: I second John Kline. Your voice is so necessary. I hope one day youll consider offering a
course like this to a wider audience, though designed as you would like. What you wrote here
came to mind again when I saw the syllabus for an online course in which I have enrolled.
Admittedly, the course is a short survey of a very long period, and doesnt pretend to be
comprehensive, but even so, I wonder about the reasoning behind selecting Schoenberg as one of
the only two 20th C choices. I dont want to prejudge, and Ill be interested to hear the
presentations, but Ill have to confess, it made me wistful for the Gann perspective.
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Jim Fogle says

Thanks for this post and the comments it inspires (or provokes). I had a long-winded comment in
mind but decided to cut it short. As a teacher of 20th-century music for many years at a small
urban college, the factor that made the biggest difference for my students was having living,
breathing composers and performers come to the class. I even had students mime such works
as Pierrot Lunaire (excerpts). Whether they could actually sing or play the instrument they were
miming was irrelevant. They did have to practice and study the scores to make the mime as
convincing as possible. (I remember a particularly engaging and disturbing mime of Nacht.)
Anything that brought them into as much direct contact with the music as possible gave them a
profoundly different perspective. Ill never forget a brilliant pre-performance lecture (and in-andout-of-phase duet and performance (a real performance of Reichs Piano Phase) given by two
students. Although I am no longer teaching, I would love to hear about activities that moved
students from viewing much of this music as the stuff of some imaginary place that they had
never been to a place they had been to, if even for a few fleeting minutes.
KYLEGANN
Just as Harry Partch called

himself a "philosophic music
man seduced into carpentry,"
I'm a composer seduced into
musicology... Read More
WHATSGOINGONHERE
So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This

blog will set out to consider that dubious factoid with
equanimity, if not downright enthusiasm [More]
Kyle Gann's Home Page More than you ever wanted to

know about me at www.kylegann.com
PostClassic Radio The radio station that goes with the

blog, all postclassical music, all the time; see the
playlist at kylegann.com.
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taking a wild guess, but are you talking about the
"historic" Village...
Posted Mar 09, 2015
SusanScheidonThereAreNo
Coincidences
I love that a connecting thread here is breakfast.
Posted Mar 08, 2015
JudeThomasonThirteen,MyLucky
Number
Thanks for sharing Kyle. I'm intrigued by your
references to barbershop singing. I'm a proud
barbershopper and was drawn into...
Posted Mar 07, 2015
DavidGoodineonThereAreNo
Coincidences
Hi Kyle, synchronicity in action...there is more to our
everyday world than meets the eye, we just need to
be...
15/18
11.3.2015
Posted Mar 07, 2015
MelodySumnerCarnahanonThere
AreNoCoincidences
Kyle, I love this story! And all the Texas
connections....recently visiting there, Marfa, Big
Bend, Austin. (I was born in...
Posted Mar 07, 2015
PaulA.EpsteinonThereAreNo
Coincidences
Damn, I was waiting for you to say he offered you a
record deal. You've got to learn to...
Posted Mar 07, 2015
newmusicbuffonThereAreNo
Coincidences
This could be the opening of a Twilight Zone
episode. Maybe the young guy is you in an
alternate...
Posted Mar 07, 2015
BillBonThereAreNoCoincidences
But isn't Texas like Kentucky, though writ
large, in that everybody is related to everybody else?
KG replies: Maybe, but I'm...
Posted Mar 07, 2015
JononThirteen,MyLuckyNumber
Intriguing. To me, the greatest stumbling
block toward more universal adoption of microtonality is how to handle melody. My ear...
Posted Mar 06, 2015
SITESTOSEE
American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio

program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann
with Tom Voegeli)
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia

of music, interviews, information by, with, and on
16/18
11.3.2015
hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the

Usual Suspects
Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station
New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with

what American composers are doing and thinking
The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross
William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive

web composition and home page of a great
postminimalist composer
Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera

composer of my generation
Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown

composer
David Doty's Just Intonation site
Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer

of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web
site
The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the

music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly
underrated composer who became America's greatest
astrologer
Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about

new music and other issues
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an ArtsJournal blog
17/18
11.3.2015
This blog published under a Creative Commons license
18/18

The End of Music History

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11.3.

Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat?

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Filed Under: main

Virginia Anderson says

Steve Hicken says

Jeff Harrington says

Russ Gershon says

Ian Stewart says

Howard Whitaker says

of merely hearing there workCertainly not in the age of the Internet.

Quartet No. 6 compared with his String Quartet No. 4.

KG replies: Brian, I wish I could take *your* 20th-century course.

David Kulma says

John Kline says

Susan Scheid says

Jim Fogle says

Just as Harry Partch called

So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This

Kyle Gann's Home Page More than you ever wanted to

PostClassic Radio The radio station that goes with the

Recent archives for this blog

Posted Mar 07, 2015

American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia

hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about

Return to top of page

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

You might also like

KG replies: Brian, I wish I could take your 20th-century course.