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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

The Precocious 5-Year-Old Musicologist

All the Wiki activity at Sequenza 21 has drawn my attention to how much needs to be filled in about new music at Wikipedia, the reader-written encyclopedia. I looked up “Downtown Music” and was astonished to find this (I quote the article in its original entirety):

Downtown music is a style of contemporary music first defined as such by Village Voice music critic Kyle Gann. It is used largely in opposition to the prevailing uptown aesthetic which it opposes.

Very flattering, but since La Monte Young, Richard Maxfield, and Yoko Ono started the Downtown scene in 1960 when I was five years old, and the Voice hired me in 1986 to cover a Downtown scene that it had already been covering for two decades, I have to modestly refuse the credit. I wrote them a new entry.

What’s going on here

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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Sites to See

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 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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