My Analysis of Minimalism seminar I just finished was the most exciting course I’ve ever taught, and I plan to write about it at greater length. But as I’m sitting here grading final papers, I’m pleased as punch to note that one student, Erica Ball (herself a precociously interesting composer) wrote her analysis paper on two works written late in 2008, by young composers Caroline Mallonée and Jim Altieri. When I think how many young composers come out of grad school these days all excited about dinosaurs like Ligeti, Xenakis, and Carter, I am especially proud. In my ideal pedagogical situation, all music more than five years old, or written by composers more than a generation older than the students, would be considered old classics, to be consulted like Bach or Beethoven as a way of grounding one’s standards, while the bulk of analysis and study would be devoted to music of RIGHT NOW. Other analyses were written on the opening section of Michael Gordon’s Trance, Jim Tenney’s Diapason, John Luther Adams’s Dream in White on White and In the White Silence, Eve Beglarian’s The Bus Driver Didn’t Change His Mind, John Adams’s China Gates (for a perspective from the distant past), and Corigliano’s Fantasia on an Ostinato (Corigliano called it his “minimalist piece,” so I said what the heck). I’ve been frustrated with minimalism classes before, but this time managed to bring together a bunch of serious music majors who really got the music, who looked past Glass and Reich and Pärt to the hipper developments that followed, and concocted theories about postminimalism’s relation to modernism. They were wowed by Nick Didkovsky’s rock-jazz-classical fusion, charmed by Daniel Lentz, blown away by Belinda Reynolds. This music may have a future after all.
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
