Kyle Gann's Writings

Books, Journalism, Bibliography:

Audio examples for The Arithmetic of Listening: Tuning Theory and History for the Impractical Musician (Univ. of Illinois Press 2019)
American Symphonies analyzed
A Robert Ashley Web Page to accompany the book Robert Ashley in the American Composers Series
Charles Ives's Concord: Essays after a Sonata (University of Illinois Press)
No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" (Yale University Press)
A Conlon Nancarrow Web Page
Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice - contents
"The Importance of Being Downtown" - introduction to the book Music Downtown
Read Kyle Gann on Henry Cowell (6.1.98)
American Music in the 20th Century - presented in its entirety in PDF form (6.9.16)
A bibliographical listing of Kyle Gann's complete articles for the Village Voice
A Bibliography of Gann's other writings

Essays, Lectures, and Articles by Kyle Gann printed in full:

Archives:

Village Voice articles not included in the book Music Downtown
Selected articles from PostClassic, Kyle Gann's blog on Arts Journal
"American Composer" columns from Chamber Music magazine
Kyle Gann's articles in the New York Times
Kyle Gann's early articles in the Chicago Reader and other miscellanea

On Gann's music:

The Melody to My Madness; or, Why I Am a Melodic, Rather than a Textural, Postminimalist (11.27.09)
Naive Pictorialism: Towards a Gannian Aesthetic (12.27.01)
The Case Against Over-notation: A Defense and a Diatribe (6.28.00)
Why I Call Myself a Minimalist (1.16.21)
A 1997 Biographical Statement
How the 13th Harmonic Saved My Sorry Ass - for the microtonal conference at the University of Pittsburgh, 2015
Epiphanies column for The Wire magazine, July 2023

Conference papers and keynote addresses on Minimalism and Postminimalism:

A Course in Postminimalism - drawn from an article published in The Ashgate Guide to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, but expanded here with more examples; an ongoing project
"Fascinating Rhythm: John C. Adams as Metametric Pioneer," - keynote address for the UCLA Symposium "Inside the (G)earbox: John Adams @ 70," March 4, 2017
Keynote Address for the 2011 Minimalism Conference at the University of Leuven
Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser - delivered at the 2015 Minimalism conference, Helsinki
Robert Ashley as Minimalist - delivered at the 2013 Minimalism conference, Long Beach
Reconstructing November - my process for creating a performance score of Dennis Johnson's November, from the American Music journal, delivered at the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music in Kansas City in 2009
Downtown Beats for the 1990s: Rhys Chatham, Mikel Rouse, Michael Gordon, Larry Polansky, Ben Neill - the 1994 Contemporary Music Review article that spawned the Totalist movement

Papers and keynote addresses on microtonal music:

Keynote Address for the 2012 Harry Partch Conference in Boston
Regarding Ben: A Keynote Address to the Microtonal Conference at Wright State University (2010)
A Whole Different Serving of Tapioca: Exploring Just Intonation Dissonance - for the 1/1 journal (PDF)
"La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano", published in Perspectives of New Music, Winter 1993 (PDF)
"The Outer Edge of Consonance" from the book Sound and Light: La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela (PDF)
Key Eccentricity in Ben Johnston's Suite for Microtonal Piano - for the Huygens-Fokker journal (PDF)
Glimpses of a Musical Future in Ben Johnston's Fourth Quartet - for the 1/1 journal (PDF)
Navigating the Infinite Web of Pitch Space - for the Open Space journal, Spring 2000 (PDF)

Conference papers and keynote addresses on other American music:

"How Ives Composed: The Geiringer Lecture", a talk on Ives's First Piano Sonata presented at the University of Santa Barbara, 2015
Outside the Feedback Loop: A Nancarrow Keynote Address, 2014
"In Dispraise of Efficiency: Morton Feldman", presented January 27, 2008 at the Icebreaker festival in Seattle
Silence in the Rearview Mirror, presented at the 2012 Cage100 conference in Lublin, Poland
Keynote Address for the 2009 Festival of Charles Ives Songs at Wesleyan University
A Pre-Concert Talk on Ives's Concord Sonata (2015)
From Hits to Niches - my keynote address for the Canadian New Music Network, 2007
The Longyear Lecture - delivered at the University of Kentucky on February 8, 2008
A Talk on John Cage's 4'33" - delivered at the New World Symphony's Cage Festival in 2013
The Uneasy, Unarticulated State of American Music - delivered at the 2013 ISCM Conference in Vienna
Keynote Address to The Extensible Toy Piano - delivered at Clark University in 2005
The Percussion Music of John J. Becker, from Percussive Arts Journal, March 1984 (PDF)

Journalistic articles on Downtown music:

"The Importance of Being Downtown" - introduction to the book Music Downtown
A Forest from the Seeds of Minimalism: An Essay on Postminimal and Totalist Music (1.4.99)
Downtown Music: An Encyclopedia Article (6.25.05)
Breaking the Chain Letter: An Essay on Downtown Music (4.18.98)
What Women's Music Does, or Doesn't, Mean: An Essay on Women Composers (5.2.99)
Banging on Pianos: The Permanent Nature of America's Classical Tradition (7.10.00)
"We are living in the new Soviet Union": a credo about censorship and the internet

Interviews with Kyle Gann:

Kyle Gann Speaks About Deutsche Grammophon Avant-Garde at Burning Ambulence, Sept. 20, 2023
"2.3.5.7.11.13 JI - Kyle Gann" - Stephen Weigel and Jacob Barton interview Gann about his microtonal music with many audio examples, Oct. 31, 2019; or listen here
"To Get the Ball Rolling Again": Kyle Gann Speaks About His Hyperchromatica - by Robert Carl for Fanfare, Sept/Oct 2018
"Kyle Gann: On Both Sides of the Fence," by Frank Oteri, New Music Box, March 1, 2010
Pitch and Rhythm Guy - Gayle Young and David McCallum interview Gann for Musicworks, Summer 2008
(Audio) John Schafer's Interview with Kyle Gann, July 8, 2005 on WNYC
Daniel Varela's interview with Kyle Gann on Perfect Sound Forever web magazine (May 2004)
Jeff Lunden interviews Kyle Gann about My father moved through dooms of love
John Ruscher interiews Kyle Gann about John Cage's 4'33"
Kirk McElhearn interviews Kyle Gann about John Cage's 4'33"

Links to Kyle Gann's Articles on Other Web Sites:

Mars and Music, for the Oxford University Press blog.

Kyle Gann's blog PostClassic, as in Post-Classical music, at Arts Journal
The Minnesota Public Radio show American Mavericks, written by Kyle Gann and hosted by Suzanne Vega and Michael Tilson Thomas - winner of the Peabody Award:

1. "What Is a Maverick?"
2. "What Is American about American Music?"
3. "Oh, to Be Popular!"
4. "It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got that Swing"
5. "If You Build It, They Will Come"
6. "West Meets East"
7. "If Jackson Pollock Wrote Music"
8. "To Repeat or Not to Repeat, That Is the Question"
9. "The Do-It-Yourself Composer"
10. "What's So Great about the Orchestra?" [omitted from the American Mavericks web site]
11. "From Moog to Mark II, to MIDI to MAX"
12. "Is It Music If Nobody Hears It?"
13. "Between a Rock and a Hard Place?"

From Folk Song to the Outer Limits of Harmony: Remembering Ben Johnston (1926-2019), August 2, 2019

Intuition and Algorithm in Einstein on the Beach - on New Music Box

Fairbanks: A Long Ride in a Slow Machine, John Luther Adams's The Place Where You Go to Listen (3.29.2006)

Making Marx in the Music - a history of political music on New Music Box (you can also read it here on a PDF
Minimal Music, Maximal Impact - a history of minimalist, postminimalist, and totalist music on New Music Box - winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (12.01.01)
Between U S - a survey of alternate and historical tunings on New Music Box (9.1.00)
Back to Nature - Tracing the History of an American Classical tradition on New Music Box (4.1.02)
Read Kyle Gann's recent columns from the Village Voice, back to September 1998, at villagevoice.com
Read Kyle Gann's articles, and articles about him, in the New York Times at nytimes.com (for a small charge via Qpass)

Responses to Gann's work:

Everywhere at Once: John Luther Adams on Kyle Gann on the March 2003 New Music Box. (5.8.03)
Paul Griffiths' review of Kyle Gann's February 19, 1998, concert in the New York Times
Bernard Holland's response in the New York Times to Kyle Gann's American Music in the Twentieth Century (6.1.98)
Allan Kozinn's' review of the New York premiere of Kyle Gann's Custer and Sitting Bull in the New York Times (12.12.00)

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