Kyle Gann
Robert Ashley
*2024 stock* This book explores the life and works of Robert Ashley, one of the leading American composers of the post-Cage generation. Ashley's innovations began in the 1960s when he, along with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman, formed the Sonic Arts Union, a group that turned conceptualism toward electronics. He was also instrumental in the influential ONCE Group, a theatrical ensemble that toured extensively in the 1960s. During his tenure as its director, the ONCE Festival in An…
Music Downtown Writings from the Village Voice
*2023 stock* This collection represents the cream of the more than five hundred articles written for the Village Voice by Kyle Gann, a leading authority on experimental American music of the late twentieth century. Charged with exploring every facet of cutting-edge music coming out of New York City in the 1980s and '90s, Gann writes about a wide array of timely issues that few critics have addressed, including computer music, multiculturalism and its thorny relation to music, music for the AIDS …
Hyperchromatica
On his latest recording, Hyperchromatica, Kyle Gann expands on Conlon Nancarrow’s work with player pianos and multiplies it. This expansive new work was written for three computer-controlled disklavier pianos that Gann tuned to an intricate system of his own design, with the express goal to “reinvent tonality.” Gann treats the work not as a piano trio but a work for a single instrument with 243 keys. Hyperchromatica extends the possibilities of the piano well beyond the range of human possibilit…
Long Night
Kyle Gann's Long Night is exquisitely drifting, ever-unfolding music for three pianos that sometimes play independently and at other times in synchronization with one another. Gann calls this “the most successful piece from my early, Brian-Eno-influenced, ambient period, a variable-length piece for three non-synchronized pianos at different tempos.”For this recording, all three piano parts were recorded by Sarah Cahill.The composer writes about the piece:“I wrote Long Night very much under the i…