“I’ve been going through a phase of naming pieces after the places I conceived them in, and percussionist Kerry O’Brien convinced me to write a vibraphone piece for her friend Andy Bliss on the day we visited Olana, the estate of the Hudson Valley Painter Frederick Church. The piece does little more than try to capture and sustain a mood. If I were to add a rather dry technical note, I could say that I arrived at its particular tonality by looking at the vibraphone key layout and thinking about the problem of trying to change interval size with the two mallets in one hand. I tried to turn that challenge into an advantage by arranging the tonality over each changing drone note to maximize the unchanging position of parallel intervals - resulting, I hope, in a piece that lends itself to an expressive performance.” - Kyle Gann
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Kyle Gann, born 1955 in Dallas, Texas, is a composer and was new-music critic for the Village Voice from 1986 to 2005. Since 1997 he has taught music history and theory at Bard College. He is the author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press, 1995), American Music in the 20th Century (Schirmer Books, 1997), and Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (University of California Press, 2006).
Gann studied composition with Ben Johnston, Morton Feldman, and Peter Gena, and his music is often microtonal, using up to 37 pitches per octave. His rhythmic language, based on differing successive and simultaneous tempos, was developed from his study of Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo Indian musics. His music has been performed on the New Music America, Bang on a Can, and Spoleto festivals. His major works include Sunken City, a piano concerto commissioned by the Orkest de Volharding in Amsterdam; Transcendental Sonnets, a 35-minute work for choir and orchestra commissioned by the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir; The Planets, commissioned by the Relache ensemble via Music in Motion and continued under a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists' Fellowship; and The Hudson River Trilogy, a trio of microtonal chamber operas written with librettist Jeffrey Sichel, the first of which, Cinderella's Bad Magic, was premiered in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In addition to Bard, Gann has taught at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, the School of the Art Instutute of Chicago, and Bucknell University. His writings include more than 2400 articles for more than 45 publications, including scholarly articles on La Monte Young (in Perspectives of New Music), Henry Cowell, Mikel Rouse, and other American composers. He writes the "American Composer" column for Chamber Music magazine, and he was awarded the Stagebill Award (1999) and Deems-Taylor Award (2003) for music criticism. His music is available on the New Albion, New World, Cold Blue, Lovely Music, New Tone, and Monroe Street labels. In 2003, the American Music Center awarded Gann its Letter of Distinction, along with Steve Reich, Wayne Shorter, and George Crumb.
