Nude Rolling Down an Escalator: Studies for Disklavier

Kyle Gann (Composer)

Product Details

• Composer: Kyle Gann
• Audio CD (June 7, 2005)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: New World Records
• ASIN: B0009RYGPO
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #231,906 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
“Some of the rhythms developed through the present acoustical investigation could not be played by any living performer; but these highly engrossing rhythmical complexes could easily be cut on a player-piano roll. This would give a real reason for writing music specially for player-piano . . .” —Henry Cowell Like many composers of subsequent generations, Kyle Gann (born 1955) was captivated by Cowell’s theories and Nancarrow’s music. His book, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, is the essential source for any serious study of Nancarrow’s work. Knowing so much about Nancarrow’s music, it’s hardly surprising that it would occur to Gann to consider the question of how he might make the mechanical piano his own. His answer is the music on this recording. The instrument isn’t exactly the same. Nancarrow employed the old-fashioned player piano, driven by paper rolls with holes punched in them. Gann uses the more recent Disklavier, which is controlled by a computer via MIDI data. However, like Nancarrow, Gann employs the mechanical piano for both musical and practical reasons. The musical attraction, of course, is the one Cowell observed: The instrument allows the composer to compose with tempo relationships and rhythmic velocities not readily playable by human performers. The practical appeal is that Gann felt that not enough people were playing his music. So in the do-it-yourself spirit of Nancarrow, Lou Harrison, Harry Partch and so many other American composers, he decided to take matters into his own virtual hands. But although Gann’s reasons for working with the mechanical piano are similar to Nancarrow’s, the musical results are quite different. Gann picks up where Nancarrow left off, developing his own personal methods of working with multiple tempo layers, and weaving elements of popular and classical music into his vivid and distinctive musical tapestries. Gann’s music embraces a wide range of influences but sounds like no other. His fascination with complex tempo structures and microtonal tunings places him in the experimentalist tradition from Cowell to La Monte Young. Yet the directness and accessibility of his music reveal his affinity with American populists such as Roy Harris and Virgil Thomson. In this highly personal blend of experimentalism and populism, Gann’s closest musical forebears are Partch and Charles Ives. In the spirit of Ives, Gann’s music invokes ragtime, jazz, folk music and Native American music on equal footing with classical music and purely abstract sonic speculations.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful!, July 28, 2005

By	E. Ribeiro - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For a supposedly avant-garde disc, this one's a lot of fun, though there are serious parts as well - in general the first half is fun, the second serious. The music is all for Disklavier, which is a modern-day player piano. Gann is author of a book on Conlon Nancarrow, the expat recluse who wrote tons of music for player piano, and he obviously learned a lot about the instrument from that experience. But while his music sounds like Nancarrow's in places, it is more melodic, more conventionally harmonic, more whimsical - and maybe even easier to listen to for people who find Nancarrow forbidding. The pieces are very diverse - there's a tango, a stride piano piece, a bebop piece, and a waltz, among other things, all made eccentric by having the melodies and accompaniments at different tempos. Sometimes Gann's sense of humor is remarkable, as in the piece (Petty Larceny) composed entirely of quotations from Beethoven sonatas, cleverly superimposed. The last piece, Unquiet Night, accounting for 16 out of 61 minutes, uses the sustain pedal all the way through, and is an impressionist blur of changing harmonies. There are many beautiful moments, many funny ones, and I think the disc could appeal to a lot of people not usually interested in modern music.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Profound, Accessible, Beautiful, July 31, 2005

By	Noah Creshevsky "composer" (New York City) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For anyone interested in experiencing new musical pleasures, there is hardly a more appealing disc than this one, featuring 10 works for Disklavier. Kyle Gann is high on a short list of America's most significant--and most significantly undervalued composers. These extraordinary pieces ought to go a long way toward confirming Gann's place as an American original and one its finest composers. Understandably, much is made of Gann's extensive musical and academic background, but what sets his music apart is his innate talent, the strength of his ear, and the breadth of his musical imagination. Gann's seamless integration of popular and classical elements, together with his sense of humor make these pieces easy to hear, even by listeners who do not often encounter new music. But just beneath a veil of levity and accessibility are deep layers of complexities that make these pieces an ongoing joy for serious listeners. It's a disc that can be heard repeatedly with pleasure. These are works of probable historical importance by one of our best composers.

2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Is Modernity over? the Disklavier will tell you, January 20, 2006

By	scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

At the Alemeda Festival in the Eighties, after a concert with John Cage, a ticket holder went backstage, there was a question & answer period,"dear Mr. Cage, you know anyone can do what you do, pluck a string, tap the piano body,what makes your work so unique?. . ." Cage responded, " . . .
I do it and you don't " those that claim this is not music, nor interesting, arbitrary, boring,no high levels of craft engaged,of sophistication, uninteresting etc, should see that modernity is over,or simply we are still realizing aspects of modernity transcended in its former life, as Jameson says someplace, modernity is about fixing a time, temporality,so everyone's modernity begins at different times,for many the music of Phil Glass is the Year Zero for the history of music, anything prior is marginal in importance. I think Gann looks much deeper the trajectories within the history of music and tries to find useful interesting contexts for which to write music. For context, form and concept is really all we have.Adorno said someplace that "Form" is the true test of longevity in music, what we shape and how we think about what we shape and give form to, is all we have in the neo-liberal order; and Gann's pieces here prooves that the agenda for music creativity should simply proceed,proceeding, keeping going, has an "ethics" about it, surrounding the subject with conviction; Gann's music prooves the late Deleuze in some respects that without the aid, the comfort of the "grand narrative" all creators do now is attentuate "fragments, particles" from the lifeworld unpretenciously, and meaning relevance can be found anywhere. I think in much of the music that gets promoted many times the concept is stronger than the actual musical results,especially within the "complexity" cadre, where the music resembles an elaborate elegant dinner setting where the food never comes; but in Gann's case he is a sensitive musician always looking at the real time realization of what his music does.
Keyboard timbres,electric,clavichords, and Discklaviers re-tuned or otherwise has become a sort of a signature focus of his work. His use of farfisa organs in his Eighties music for example has a kind a cheapness to it,a particle timbre from the American lifeworld that has a fascination, like it is an integral part of the meaning of the landscape itself with "greasy-spoon diners",or secondhand gift stores,the homeless panhandlers On another level the poverty/hypocrisy of ideology in American entertainment is another fragment we live with and make music with everyday. The "real" is always simple just that unless it undergoes fetishization, and how can we live without the fetish of the object.But we have become fixed on myth in some respects the glorification of "junkspace" as Rem Koolhaas might say. Gann doesn't quite go full-tilt in that direction for his work does not relish in the commonplace, it merely suggests it;He does believe in the power still of the musical genre,its form and accessibility of the character pieces as retaining substance. The Discklavier is also an uncharted genre, Srockhausen's latter klavierstuck #15 and 16 make use of it as well, but beyond that Gann has discovered a useful space here.

I found these pieces quite with the landscape,perhaps these works are telling us that this is reality, democracy is here and now, there is no future, or if there is one well create it. Certainly the influence of Nanacarrow is prevalent here, the early music automata of the Player Piano, another quite useful invention for the American social lifeworld, it was the focus the center for family entertainment, as the sheets rolling from Tin Pan Alley, WEll, here Gann explores the landscape with his own personal blends of Southwest culture.