Santa Fe New Music continued its 2003-2004 season with two concerts by
composer and music critic Kyle Gann. These took place Friday, March 12,
2004 at 8:00 pm and Saturday, March 13, also at 8:00 pm at the Center
for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe. Kyle Gann is well-known as our nation's leading musicologist for late
20th century and contemporary music (for The Village Voice and
the New York Times, among others), but he is first and foremost
a singular composer whose work ranges from haunting social commentary
to mesmerizing kaleidoscopes of complex rhythms and altered tunings.
Gann performed his one-man opera Custer's Ghost, as well as
recent and brand-new works for disklavier including Texarkana, Nude
Rolling Down an Escalator, and Bud Ran Back Out. In these recent electronic works, Gann has elevated the digitally enhanced
but oft-misunderstood disklavier to remarkable artistic heights. This
"computer-age player piano" has become, under Gann's artful
composition skill, a true cohort in microtonal musicality. "To me,
Kyle Gann is one of the most remarkable musical minds of our time,"
says Kennedy. "His music is unlike any other we hear, but most importantly,
it is infused with spirit, feeling, and innate musicality." In addition to the two concerts, Gann participated in a roundtable
discussion with James Keller, Chris Shultis, and John Kennedy, a spirited gathering of four
of our nation's leading experts in contemporary classical music. This
roundtable discussion, free of charge, took place on Saturday, March 13,
at 5:30 pm at the Center for Contemporary Arts. It was made possible in
part by a grant from the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities.
Program Notes
Since I first heard Kyle Gann's music in Chicago in 1984, I was convinced
I was hearing the music of a composer working in altogether unique ways.
Twenty years later, Kyle's voice has proven to be one of the most original,
interesting, and provocative voices in music today. Gann has a prolific
body of work in both traditional and experimental genres, always facile
and communicative. Tonight, these recent works highlight the vanguard
of "solo" works with digital technologies, and though modest
in their resources, display the breadth and imagination of this very gifted
composer.
– John Kennedy
Program Notes by Kyle Gann
How Miraculous Things Happen – In 1996,
my son Bernard began to insist that I write a piece entitled How Miraculous
Things Happen. I began this Tuning Study without a title, and finally
realized that Bernard's title suggested interesting possibilities for
this piece. The work deals, after all, with the transformation of disappointment
into triumph, or—on the most literal level—with the gradual
transformation of minor into major, along a series of microtonal steps.
The scale employed contains 24 pitches per octave in an eleven-limit just-intonation
system, two of those pitches appearing only in the final measures. (The
piece is not at all quarter-tone; some of those pitches follow a fairly
chromatic scale, others are squeezed much closer together.) The piece
is dedicated, naturally, to Bernard.
Fractured Paradise – The idea behind Fractured Paradise (Tuning Study No. 3) was very simple. I wanted
to see what would happen if you took a typical country & western idiom
and tuned it perfectly. I stole a bass line from a country song (never
mind which one - its own author wouldn't want it back after I've finished
with it), and used enough pitches so that every chord would be exactly
in tune. The result was a non-chromatic scale with 16 pitches to the octave,
even though there are only eight scale steps represented. Fractured Paradise
is dedicated to my wife Nancy.
So Many Little Dyings – Since
college I have been a big fan of the San Francisco poet Kenneth Patchen,
one of the most compassionate, lively, human voices in modern poetry.
(I think of him as the John Cage of poetry, only far more emotional.)
In July of 1994 my mother-in-law died, and in August death was on my mind.
I had always loved Patchen's line, "There are so many little dyings
that it doesn't matter which of them is death." I sampled his voice
reading it from one of his Folkways recordings, deciphered the inadvertent
pitches and rhythms of his speech, and based this work for keyboard sampler
on the phrase. At first the sentence is imitated by sampled toy piano
in a microtonal scale, but gradually the toy piano is replaced, phrase
by phrase, with Patchen's warm voice.
Texarkana – Texarkana was the birthplace
of both Conlon Nancarrow and Scott Joplin. Nancarrow's favorite pianists
were Earl Hines and Art Tatum. Had Nancarrow (1912-1997) and Joplin (1868-1917)
ever worked together, or influenced each other, we might have had a ragtime
of transcendent rhythmic complexity. Joplin liked his ragtime slow, however,
and the Disklavier is a fast medium, so I split the difference between
Joplin and Hines and applied Nancarrow's techniques to an early-jazz,
stride piano style derived from James P. Johnson (1894-1955). Texarkana is built almost throughout on a fast basic rhythm of 29 in the virtual
"right hand" against 13 in the "left," with a couple
of Johnson quotes, one small Joplin one, and ending in a skewed version
of James P.'s solo "Jingles," as recorded in 1930. The piece
is dedicated to John Esposito, who may play it any time he likes.
Nude Rolling Down an Escalator– The
20th century began with a "Nude Descending a Staircase," and
I thought it should end this way. Even modernism has its moments.
Petty Larceny – There are days when
you don't have an original thought in your head. At such moments, theft
is always an option. Just make sure you steal from the big guys. Dedicated,
naturally, to Peter Schickele.
Bud Ran Back Out – The question was
whether I could make the Disklavier respond as fast as Bud Powell played.
Doubting that I could surpass him, I added some tricks that I hope Powell
might have envied, such as playing his ultrafast melodies in chromatic
sixths and triple octaves, and simultaneous melodies in tempo ratios of
7 against 8 against 9. It was time for technology to provide a new spin
on Thelonious Monk's composition In Walked Bud. The piece is dedicated
to Thurman Barker.
Custer and Sitting Bull – Custer and Sitting
Bull—an electronic cantata, if you will—is a musical
document of two male egos, taken as symbolic of the tragic clash of two
cultures. My aim was to juxtapose statements each made throughout his
career, many of them mutually self-contradictory; the complexity of their
personalities thus revealed precludes, I feel, the possibility of a simple
or unequivocal response. At greatest issue, of course, is the alleged
guilt of George Armstrong Custer: once a hero to many generations of American
schoolboys, more recently a scapegoat for everything considered culpable
about the white male. The text to "Custer: If I Were an Indian…"
is mostly taken from Custer's autobiographical My Life on the Plains,
which was first published serially, starting in May 1872, in a belles
lettres magazine called The Galaxy (which later merged with The Atlantic).
In early installments, Custer showed considerable sympathy for the Indians
he was pursuing. If he were an Indian, he muses, he would rather join
his comrades hunting on the plains than confine himself to a reservation.
The nonchalance with which he admits this is shocking, given that his
assignment was precisely to hunt down and kill any Indians who refused
to live on the reservations.
In later chapters—either because portraying the Indians as savages
added to his reputation, because he was being pressured to justify the
Army's genocidal Indian policy, or some other reason—his tone changes,
and he sets down some of the coarsest, ugliest statements of hateful bigotry
ever committed to print. What changed? His early sympathetic remarks have
an air of sincerity, while the later bigoted ones seem forced, overstated
for badly calculated effect. The middle part of the movement evokes the
1868 "battle" of the Washita, in which Custer claimed to have
killed 103 Cheyenne warriors; what he actually achieved was to kill 11
warriors and massacre 92 women, children, and old men. The band stormed
in at daybreak playing Custer's favorite tune "Garry Owen,"
quoted here at length. The last section, beginning with a litany of military
crimes Custer didn't commit, is taken from Custer's written defense at
his court-martial. (Here and elsewhere I have streamlined Custer's eloquent
19th-century English; no military leader today could match Custer for
fluency of literary style.)
This latter event preceded the Washita battle by a year, but I have placed
it last to allow the final words—"Judge me not by what is known
now, but in the light of what I knew when these events transpired"—to
serve as a defense for Custer's entire life, and perhaps by extension
as an epitaph for the white male in general, of which he is so archetypal
a symbol. Custer's ambivalence is nicely matched by that of his enemy
Sitting Bull. Clearly, Sitting Bull was the greater man, a true spiritual
leader, but he was not blind to the value of good public relations. Granting
interviews to reporters, he would claim in humility that he was no chief,
just a man. Facing U.S. government agents, he would revel proudly in his
chiefhood and boast of his importance. His actions never seem mendacious
or self-serving, yet he did keep a fluid enough view of reality to change
stories as circumstances seemed to require.
The second movement, "Sitting Bull: Do You Know Who I Am?",
contrasts quotations from Sitting Bull's speeches from various parts of
his life, and is based on a song attributed to Sitting Bull and written
down second-hand after his death. "Sun Dance / Battle of the Greasy-Grass
River" depicts the fateful encounter of the two men, the Battle of
the Little Bighorn, in which the Sioux killed 263 soldiers including Custer's
entire command—the greatest military victory the Indians were ever
to enjoy over the American army. (Greasy-Grass River was the Sioux name
for the Little Bighorn River.) Before the battle, Sitting Bull performed
a sun dance, cutting notches of flesh in his arms and legs and letting
the blood run down until he had a vision. The vision he had was of white
cavalry and soldiers falling down, as a voice said, "I give you these
because they have no ears."; The Sun Dance uses motives from a war
song Frances Densmore recorded from Isna'la-wica', or Lone Man, a Teton
Sioux who had participated in two sun dances and who fought with Sitting
Bull at the Little Bighorn.
The rhythms of the battle scene are based on the text of the frantic
note that Custer dictated to his aide during the battle, his last words
to posterity: "Benteen, Come on, big village. Be quick. Bring packs.
P.S. Bring pacs [sic]." The original note can be seen today in the
museum at West Point Military Academy, Custer's alma mater. The actual
battle lasted only fifteen minutes, so at two and a half minutes it is
represented here at a scale of 1:6. According to a Lakota Sioux tradition,
Sitting Bull visited the battlefield after the battle, where the ghost
of George Armstrong Custer appeared to him; only after one's death did
the two meet face to face. "Custer to Sitting Bull" is a setting
of the alleged text of Custer's posthumous speech, taken from an old astrology
book by psychic Martin Schulman, who claimed to have channeled it from
the spirit of Sitting Bull. That was good enough assurance for me. Undoubtedly
Custer's worst act, for which he should fry in hell for a billion years,
was the Washita River massacre—but in this Custer was merely following
army policy, and he was afterward rewarded by commendations from General
Phil Sheridan and the Secretary of War.
The charges against him at his court martial seem trumped up (he was
charged with shooting—though not killing—deserters who were
resisting arrest, and for leaving the post to visit his wife, both of
which he had been given permission to do in advance), while his actions
at the Little Bighorn are militarily defensible, given what he knew at
the time. Custer was a popular Civil War hero, and many jealous enemies
yearned to cut him down to size. He testified against corruption in Grant's
administration, for which Grant got revenge by putting control of the
disastrous 1876 Indian campaign in Alfred Terry's hands, a situation partly
responsible for Custer's defeat. For 120 years Custer has been singled
out, made to bear America's genocidal sins on his shoulders alone. But
his real crime, a crime he shared with thousands of his contemporaries
and with untold millions in this century, is that he handed over his personal
responsibility to a corrupt social structure. Custer's tragedy—perhaps
a basic white male tragedy—is that a person so daring and brilliant
in carrying out his assignments had no moral compass with which to judge
the humaneness of those assignments. "Custer: If I Were an Indian..."
uses a scale of 20 pitches, actually made up of two pairs of major-minor
scales 257 cents apart. In short, there are two tonalities related more
or less by quarter-tones. Where Custer rationally contrasts Indian and
White cultures, the music flows smoothly between the scales. Where Custer
retreats into a narrow, white man's vision of life, only one of the scales
is used. And where he indulges in hypocrisy and dissembling, the two scales
combine, contradict, and sour each other. This is my first piece to extensively
explore just-intonation dissonance, which, as Harry Partch says, is "an
entirely different serving of tapioca" from equal tempered dissonance.
"Sitting Bull: Do You Know Who I Am?" weaves nuances around
Sitting Bull's quoted song in a 22-note-to-the-octave mode. The third
movement uses a complex scale of 30 pitches; 22 are used in the Sun Dance,
capitalizing on various dissonances between the perfect fourth and perfect
fifth, including the "wolf fifth" that European music spent
centuries avoiding; the other eight, outlining a tonality a tritone away,
come in during the Battle to symbolize the attacking cavalry. "Custer's
Ghost to Sitting Bull" is set in a more consonant 30-pitch scale
over a drone, meant to allow a sighing motion like that of the wind.
