Author Archives: Kyle Gann

Composer Elodie Lauten has consulted the I Ching–the ancient Chinese “Book of Changes”–every day since 1975. “At this point,” she says, “I no longer have to consult the book for the reading.” Composer John Cage made the I Ching famous among musicians by throwing coins to arrive at random procedures for his music. Lauten, however, […]

The wind chill is 50 below in Moorhead, Minnesota. Sick of fighting it, Henry Gwiazda is cooped up inside, playing baby gurgles and bird tweeps. Gwiazda’s music has the momentum of rock, the soaring guitar gestures of jazz. The sounds, though, are an aural zoo of non sequiturs: a rooster crows, car horns honk, engines […]

Accordionist Guy Klucevsek intones one caveat for those tempted to come to his concerts. “Remember,” he cautions, “this isn’t weird music for polka people, these are polkas for weird people.” Klucevsek–to pronounce his name, say the “c” as an “s,” and leave out the “s”–doesn’t look like a weird person as he explains the wrinkle […]

Margaret Leng Tan hovers over the smaller of her two Steinway grand pianos. She presses a chord. Slowly, her hands sweep into the inside of the piano to pluck a cluster of strings. Striking a low note, she damps the string with her finger (“thud”), and then begins to apply various objects, flicking a string […]

“The whole world of music comes at us from all sides these days,” says Neil Rolnick, oblivious in this Indian restaurant to the guy playing ambient music on the African kora immediately behind him. “Looking back, what I got from studying with [French composer] Darius Milhaud is that–he lived over the Place Pigalle [the red-light […]

When Nicolas Collins paid $12 for his trombone, it looked like any ordinary beat-up trombone. Today it looks like no other trombone in the world. Attached to the slide is a small circuit board with 19 buttons: 16 red, 3 black. There’s no mouthpiece; it’s been replaced by a round, black speaker driver, a device […]

Years ago, when the Composers Quartet and Concord Quartet were the leading interpreters of American string music and before the Kronos Quartet was a twinkle in its first violinist’s eye, a name was reverently whispered in new music circles: the Arditti. We had heard that this avant-garde quartet from England seemed capable of anything and […]

Pierre Boulez was recently asked why American minimalist music, popular in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, had had little influence in France, Germany, and Italy. “If I wanted to be nasty,” he grinned slyly, “I could say it’s because we have culture.” Perhaps Boulez’s colleagues are less cultured than he’d like to believe. New musical winds […]