Custer's Ghost
The electronic music of Kyle Gann
by Jason Stanyek
I've always read Kyle Gann's writings on music as the ruminations of a composer. His columns in the Village Voice, his books on Conlon Nancarrow and American music, and the myriad other reviews and articles he has penned are replete with observations that only a composer could make. His ears are composer's ears and this is what distinguishes him from the large majority of critics out there who have the luxury of critical distance.
Composers don't listen to music the same way that other people do. Forgive the hokey analogy - but it's like a farmer looking at vegetables or an auto mechanic peering at an engine; between the observer and the observed there is a kind of intimacy, a rapport predicated on lived connections.
This is the main reason why Gann's criticism is, all at once, so brilliant and provocative, so trenchant and idiosyncratic - aloofness is not an option for him. A composerly sensibility infuses his writings and these are always characterized by a high level of engagement and an overwhelming sense that music matters. This quality has always jumped off the page at me; I've often wondered if anyone else noticed.
This CD will put to rest any doubt that Gann is, first and foremost, a composer.
I'm not trying to say that his other work is unimportant or incidental. For the past 20 years Gann the musicologist, critic and educator has left an indelible mark on the contemporary music world. My point is that his writings (which are, in many senses, "pre-compositional studies") can no longer be dealt with in isolation from his compositions.
The six pieces on this disc are sonic manifestations of the enormous breadth of Gann's knowledge and musicality. Brought to bear here are his intimate relationships with Nancarrow's complex tempo canons, the disparate approaches to just intonation found in the musics of Partch, Johnston and LaMonte Young, the wide discursive universe of Ashley's operas, the cyclic loops of Glass and Reich, Native American ritual and rhythmic techniques, the proportional rhythmic structures of Cage, country and western music. I could go on.
But what we get here are in no sense mere amalgamations. Gann's music is certainly eclectic but his sources are always fully digested. He never resorts to pastiche, he never appropriates. His sonic world is an emergent one.
This world is undoubtedly large but it is bounded with concerns which grow out of two different strains of American music. On one end of the spectrum there is the populist tradition which peaked in the 1930s and 1940s with composers such as Hanson, Harris, Barber and Copland; it is from this sumptuous tradition that Gann gets his predilection for accessibility and grand American themes, his lyricism (there is much here), and his lush but lucid orchestration (don't let the fact that these pieces are electronic fool you into thinking that there is no orchestration involved).
On the other side there is the experimental tradition and its unremitting (and unrepentant) voracity for the new: the kind of attitude towards music making that would drive someone like Henry Cowell to stick his hands inside the piano, or Harry Partch, quite unpragmatically, to devise his own scale and build his own instruments, or Conlon Nancarrow to spend decades sequestered away in Mexico City laboriously punching out canons into player piano rolls.
Gann is one of the few composers who can negotiate the terrain between these two discourses and break down the distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric. None of his "totalist" comrades have been able to do this to such a degree. And this is what separates Custer and Sitting Bull from a piece like Mikel Rouse's Failing Kansas (although there are many, many resemblances).
In this regard, it is Ives (the master at steering through the antipodes), who needs to be recognized as Gann's main progenitor. (Check out the truly Ivesian moment in "Custer: If I Were an Indian..." where Gann quotes "Garry Owen," the old Irish drinking song which Custer transformed into a cavalry charge.) Like Ives before him, Gann has his ear to the ground of history; he hears clearly what's behind and also what's ahead. His uncanny knack for utilizing the most complex rhythmic and pitch structures without sacrificing intelligibility is also something he inherits from Ives. And, most importantly, the diversity that undergirds the music of both composers is always mediated by their personal histories. For instance, the elegiac, heart-wrenching setting of Kenneth Patchen's line in So Many Little Dyings was triggered by the death of his mother-in-law; the title How Miraculous Things Happen was (imploringly) suggested by to him by his son; Gann's upbringing in the Southwest conditioned his love for Native American culture and this affection, in turn, provides the musical and spiritual foundation for so many of his pieces, including, the obvious centerpiece of this disc, the monumental Custer and Sitting Bull.
It is in Custer and Sitting Bull that Gann puts it all together. Or, I should say, he breaks it all down. This piece is, at its core, an acknowledgment of the difficulty of ascribing fixed identities to complex entities. Gann takes a slice out the history of Native American/Anglo American relations and flips it around so that we can see it from a new angle; he opens up a discursive space within which he can re-present history, with all its contradictions and disjunctures intact.
This discursive space is not engendered simply through Gann's nuanced setting of his well-chosen texts. His recitations, which reside on the treacherous but lovely precipice between the spoken and the sung, certainly do contribute a great deal towards the creation of a truly polyvalent narrative. (Particularly poignant is the imploring realization of Sitting Bull's "Do you recognize me, do you know who I am?" which Gann intones in a manner very much reminiscent of Rzewski's invocatory piece To The Earth.) But for me, it's Gann's masterful ability to harness the subtle pitch gradations of just intonation which makes his Custer and Sitting Bull such a vivid depiction of a manifold reality.
Just intonation is not simply a system which helps a composer utilize the infinite number of pitch relationships found in the natural overtone series; it is also a tool which broadens the composer's palette and increases the possibilities for more detailed and profound representations. Gann takes what are essentially quantifiable numerical relationships and turns them into qualities and structures of feeling. This is why Custer succeeds so well in portraying the subtleties of an incredibly intricate moment in American history.
It is not only in Custer that Gann puts just intonation to good use. In Fractured Paradise he uses a seven-limit, 16-tone B minor scale (complete with three different "versions" of both the minor third and the minor sixth) to transform the otherwise innocuous harmonic and melodic world of country and western music into something startling and gorgeous (listen for the exquisite use of two different "A"s about a quarter-tone apart in the entrance of the flute melody at about 50 seconds into the piece). In Ghost Town he combines Partch's 43-tone scale (heard in the sampled goose calls) with a septimal eight-tone diatonic scale (which La Monte Young could have devised) to create the kind of quirky, sarcastic piece that Partch would've loved.
The labyrinthine How Miraculous Things Happen explodes the rigid dichotomy between major and minor and shows just how subtle and elegant microtonal modulations can be. In So Many Little Dyings microtonality enables Gann to create a lovely symbiosis between Kenneth Patchen's voice and a sampled toy piano and also to audibly reflect the "many" in Patchen's line "There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death."
And be sure of this: Gann's music thrives on the "many."
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Jason Stanyek is a composer, guitarist and writer. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Critical Studies and Experimental Practices program at UCSD.