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SEQUENZA21/
340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Zookeeper:   
Jerry Bowles
(212) 582-3791

Managing Editor:
David Salvage

 Contributing Editors:
Galen H. Brown
Evan Johnson
Ian Moss
Lanier Sammons
Deborah Kravetz
(Philadelphia)
Eric C. Reda
(Chicago)
Christian Hertzog
(San Diego)
Jerry Zinser
(Los Angeles)

Web & Wiki Master:
Jeff Harrington

Latest Posts
Fourth of July Eve
Lumina String Quartet at Europe/Asia 2005 Festival of Modern Music in Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia - Part 3
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A Friday in July
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Monday, Monday


 

Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for review. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Monday, July 04, 2005
Gone to Look For America

There could hardly be a better musical metaphor for this big loud, messy, gregarious, conflicted, na�ve, sentimental, dangerous, scary and wonderful country than the second movement of Charles Ives� Three Places in New England. Few works can approach it in degree of influence on future generations of composers. Its heady blend of brassy aw-shucks Americana and sophisticated warring tempos is irrestistable and has led many an impressionable young mind to abandon common sense for a life in music making.

All of which is a way of suggesting that if you should find yourself driving down the Henry Cowell Expressway this fine Fourth of July, turn off at Colin Nacarrow Boulevard and make your way over to Kyle Gann Plaza where the ghosts and ancestors of Ives� clashing marching bands are still merging and converging in a cacaphony of rhythmic disharmony.

Like Ives� iconic masterpiece, the pieces on Gann�s new CD, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator: Studies for Disklavier (New World 80633-2), are concerned not just with any sounds and rhythms but mainly �American� sounds and rhythms. Using the Disklavier�s computer-driven ability to go where human beings cannot go in terms of tempo and velocity, Gann brilliantly deconstructs familiar genres like ragtime, boogie-woogie, bop and Tex-Mex and reassembles the pieces in ways that are hauntingly familiar and completely new, popular and avant garde, steady and revolutionary, experimental and polished. The unique blend of exaggerated rhythms, microtonal tunings and populist hooks gives his music a sound that manages to be simultaneously fresh and nostalgic, and completely unlike that of anyone else writing today. Gann demonstrates that you don�t need an orchestra or a couple of brass bands to create first-rate musical fireworks. Imagination and Yankee ingenuity will do the trick.

Old Charlie would have been proud. Happy Fourth.
posted by Jerry Bowles 7/04/2005



 
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