Moving Meditations
by BLC ©2008
Kyle GANN: Private Dances (2000-04); Hovenweep (2000); Time Does Not Exist (2000); The Day Revisited (2005); On Reading Emerson (2006). Sarah Cahill, piano; Da Capo Chamber Players. New Albion, NA 137. (70:46)
Kyle Gann is that rare figure in today’s creative world – long obsessed with specialization – whom we can call a Renaissance man, albeit with the qualification “local” Renaissance man. No, he doesn’t paint the Sistine Chapel, but then Michelangelo didn’t write very much music. Gann is also a frequent traveler (in body and mind), a music critic (or, even better, an observer of the scene) and he is clearly a serious reader, and we learn this from the liner notes of his disc, notes which generously provide plenty of copy to make life a little easier for reviewers. But that does not mean he cooks up such difficult tonal art that we need a road map to get through it. He makes us listen and we hear some wonderful strokes in the mind of an artist who is also a quiet thinker.
There is a fairly new website now available that offers complete pieces of his. Listening to that download file we get a sense of the range of his musical monologues, music that is fresh and that sounds spontaneous, even though it may be carefully posed and worked out. He is smitten with ideas that are often highly technical, and, for example, in the CD liner notes here, he writes, “rhythmically, a lot of my music involves a paradigm in which repeating melodies of different lengths run out of phase with each other creating textures which are static, meditative, yet never really repetitive.” At the same time, his sources betray a man moved by great literature, especially by the quintessential poetic phrase, as this line from Emerson
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew.
That he admits he never completed a song begun while in college based on “The Rhodora,” because the rest of his music was not up to that inspiring line, shows an artist who is critical of himself and who seems unafraid of burning his bridges behind him. But rather touchingly, he credits Sarah Cahill – who suggested the subject – with “giving that orphaned phrase a home at last.” On Reading Emerson (2006) is the final work on the CD, and it serves as a worthy finale with its insights and sometimes dramatic flashes of wisdom.
The album title opus, Private Dances, covers six tracks, each one with music of a different mood. They are described as sexy, sad, sentimental, sultry, saintly and swingin.’ “Sexy,” the first of these alliterative titles, written in 2000, is made up of a hummable tune that leads the first-time listener perhaps to the deception that much of the same will follow, making it a good opener for that reason. Interestingly, the remaining five “dances” were written four years later in “a burst of creativity.” Should those titles be taken literally? Like any product of a sophisticated creative artist, if you were to take a sample of people and ask them for their reactions to these pieces without prior description you would no doubt get a different reaction from each listener. For one thing, Gann is as serious about the use of the word “private” as he is of the so-called “dance” label. These are about conditions that move his mind to expression, not literal body movement. Only when we get to “Swingin’” does the beat pick up and then some. This is herky-jerky, heavily syncopated music that might tempt a modern dancer to “get down.”
There is a dance the listener – at least this listener – also senses in Hovenweep. It is one of Gann’s many works inspired by Native American cultures in the Southwest. The title represents a still-standing ancient village on the Utah-Colorado border built by the Anasazi civilization, which lasted close to two millennia and then suddenly and inexplicably disappeared around 1300. While archeology may have been the basis for these temporal/historical facts, only the composer’s mind is left to determine what sort of music these people sang and danced to. The piece involves passages from several different solo instruments – flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano – which portray characters as might appear in one of those tragic/majestic pageants, such as “Unto These Hills,” once performed by Cherokees in western North Carolina. Here, each instrument does its own steps, except for the cello, which, in its deep, grumbling bass voice could be interpreted as the chief presiding over the ritual. There most definitely is an authenticity here that emerges from the experiences that have fed Kyle Gann’s imagination.
Time Does Not Exist serves as the very example the composer refers to in the earlier mentioned paradigm. This is indeed music of meditation, and if those out-of-phase melodies help to create that sense of stasis, he has indeed hit upon an immensely effective technique. Perhaps his own referrals to therapy, however, can be just as easily replaced by Eastern philosophy, particularly Zen Buddhism and Existential Phenomenology, and the idea of the Eternal Now. Freud concluded the same thing about the unconscious, showing that civilizations are not all that far apart.
This track is followed by The Day Revisited, thus making for an interesting sequence. No, this composition is in no way a reprise of previously heard ideas. We see it in fact as a statement about the chaos that results when we try to make sense of events that touched us over time just past. To achieve this, whether intentionally or not, Gann experimented with microtonality and a 29-pitch scale. His stated aim was to “cause the listener to float,” but haters of microtonality will surely find themselves squirming. Such concepts are always of interest to more progressive listeners, and we would dare not advise Mr. Gann to stop experimenting. We simply find that he is at his best in works like On Reading Emerson which ends the CD on an uplifting note.
The performances are all outstanding, especially the pianism of Sarah Cahill, who quite obviously is a thinking performer to match Mr. Gann’s ruminative composer. The playing of Da Capo in Hovenweep and The Day Revisited are largely enthusiastic responses to music written with that group in mind. One only wishes for better audio clarity in those complex passages.