eMusic Review 0
America has a surprising tradition of composer/critics — a potentially uncomfortable pairing, but one that worked well for Virgil Thomson and seems to have left Kyle Gann reasonably sane. For many years, Gann was a leading observer of the Downtown scene as the critic of the Village Voice. But his own compositions have only come to be better known since he stopped writing. He has pursued a longtime interest in electronics, in Native American (especially Sioux) music and ritual, and in alternate forms of tuning. The Disklavier is a working grand piano that also contains an onboard computer, allowing it to play intricate rhythms and layers of melody that would be impractical for a human pianist. Gann's music presents a thicket of rhythms and a jumble of melodic ideas that nonetheless can't hide the music's roots in jazz, ragtime and (in Gann's case at least) Native American music.
