NY Times review: Kyle Gann: Tuned to Sound Out of Tune

February 21, 1998

Kyle Gann: Tuned to Sound Out of Tune

By PAUL GRIFFITHS

Kyle Gann's reputation as a composer is beginning to
equal his renown as a writer on new music. A couple
of recent recordings have included pieces by him,
and on Thursday he was at Merkin Concert Hall to perform,
as keyboardist and vocalist, several of his compositions.

He is as thoughtful, independent and inventive a musician
as might be expected from his writings. All the music he
presented at Merkin Hall is in some form of just
intonation, using scales in which the notes are tuned
as harmonics of one another, and in which there are
many more steps than 12. Harry Partch was the pioneer
of this sort of music, and Mr. Gann's pieces often
move near or into a Partch-like territory of strange
intervals and odd harmonies, a territory where the
musical system we know -- that of equal temperament --
seems to be reflected in a distorting mirror.

There is a paradox here. Just intonation is more natural
than equal temperament, in that it reproduces the
harmonies of pure vibration: if you blow overtones
on a pipe or a bottle, the notes you get will be perfectly
tuned. But equal temperament is so much the norm that it
has come to seem more natural, which makes music like Mr.
Gann's sound out of tune.

This provides him with excellent means to explore notions
of the natural and to dramatize conflicts between nature
and human will, as he does in the two parts he performed
of "Custer and Sitting Bull," written for his own speaking
voice and computer music on tape. The first part uses
quotations from Custer's memoirs and trial testimony that
are a verbal affront: the spectacle of a gentle musician
mouthing these sentiments is shocking, and takes away the
trust one generally has in words spoken from the stage.

But this world of absent trust -- where we have to consider
every particle of what is said, try to place it in some
coherent system, and cannot do so -- is beautifully
suited to the bent, ambiguous progressions, harmonies and
melodic shapes of Mr. Gann's computer music,
which moves with and around his voice in this first part
in kaleidoscopic counterpoint. The second part, where the
text is supposedly delivered by Custer's ghost (again
straining trust), music and voice are together, the fine,
weird electronic harmonies coloring the words.

The pieces Mr. Gann played at the electronic keyboard --
"Fractured Paradise," "So Many Little Dyings" and "How
Miraculous Things Happen" -- were, respectively, a pure-tuned
take on a country and western song, a kind of chorale prelude
on a recorded fragment of Kenneth Patchen speaking his own
poetry, and a hymnlike movement through an enriched
harmonic spectrum where major and minor can be simultaneous.

After intermission, when Bernadette Speach began her part of
the program at the piano, equal temperament sounded like a
delicious novelty. The effect lasted about five seconds.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company





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