Kyle Gann: Nude Rolling Down an Escalator

Album review

As a composer, theorist, technician, and commentator on the state of new music, Kyle Gann is in an excellent position to analyze the problems of the contemporary scene and to do something about them. However, it may be argued that his best efforts in composition boil down to an apologia for eclecticism. While his "Renaissance Man" qualities are impressive, Gann's virtuosity may mask a deep confusion about the direction of music -- his or anyone's -- in an unavoidably polystylistic age. Neither post-Modernist nor neo-Romantic, Gann is a self-styled post-Classical composer, who draws on the music of the past without intentional irony, and incorporates influences from Beethoven to Nancarrow and beyond to achieve an all-embracing music. Yet Gann's Nude Rolling Down an Escalator: Studies for Disklavier seems quite a mélange of quotations, borrowed riffs, rhythmic puzzles, and pastiches of everything pianistic from Frédéric Chopin and Scott Joplin to Henry Cowell, Bud Powell, and Terry Riley, with enormously complex rhythms and elaborate textures realized through a computer. The results of Gann's explorations on mechanical piano are dazzling and entertaining; but on closer inspection, these studies seem expressively shallow, impersonal, and perhaps little more than brilliant exercises in mimicry. The sound quality is exceptional, though a bit loud.

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