Born and reared in Dallas, Gann has produced a diverse and substantial catalogue of both conventionally tuned and microtonal compositions, as well as several books, including The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (1995), Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays after a Sonata (2017) and The Arithmetic of Listening: Tuning Theory and History for the Impractical Musician (2019). Since 1997 he has taught music theory, history and composition at Bard College. He is also a prominent new music critic who has contributed thousands of articles and reviews to publications such as The Village Voice, Chicago Reader and The New York Times.

As a composer, Gann is sometimes associated with Totalism — a term he didn’t coin but was first to use in print. Totalist music, as he defines it, derives from “rhythmic structures that came from minimalism: usually cyclic loops of different lengths going on at the same time, or different tempos out of phase with each other, or the repetition of complex numerical patterns.” His work is deeply informed by the polyrhythmic procedures of American-Mexican iconoclast Conlon Nancarrow and Native American musicians and composers, particularly members of the Hopi and Zuni tribes.

Gann’s interest in music started early. His father, a chorister, loved Handel’s Messiah and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; his mother, a piano teacher, began his lessons once he turned six, when Gann made his earliest attempts at composing. After graduating from Skyline High School, an arts-focused public magnet in East Dallas, Gann attended Oberlin Music Conservatory and, for one year, studied with Gregory Proctor at the University of Texas. In 1975 he took two lessons with Morton Feldman, an important early influence. After earning his undergraduate degree in 1977, Gann obtained master’s and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University, where he studied with the postminimalist composer Peter Gena, a student of Feldman’s. In 1981, after Gena was appointed co-director for the groundbreaking New Music America festival in Chicago, he hired Gann as his administrative assistant. This immersion in experimental contemporary music inspired Gann’s parallel career as a freelance music critic, which eventually brought him and his wife, Nancy, to the East Coast.

The Composer Speaks

“Serenity” (1919) is one of my favorite songs by Charles Ives, and one of the rare pieces in his output in which his mysticism achieved the state of a timeless continuum. I’ve always regretted its brevity, and the two perfunctory chords that bring it to a premature conclusion. One day it occurred to me to take the song’s material and stretch it out over a longer period of time. I also added in a few motives from his last composed song, “Sunrise” (1926), which has a similarly aimless feel, and a phrase from “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” I like to think I extracted what was Feldman-like from Ives’s most Feldmanesque pieces, and turned it into something Gannian. The piece is dedicated to my colleague in Ives enthusiasm, Neely Bruce, and I wrote it after he invited me to give the keynote address to a festival of Ives’s songs. — Kyle Gann

Shostakovich worked closely with the virtuoso David Oistrakh to create his Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, which he withheld until late 1955, about seven years after its completion. The composer was wise to keep this bold and challenging effort to himself. Under Joseph Stalin, Socialist Realism wasn’t merely Russia’s dominant musical style; it was the only safe musical style. Concert music was expected to please the proletariat and promote a patriotic message. State-approved compositions typically drew on folk songs and ended in a major key. The cultural watchdogs, alert to any whiff of the avant-garde, were especially wary of Western forms. Countless Russian artists, composers and writers who didn’t comply with the ever-shifting standards were executed, sent to Siberian gulags or simply made to vanish. Despite his ongoing attempts to appease the Soviet censors, Shostakovich was denounced in 1948 for “decadent formalism”— a terrifying, possibly fatal designation.

Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, Shostakovich waited a couple of years before he felt safe enough to unleash his Op. 77, which he later renumbered as 99, before switching it back to 77 some years later. Oistrakh, the dedicatee, didn’t embrace the concerto immediately, but after marinating in its unique sound world, he became its most passionate champion. His advocacy helped ensure that Shostakovich’s strange masterpiece received its rightful acclaim.

A Closer Listen

Although the Soviet-Modernist poet Anna Akhmatova seldom missed a Shostakovich performance, she didn’t meet the man himself until 1961, when they sat in complete silence together for 20 minutes, an experience that she described in her diary as “wonderful.” She dedicated the poem “Music” to her fellow survivor of Soviet repression. The poem’s last three lines movingly describe the solace that his music confers to the lonely, the suffering, and even the dead: “It was with me in my grave/As if a thunderstorm sang/Or all the flowers spoke.” The supernatural simile perfectly suits the Violin Concerto No. 1, with its dusky enchantments, diabolical dances and blossoming profusions of folk tunes.

Cast in four movements (slow, fast, slow, fast) instead of the typical three (fast, slow, fast), Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto is unconventional from the start. Trumpets and trombones are omitted from the orchestration, creating a more transparent sound, akin to chamber music, which enhances the intimacy among the solo violin and the other instruments.

Oistrakh described the melancholy, meditative opening Nocturne, marked Moderato, as “a suppression of feelings,” and the subsequent Scherzo, a wild Allegro, as “evil, demonic, prickly.” Here in the second movement Shostakovich inserts his trademark musical signature, the DSCH motif (a German spelling of his abbreviated name, transliterated to the notes D, E-flat, C and B), which percolates in the background before erupting at the end of the savagely virtuosic, folk-inflected violin solo. The slowly unfurling Passacaglia, in F minor, is the beating heart of the concerto, an intensely expressive re-imagining of a Baroque genre that calls for a series of variations anchored by a recurring harmonic progression. An allusion to Beethoven’s famous “Fate” motif leads to a long, extremely demanding cadenza that resurrects the DSCH theme, now slightly disguised as a series of chords. Without pausing, the cadenza sprints to the Allegro con brio finale, the festive, borderline-manic Burlesque, where Stravinskian riffs collide with Jewish folk tunes against driving ostinato, clackety xylophones, piercing winds and relentless solo pyrotechnics.

Many composers of the Classical era believed that the choice of a musical key was laden with meaning: emotional, symbolic, possibly even cosmic. The home key of Die Zauberflöte, Mozart’s zanily profound final opera, is E-flat, which for Mozart represented warmth and solidity. For Beethoven the key represented, among other things, Mozart, the only composer whom he truly envied, and Die Zauberflöte, his favorite opera.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 and his “Emperor” Concerto share the same home key, but that’s not the only commonality. Both works are long and ambitious, and both are known by nicknames that happen to begin with the letter E, although neither epithet is likely to have originated with Beethoven. After violently striking out a dedication to Napoleon — he actually tore the manuscript paper — Beethoven opted instead to dedicate the symphony to an important patron, Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz. And although Beethoven occasionally used the Eroica nickname when referring to his Third Symphony, he surely would have loathed the nickname for his Piano Concerto No. 5: “Emperor,” the coinage of an English music publisher. A liberal humanist who embraced democratic ideals, Beethoven became disenchanted with Napoleon in 1804, when he declared himself emperor.

Completed in 1803, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 acquired the nickname Eroica after the publisher printed the description Sinfonia Eroica (Italian for “Heroic Symphony”) on the title page of the score. At the time of its composition, Beethoven was in agony, culminating in his so-called Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, an unsent letter, posthumously discovered, in which he confessed to thoughts of suicide provoked by his worsening deafness. “Only my art held me back,” he wrote. “It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me.”

Fortunately for the world, Beethoven soldiered on, creating many of his greatest works even when he could no longer hear them. Despite excruciating physical pain, constant loneliness, and a relentless racket in his ears, he persisted. The real hero of Eroica is Beethoven himself.

The origins of the symphony can be traced to 1802, the year of his great crisis, but he didn’t start working on it in earnest until May 1803. Most music historians assign it to the end of his “early” period or the beginning of the “middle” period of his career. Roughly defined, this “heroic” stage lasted from 1803 to 1812, years in which the composer was astonishingly prolific. “I live only in my notes, and with one work barely finished, the other is already started,” he proclaimed. “The way I write now, I often find myself working on three, four things at the same time.”
Eventually published as Sinfonia Eroica, it bore a rather enigmatic subtitle, also in Italian, that means “composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” Beginning in early August 1804, Eroica was first heard in private and semi-private performances at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz, to whom the work is dedicated. The public premiere, at the Theater an der Wien, did not take place until April 7, 1805.

“In his own opinion it is the greatest work that he has yet written,” Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries reported in a letter to the music publisher Nikolaus Simrock in late October 1803. “Beethoven played it for me recently, and I believe that heaven and earth will tremble when it is performed.”

More than twice as long as the average Mozart or Haydn symphony, Beethoven’s Third was unprecedented in scope. The score pushes the formal protocols of classicism into new, uncharted terrain, thanks to its far-ranging harmonic language, its wrenching rhythmic displacements and its expressive intensity. Although firmly rooted in the Classical period, it anticipated Romanticism, influencing all of its major exponents. Both Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner revered the symphony for different reasons: Wagner loved its “endless melodies,” which he sang loudly from memory while working on Tristan und Isolde; Berlioz used the second movement, the funeral march, as inspiration for Symphonie Fantastique. In 1817, only a decade before his death, Beethoven reportedly told an acquaintance that of all his eight symphonies (the Ninth wasn’t finished yet), the Third was his favorite.

A Closer Listen

The symphony is divided into four movements and lasts about 50 minutes.

The first movement sets the stage for the many surprises to come. It starts with two assertive tonic chords, followed by a graceful cello tune that’s soon punctured by a shocking C-sharp, a note seldom associated with the home key of E-flat. Later, a French horn disrupts the recapitulation of the theme, a striking effect that caused many of his contemporaries to wonder if he’d made a mistake. (He hadn’t.)

Next comes the funeral march, which Beethoven marked Adagio assai. Enormously influential, this movement, in C minor, inspired Schubert, Mendelssohn, Mahler and many others with its somber and often spooky intensity.

Equally arresting but with a contrasting cheerfulness, the scherzo is a disorienting, delirious mix of metrical ambiguity and melodic invention. The central trio section contains the first use of three horns in a major symphony.

For the finale (Allegro molto), Beethoven made yet another structural innovation by casting the movement as a series of variations. Here he resurrects a melody that he’d used three times before: in an early contredanse, in the ballet music for The Creatures of Prometheus, and in the Piano Variations in E-flat, Op. 35.

The Composer Speaks

“I shall not say anything to you about our monarchs, and so forth, or about our monarchies…. I much prefer the empire of the mind, and I regard it as the highest of all spiritual and worldly monarchies.”—Ludwig van Beethoven, 1814