Interview: Kyle Gann

Talkin' avant-garde classical with a legendary critic

I recently received a 21CD box set from the Deutsche Grammophon label, reissuing almost all of the two dozen albums they put out between 1968 and 1971 in their Avantgarde series. Four boxes, each containing six LPs, were released, one each year, premiering works by composers including Luciano Berio, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Luc Ferrari, Vinko Globokar, Mauricio Kagel, Roland Kayn, Gyorgy Ligeti, Luigi Nono, Krszystof Penderecki, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. There are string quartets, organ pieces, vocal works, electronic and tape compositions, things that sound like weirdo theater happenings, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. The CDs are packed in reproductions of their original sleeve art, which was very cool — bright colors, minimalist typography, designed to look like volumes in a series (collect ’em all!) — and the box comes with a thick-ass booklet reproducing all the liner notes. A lot of this material has never been on CD before, so this is a major gift to fans of modern composition and weird, off-putting music generally. I’ve written a long review which will be published elsewhere soon; when it does, I’ll share a link.

(There’s a note in the book that reads, “Three Stockhausen albums, which were part of the original Avantgarde series, have not been included in this edition as we respect the preference of the Stockhausen estate to abstain from such re-release.” The works in question are “Gruppen,” “Carré,” “Telemusik,” “Mixtur,” and “Stimmung.” The first two were released on CD on Stockhausen’s own label in the ’90s; the other three have never been reissued to my knowledge.)

Anyway, I’m pretty much a knuckle-walking ape-man when it comes to this stuff; I enjoy the sounds, but had zero knowledge of the history or cultural significance behind the series. So I reached out to someone I thought would know more — composer, author, and former Village Voice new music critic Kyle Gann. We had a very pleasant phone conversation, and he filled me in on lots of things I didn’t know. So I’ve transcribed the bulk of our discussion, and you can read it below.

Phil Freeman: So thanks for being willing to talk. I wasn’t sure who to ask about this set, and then your name popped into my head. So, do you remember…

Kyle Gann: You’re talking about the old DG recordings that were kind of monochrome on the cover.

PF: Yeah. Yeah. They’ve all been reissued in a big CD box set.

KG: Oh, really?

PF: Yeah. So you remember them from when they came out, like ’68 to ’71 was when they were originally released?

KG: I probably have them all on vinyl. Yeah. In fact, they’re a few feet away from me. Most of my vinyl is downstairs, but the rare avant-garde stuff I keep up in my living room.

PF: Oh, okay. So what was your impression of those records when they were new? Like, how familiar were you with those artists at the time?

KG: Well, I wasn’t familiar before I got them. I mean, by the time I went to — I started college in 1973. At that time, I think I had every Stockhausen record that had come out. And so I certainly, I probably got onto the series through him, and I didn’t have any, you know, I was just discovering this stuff on my own. I didn’t have any teachers, I didn’t know anybody who knew this music. I was just going to the record store and finding it. So, and there were…I trusted the series enough that I would buy anything on it. Some of those people I never heard of again, like Roland Kayn. I remember some electronic piece of his that I liked. And I’ve never heard the name since. That record — Nono’s piece was Contrappunto dialettico alla mente. Am I right?

PF: Yeah.

KG: That was one of the pieces I like best of his. And you might tell me some more names. I could look through my record collection and find them.

PF: Yeah, there was some stuff by Vinko Globokar, the trombonist; there’s a John Cage album. There’s an album by the the Italian Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza... let’s see who else.

KG: The Gruppo di Improvvisazione I probably didn’t get. I don’t recall that one. And the John Cage, was that Atlas Eclipticalis, I think?

PF: Yeah. And then there’s Penderecki, there’s Lutosławski, there’s Ligeti. There’s about 30 people, I think, represented across the various sides. There’s Luc Ferrari stuff. What’s interesting, too...

KG: Oh yeah, Luc Ferrari. I was trying to get anything by him. Was that the “and if the piano were a female body”?

PF: Yeah. Yeah.

KG: Okay. [laughs] These all made a big impression on me. I remember it to this day.

PF: Well, that’s sort of what I’m wondering is, what was the reception for this type of music at the time? Was it as warmly received as stuff like [Teddy Riley’s] In C or other things that are thought of as, you know, modern classical for young people or whatever? Because bear in mind, I’m only 50, so I missed out on all this stuff.

KG: Well, you know, I don’t know that there was any reception at all. I was the only person I knew who had ever heard of any of this music. I took a John Cage record to my high school theory class and played it and my teacher thought I was nuts. And so I was discovering all this stuff on my own. There was a local radio station in Dallas that played new music an hour or 90 minutes every week, and I listened to it faithfully. I think the stuff on those records is probably a little more out there than anything he would have played. So I was just getting it. I mean, the fact that they were, you know, Deutsche Grammophon was the prestige label at the time. Which is one of the reasons it so bowled everybody over when they put out that three-record set of Steve Reich in 1974. Because all of a sudden — people were trying to ignore Steve Reich, and Deutsche Grammophon picked him up. That changed everything.

PF: Okay. Yeah. See, because I come from rock and jazz, I don’t really know the dynamics of the classical universe, you know, like how people get ranked…is it all just based on who you studied with and where you went to college and stuff like that?

KG: Oh, there’s an awful lot of that, yeah, and especially today, more than there was then, I think. You know, composers didn’t tend to go to — where you went to college as a composer didn’t mean much before the 1960s. And the universities expanded so much in the Sixties that a lot of composers got into academia; before that if you had to take a teaching job, you were considered a failure. But then, you know, rock sort of pushed jazz out of the way, which had already pushed classical music out of the way. So it was a really niche thing. But Deutsche Grammophon was the big label that all the Brahms symphonies and Beethoven symphonies and Wagner Ring cycle set were on and they put all their weight behind Stockhausen. And so that’s — I’m sure that’s why Stockhausen looked like such a tremendous figure during that period. He had the imprimatur of the German establishment record company.

PF: See, and it’s very interesting because there are three albums that are not included in this CD reissue, and they’re all by him.

KG: It’s probably a copyright issue.

PF: See, that’s what I’m wondering, because only two of those albums have even been reissued since the Sixties, like Gruppen and Carré were the two pieces that were reissued on CD on Stockhausen’s own label, but the other stuff has never come back into print at all. Do you know anything about that?

KG: Wasn’t one of them Stimmung?

PF: Stimmung was another, and I didn’t think that was ever reissued. I couldn’t find a listing for a new edition.

KG: I think there’s a more recent recording of it. It might be the original one. I’m not sure. But that Gruppen recording is the only one, as far as I know. And I’ve been teaching that piece for 30 years and studied it in college and I bought the score when I was at Oberlin. Oberlin had a fantastic music store where you could get sheet music and man, I have a long history with that piece. And that’s the only recording.

PF: Yeah. And for some reason they put it out on CD in the early Nineties on his own label or something. But it’s never been reissued since. And it’s not in this box. Like, there’s a note in the booklet that says, you know, his estate did not want us to put out certain records and we have honored their wishes, it’s a weird thing.

KG: Well, he also withdrew his scores from Universal and started publishing them himself. And, you know, I think Stockhausen went crazy. You know, he just — at some point, he became too big for the world. You know, he was a narcissist, he had some — he performed with his wife and son and sister-in-law. And he would write these encomiums to his sister-in-law in the liner notes, like how wonderful she was. He got kind of weird [laughs]. And his music got kind of weird. I mean, it went up to, you know, the seven-day opera Licht, and I kind of lost interest in him around that point. But each of those operas was composed of hundreds of little pieces that could be played separately.

PF: Right. Right. And didn’t he have a piece that was written to be performed from multiple helicopters? Was that his thing also?

KG: Yeah, that was much later. I wasn’t paying much attention to him by that point, and I’m not real impressed with the concept, frankly. It’s what you do when you’re not getting enough attention and you want to make a media splash.

PF: So some of these composers actually do seem to be having kind of a moment right now. Like Roland Kayn’s estate has been putting out a ton of reissues and previously unreleased music, all on Bandcamp. He’s got like 50 things out on Bandcamp, all electronic and tape pieces going back from the Sixties to, I think up to the Eighties, maybe even later. And then, you know, there was a box set a few years ago by the Gruppo. There was, you know, some people, like Ligeti and Kagel are kind of perennials, but then others like Cornelius Cardew and some of the other more obscure guys have kind of been forgotten. What do you think makes certain composers fashionable and others not within this small niche?

KG: Oh, god, that's — I've been working on that opus for my entire life. And in Europe, I mean, I kind of know how it works in America. I don’t really know how it works in Europe, but I know that, for example, after you had all those serialists, the students of theirs who continued writing in the same idiom were acceptable. And anybody who tried to do anything different was not, and I don’t know who wields the power over there. Here it’s the conductors. And you have to get in good with conductors by age 35. And if you get some high-profile orchestral performances by that age, then you’re kind of in the group. And it doesn’t matter whether your music’s any good or whether it gets better or whether it gets worse, it’s just — you just stay there and it has a lot to do with who you know. I wrote for three years, I wrote liner notes for the Cincinnati Orchestra, which was conducted by Paavo Järvi, and he did a lot of new music. And every living, every young composer he would do, he would perform, I’d look up their bio and it said, went to grad school with Paavo Järvi [laughs]. Every one. He was just playing his friends. So whether that’s what happens in Germany, in Europe, I couldn’t say. I don’t think the relationship with the university is quite there what it is here. But it has a lot to do with the politics of Darmstadt, I guess. There’s still a circle around Darmstadt and also around IRCAM in Paris. I think those are two of the focal points that you get.

PF: Well that kind of leads me to my other question, which is sort of related, which is how influential has this music been on the current generation of composers, do you think? Because I feel like even though people like Anna Thorvaldsdottir, who’s very prominent now, are writing highly abstract music, they’re using traditional instruments and old-school scoring techniques and stuff. So was the Sixties avant-garde a wave that crested and rolled back, or is it still audible today, to your mind?

KG: I think so. I think it was — I think it was partly...it was economic. It was back in the Seventies. You know, let’s see, you’re 50, so you don’t remember life before Reagan. Life before Reagan, it seemed like we were on a big upward sweep and things were just going to become more and more liberal and possibilities seemed endless. And the record companies really were very supportive of new music back then. And in fact, they would say, we have to put out new music. It’s part of the way we give back to society and everything. So they felt a moral necessity to do that. And then very quickly after Reagan got in office, corporations all started [being] about the bottom line and their stockholders being the only things that mattered. And the culture just changed very quickly within about two years. And everybody was horrified by it, and hoped it would go back and of course it didn’t. And I think the composers who are trying to make it in the mainstream world feel like their only chance at doing that is going back to the conventional orchestra and conventional organizations that can support them, because otherwise you end up trying to do everything on your own. And there are a lot of people who do that, too. But if you want support for your music, it has to be pretty conventional in certain respects.

PF: And do you think there’s a lesson in the marketing of this series for present-day classical labels? Is there a way to make new music seem cool, or is that out of the question at this point?

KG: No. Somebody could do it if they wanted to. You know, it’s the famous — you probably know about this case. The famous one was when Nonesuch picked up Henryk Goreçki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Which had been written 12 years earlier, and they liked it, and they decided to make it famous. And so they sent free copies to all these tastemakers in Britain. And lo and behold, it became a huge success. And they could — there are a lot of things they could do that with.

PF: I seem to remember they did that with Gavin Bryars, too.

KG: Yeah. Yeah. ECM and Nonesuch had that capability. And if you’re — if somebody like [Nonesuch head] Robert Hurwitz thinks you’re a good bet, then, you know, I always say in this business, you’re nobody until somebody with a lot of money thinks they can make money off of you. Now, I don’t think that happened for most of the people in that series. I think that Avantgarde series was Germany trying to — I mean, Germany has always supported its own composers, and during the Cold War, every country, even the US, was championing its composers a little bit, as a way to try to make democracy look better than socialism. And then when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no reason to do that anymore. The CIA was supporting new music concerts in Europe, of American music, to try to show to try to show Europeans that our system produced important music. And now there’s no reason to do that.

PF: Yeah, I remember reading a book about that some years ago called The Cultural Cold War, that was all about how all that stuff was backed, you know? …I think it’s very fascinating what you were saying about how these things, these experiments became kind of a wave that rolled back, because it’s not exactly what happened in jazz. Like, for example, free jazz from the 1960s was seen as a rebellion and, you know, a breakthrough and stuff like that. And then it became a language, like now there are new groups coming up that play free jazz in quotes, in the style of, you know, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman and stuff like that. And you can tell that it’s just one more dialect, like big band swing or whatever, you know.

KG: Funny. Well, you know, there’s a great [Morton] Feldman essay in which he says, when you do something original in music, you’re an amateur. Your imitators, those are the professionals.

That’s it for now. See you next week!