Jackie sings a World Premier Piece!

Jackie sang this song a couple weeks ago for the SHSU Contemporary Music Festival. The featured composer for this year's festival was Kyle Gann. (read his bio below!)

The piece was called "In the Busy Streets". Per Jackie "This piece was a note nightmare!! It had accidental signs and note changes and weird chords everywhere! Trying to sing on top of that in the piano was CRAZY, but do-able."

"It was hard, but really fun and it was a real honor to sing this song. The teacher who organized the concert told me that this song was the world premier of this piece. HOLY MOLY!!"

"After checking his website a week later, he posted my recording on his website of me singing his piece! YAY!! I'm super stoked that he thought I sang well enough to post my recording...what an honor!"

You can listen to Jackie's recording at his website http://www.kylegann.com/
Click on the Index of PDF scores, recordings and program notes.
Find "In the Busy Streets" and click on the MP3 file to play

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Kyle Gann, born 1955 in Dallas, Texas, is a composer and was new-music critic for the Village Voice from 1986 to 2005. Since 1997 he has taught music theory, history, and composition at Bard College. He is the author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press, 1995), American Music in the 20th Century (Schirmer Books, 1997), Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (University of California Press, 2006), No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" (Yale University Press, 2010), and Robert Ashley (University of Illinois Press, 2010; forthcoming).

Gann studied composition with Ben Johnston, Morton Feldman, and Peter Gena, and his music is often microtonal, using up to 37 pitches per octave. His rhythmic language, based on differing successive and simultaneous tempos, was developed from his study of Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo Indian musics. His music has been performed on the New Music America, Bang on a Can, and Spoleto festivals. His major works include Sunken City, a piano concerto commissioned by the Orkest de Volharding in Amsterdam; Transcendental Sonnets, a 35-minute work for choir and orchestra commissioned by the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir; Custer and Sitting Bull, a microtonal, one-man music theater work he's performed more than 30 times from Brisbane to Moscow;The Planets, commissioned by the Relache ensemble via Music in Motion and continued under a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists' Fellowship; and The Hudson River Trilogy, a trio of microtonal chamber operas written with librettist Jeffrey Sichel, the first of which, Cinderella's Bad Magic, was premiered in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 2007, choreographer Mark Morris made a large-ensemble dance, Looky, from five of Gann's works for Disklavier (computerized player piano).