Kyle Gann has uncovered, on the archives of YouTube, a brief but striking untitled composition for one electronic keyboard. It is risky to attempt an analysis of such an intricate musical conception after only a few auditions, but I am ready to hail this fluffy young composer's work as a captivating and utterly fresh synthesis of late twentieth-century minimalist tendencies with the chromatic language of canonical European modernism. Observe the remarkably fluid yet unexpected way in which he or she segues from relaxed, recumbent "long-tone" sonorities of the La Monte Young / early Terry Riley type to a more agitated, distracted, quasi-Webernian vocabulary, all by way of an interlocking network of fleet-fingered — or should one say fleet-pawed — interval leaps. Toward the end, a surprisingly dark atmosphere develops, as a sudden plunge to low E-flat conjures up the funerary mood of Tristan's death. All registers are kept active and the thematic material is handled with superb economy. The gestures have the freedom of improvisation, yet everything seems deliberate. The ending is hauntingly abrupt, almost cavalier. A miniature masterpiece. Meow.
