“American Composer” Magazine on Alvin Singleton, African American Composer

[Sing to the Sun: Chamber Music by Alvin Singleton, Troy 902 (2007)]

20 july/august 2008 21
AmericanComposer
Alvin Singleton
by Kyle Gann
“The orchestral success of Alvin Singleton baffles me, for the same reason that I’m surprised
by the continuing popularity of Sibelius. I consider myself a connoisseur of exotic and peculiar tastes suggestive of insight superior to that of the average classical music lover. I love Sibelius for his quirks, his austere independence, his counterintuitive gestures, so foreign to all previous
orchestral rhetoric. He’s the kind of composer I would expect to be a specialty, a maven’s obscure delight, and it dilutes my pleasure in him slightly that he is so widely appreciated by people who otherwise savor Tchaikovsky and Grieg.

“Likewise, Singleton is hardly the kind of bombastic purveyor of moto perpetuo percussion who makes a splash in concertopeners, and even less the kind of highly technical composer faintly praised by academics. His music is soulful, with an understated simplicity that I particularly prize and that I would expect the oh-sosuperficial classical music world to crassly misunderstand. I want him to be ignored and underrated so I can knowingly laud him as far better than the current run of orchestral racehorses. But somehow, despite his music’s poignant subtlety, his reputation needs no help from the likes of me. He’s doing just fine.

“So I am forced to conclude that there are conductors? managers? Audiences? out there thirsting for new classical music that is long on substance and short on bells and whistles. Singleton’s music is often slow, at the beginning of pieces almost motionless. American orchestral composers aren’t supposed to be slow. That’s soulful Eastern Europe territory, for religious types who suffered under Communism: Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli, Henryk Gorecki, Ljubica Maric´. Yet Singleton’s music, for all its Atlantabased Americanness (though he did spend a long, crucial part of his career in Austria) is sometimes leisurely to the point of stillness.” “Composer Kyle Gann is a professor at Bard College. His latest book is Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice...” Full Post
American Composer
Chamber Music
Alvin Singleton
African American Composer
Kyle Gann
Sing to the Sun