Kyle Gann

Gann was born in 1955 and raised in a musical family. He began composing at the age of 13. After graduating in 1973 from Dallas's Skyline High School, he attended Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he obtained a B.Mus. in 1977, and Northwestern University, where he received his M.Mus. and D.Mus. in 1981 and 1983, respectively. As well as studying composition with Randolph Coleman at Oberlin, he also studied Renaissance counterpoint with Greg Proctor at the University of Texas at Austin. He studied composition primarily with Ben Johnston (1984–86) and Peter Gena (1977–81), and briefly with Morton Feldman (1975). In 1981–82 he worked for the New Music America festival.
Gann has also worked on Dennis Johnson's once lost minimal composition November, which was written for solo piano in 1959 and later revised. The creation of November was inspired by Johnson's UCLA college friend La Monte Young's Trio for Strings, written in 1958. Johnson recorded part of it in 1962 on audio cassette. November was in turn an inspiration for Young's 1964 The Well-Tuned Piano. Young gave, from his archive, a cassette copy of November to Gann, who made a new recording of it and produced six pages of the original score. Gann first performed a four-and-a-half-hour version in 2009 with Sarah Cahill, and has produced a new performance score based on the original material that R. Andrew Lee recorded in a five-hour version released in 2013 by Irritable Hedgehog Music, after receiving good reviews. In 2017, the Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen released November as part of his eight-disc Minimal Piano Collection, Vols. XXI–XXVIII.
Gann also worked as a journalist at the Chicago Reader, Tribune, Sun-Times, and New York Times. In 1986, he was hired as a music critic at The Village Voice, where he wrote a weekly column until 1997, and then less frequently until 2005. Gann taught part-time at Bucknell University from 1989 to 1997. Since 1997, he has taught music theory, history, and composition at Bard College. In October 2026, Bard College placed Gann on administrative leave after an alumna alleged he sexually assaulted her in 1998.
Gann married Nancy Cook (the managing director of Bard College's Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts) c. 1982, and is the father of Bernard Gann (b. 1984), a guitarist formerly with the New York "transcendental black metal" band Liturgy.