The emergence of a "Downtown" realm of creative music could have been predicted. In fact, it was. As early as 1945, in "What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts," Frankfurt School social theorist Theodor Adorno wrote, "The present stage of technical civilization may call for a very ascetic art developed in the loopholes of poverty and isolation, as counter-balance against the business culture which tends to cover the whole world." [1] As World War II was drawing to a close, Adorno launched a warning that the rise of technology had destroyed the ages-old balance between art and science, and that a new technology worship relegated art to the marginalized world of entertainment, leaving it vulnerable to fascistic corporate control. The thread of humanism had been cut, creating a spiritual void into which the values of either fascism or manipulative consumerism could be poured into a mostly unresisting public. Corporate control of the art/entertainment business would push truly creative music out to the impoverished margins of society: thus, Downtown music.
Part of the result of corporate control was the rising fetishism of the classical music business, along with what Adorno liked to call the "reification" of famous musical works. Listening to classical music and attending concerts became a sign of social status - as it really had been in the United States since the 1840s. The orchestra ceased to be a growing, evolving medium and became standardized as to instrumentation and size - partly by rules imposed by musicians' unions, who unwittingly worked against the needs of the composer who might feel compelled to innovate. The encouragement of American orchestral music, common in the early 20th century, ground to a virtual halt in the 1930s as European composers, conductors, and other musicians flocked to the New World to flee Nazi persecution. Classical music became something set off from the rest of American life, its exoticism symbolized by tuxedos and even the exaggerated solemnity of those who rearrange the chairs and music stands at Avery Fisher Hall.
"Composers," Adorno wrote a few years later in a 1953 article titled "On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music," "have the agonizing choice. They can play deaf and soldier on as if music were still music. Or they can pursue the leveling on their own account, turn music into a normal condition and in the process hold out for quality, when possible. Or they can ultimately oppose the tendency by a turn to the extreme, with the prospect of... becoming dessicated as a specialty." [2]
In these sentences, Adorno set out three strategies for musical survival. And one could argue that those turned out to be the three strategies American composers actually worked out for themselves - even without Adorno's help, since his article wasn't published in English translation until 2002. Further, one could use Adorno's descriptions to characterize the three streams of musical life widely acknowledged, at least in New York musical circles, as Midtown, Downtown, and Uptown, respectively. The Midtown composers, those especially associated with Juilliard and the orchestral circuit, can be said to "play deaf and soldier on as if music were still music"; that is, they continue to write symphonies and concertos, wear tuxedos and formal attire to concerts, and do their level best to ignore their marginalization in a world in which they are subject to the whims of the star conductors and soloists, and made to feel that their music is inferior to even the minor opuses of the dead masters such as Brahms, Mendelssohn, and so on.
As prominent composers referred to as Midtown one could name John Corigliano, Joan Tower, John Harbison, William Bolcom, Christopher Rouse, William Bolcom, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Stephen Albert, Joseph Schwantner, John Adams in his later music, and others who write orchestral and chamber music in intuitive, non-systematic idioms comparable in form and feeling, if not always musical materials or style, to European works of the 19th century. The term "Midtown," a kind of back-formation in response to the more widely publicized Uptown/Downtown split, refers to the association of some of these composers with the Juilliard School and Lincoln Center (against which "Uptown" has acquired an association with Columbia University).
The Uptown composers could be described as "oppos[ing] the tendency by a turn to the extreme, with the prospect of... becoming dessicated as a specialty." Out of context, this is a rather vague statement, but Adorno wrote at great length about this strategy in a better-known 1955 article "The Aging of the New Music." For Adorno, the mid-century avant-gardism dedicated to dissonance and musical fragmentation (represented by Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono and others heavily influenced by Anton Webern) was a critical movement, a music that criticized the new position of music: a negation of musical expectations, a refusal to fit into a social role that had ceased to be authentic. Avant-garde music [3], he wrote, "has its essence in the refusal to go along with things as they are, and has its justification in giving shape to what the conventional superficies of daily life hide and what is otherwise condemned to silence by the culture industry...." [4] Already by the mid-1950s, however, Adorno felt that this music had been tamed and watered down by a false positivism, a cheerful and unreflective overdependence on technique, and a renewed striving after verifiable masterpieces. Though still using the rhetoric of negation, it had lost its critical edge.
Adorno wrote from a European viewpoint. In America the problems were the same, but the perception quite different. Twelve-tone music and its related forms worked their way into university music departments, meeting with tremendous and well-documented resistance at first, but eventually finding a home there. This was music made to be analyzed, and if its presence in the concert hall was problematic, its use in the classroom was a continual frisson of intellectual excitement. Uptown composers often acted surprised and hurt that the classical music organizations gave their music an increasingly cold shoulder (Milton Babbitt, chief spokesperson for the field, sadly called the university "our last hope, our only hope...." [5]), but actually their music became the musical culture of academia, with its own concerts, stable of expert performers, and well-funded support system. An endless supply of students made academic musical culture self-propagating, ensuring its survival for many decades hence. (One could quote Chomsky: "Institutions of dominance have a nice way of reproducing themselves.") [6]
As leading Uptown figures one could name, besides Babbitt, Elliott Carter (independently wealthy and curiously absent from academia for most of his career), Roger Sessions, Donald Martino, Mario Davidovsky, Charles Wuorinen, and Leon Kirchner. There is a general consensus that the Uptown scene began to lose steam in the mid- 1980s with the defection of many younger composers from any allegiance to 12-tone technique, although there has been a rallying characterized as "the New Complexity" centered around the cult figure of British composer Brian Ferneyhough.
This brings us to the third strategy, the one that is largely the subject of this book: "they can pursue the leveling on their own account, turn music into a normal condition and in the process hold out for quality, when possible." What Adorno calls "leveling," which acquires a derogatory tone in his writings, was for Downtown composers a determination to reintegrate their music into the normal flow of daily life. In the most obvious respect this meant rejecting the formality of classical orchestra concerts, the tuxedos and the distant proscenium stage, and equally rejecting the internal framing devices of classical music itself. For awhile Downtown music took this as literally as possible: it was a movement that began in private lofts in Manhattan, performed by composers in their own living rooms. The very terminology Uptown/Downtown (from which Midtown emerged as a later coinage) came from the then-anomaly of Yoko Ono having presented concerts in her loft on Chambers Street in 1960. "In those days," as Ono says in my interview with her, "there was only Town Hall and Carnegie Hall." Performing music Downtown was a strange experiment.
Downtown music was a deliberate rejection of Uptown elitism. Most of the early figures in Downtown music, including La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, Rhys Chatham, and others, had been educated in situations that brought them into contact with the complexity of the European avant-garde and with the American 12-tone movement. Glass, studying in a Paris dominated by Pierre Boulez, later described it as "a wasteland, dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy, creepy music" [7]; the colorful phrase sums up a reaction typical among those who gravitated toward the Downtown scene. And yet, what Downtown composers admired in and shared with Uptown ones was the felt necessity to flee from mass culture, a belief that whatever was being hawked commercially must be contaminated. Downtown music was never elitist like Uptown music, in the sense of an extravagant and difficult-to-follow technical apparatus. But it could at times be as austere, from the audience's point of view, and as baffling in its covert rules.
In fact, patent surface differences in social sphere obscured a strong point of commonality between Uptown and Down. While Midtowners generally proclaimed a faith in intuitive musicality and traditional expressiveness, those at Manhattan's opposite ends pursued avenues of speculative theory, though in different areas. Uptown was fascinated by the 12-tone row; Downtown by the harmonic series. Postserialists at Columbia worked out large-scale permutational systems that you couldn't hear; those at Roulette and Experimental Intermedia, just as frequently, drew cascades of notes from inscrutable algorithms, or let a progression of sounds be dictated by digital machines or software. What Downtowners rejected in Uptown music was the artificiality of the 12-tone row and its attendant pitch-set permutations, preferring more "natural" ordering devices as chance, machine logic, natural numbers, and the harmonic series. Both sides gave lip service to the importance of being able to hear what was going on in the music, Downtowners perhaps more vociferously. But in practice, both sides knew that they often performed for sympathetic audiences of friends and fellow practitioners, and that opacity would be forgiven.
Meanwhile, Downtowners rejected the formality and the implied upper-class status of of both Up- and Midtown music. Midtown composers seemed to revel in dressing up to the gills for world premieres, trading public and effusive compliments with the performers, and generally setting their music off in a make-believe world that imitated 19th-century conventions of patronage and royalty. By contrast, Downtown composers were often so committed to the "normalcy" of their music that they would perform in whatever torn T-shirt they had happened to throw on that morning. Their rejection of music's "specialness" even extended to musical technique itself; all the hard-learned conventions of tonal harmony, the finer points of orchestration, the fetishization of notational detail common in Midtown music seemed like precious attempts to inflate one's self-importance and musico-technical expertise. Midtown composers seemed, socially and in their music itself, like people who had ben impressed by glorious biographies of great composers of the past, and were desperately trying to live a life that no longer existed, or did so only artificially. Downtown composers were committed to making their music part of everyday life - and, in Adorno's poignant phrase, "hold[ing] out for quality, when possible."
At the same time, Downtown composers shared with Midtown ones a feeling that music should not ignore the audience, that it should be made for a particular body of listeners or venue. Midtown composers had a clear clientele to whom they pitched their music: the classical music organizations and performing ensembles, the in-place orchestras and string quartets, Lincoln Center, chamber music organizations. Downtown composers had a more difficult time figuring out where their audience was; at first it did not exist, nor were alternative institutions available. The commercial success, in the late 1970s, of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams built up an audience for new music, but one that younger composers have had a difficult time tapping into (for complex reasons which I have frequently speculated about in articles). Downtown music gave rise to its own performing venues altruistically run by local heroes, usually in fairly rough New York spaces never originally intended for music: Roulette, the Knitting Factory, Experimental Intermedia, and others more ephemeral. Eventually, the hipper "legit" spaces - Brooklyn Academy of Music unparalleled among them - figured out that the music most conducive to pleasing a sophisticated audience of nonmusicians came from the Downtown scene. And this may be the place to emphasize once again that Downtown music was not only a New York phenomenon: Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and many other cities have their own "Downtown" scenes of composers who fit the descriptions here.
After all, what separates Downtown music most from both Uptown and Mid- is the provenance of its source materials. Generally speaking, Downtowners believe in drawing on their personal experience and environment for musical ideas, not on the heritage of European music they were taught in school. In this respect, Downtown composers share a philosophy and sensibility with most American visual artists, novelists, and playwrights, who don't have to struggle as much with and against the Great European Tradition as composers do. There is much talk of "the vernacular" among Downtown musicians, meaning mostly the pop music young Americans are commonly exposed to in public settings. It is often asserted as a principle that one's music should draw on vernacular sources in order to provide the presumed audience with a point of recognition. Often parallels are drawn, correctly or not, with the great classic composers like Mozart and Schubert, who are alleged to have drawn on the "vernacular" or folk music of their own place and time. Downtown electronic composers tend to use samples and noises found in their environment, or locatable in some immediate cultural sphere. When a Downtown composer does make reference to European music (one could cite as examples Kitty Brazelton's Fishy-Wishy based on Schubert's "Trout" Quintet or Eve Beglarian's Machaut a Go-go), it tends to be with a sense of irony or at least self-conscious quotation of something foreign and distant, as one might make a reference to Balinese gamelan patterns. There is a strong sense that, however one may have been trained, true art should be directed toward, and drawn from, one's everyday life and experience - not a musical tradition from a long-ago era and a distant continent.
The most important thing about Downtown music, however, is revealed in the fact that Adorno was able to predict its eventual existence as early as 1945. For Downtown music - whatever its excesses, whatever its unconventional sounds and methods, whatever its detractors say about it, whatever legitimacy those with further Uptown sympathies wish to deny it - was a deeply felt and collective response to an oppressive economic and cultural situation.
In the 1950s, the American business class succeeded in imposing its values on the rest of America, and, incipiently, on the rest of the world as well. The deluge of propaganda that the corporate world poured into the media after the widespread strikes that followed World War II, in order to wrest worker allegiance away from the unions and portray business values as American values and therefore sacred, has been abundantly documented. [8] As Adorno spent his career pointing out, business ethics destroy the "use-value" of a work of art - i.e., what a work of art can potentially mean to a person or a people - and substitute "exchange-value," what someone will pay for it. The process had been going on for decades, but in the 1950s there was a particular triumph of business culture - vastly reinforced in the Reagan 1980s - that reduced art to mere entertainment, diversionary but not particularly necessary or reliable as a source of truth or self-knowledge. Whether a work such as Le Sacre du Printemps was capable of changing the course of history, or making an entire culture take a new look at itself, was no longer important. All that was important was - how much would you pay for the recording?
The "Midtown" response - not to really geographically locate it, but just to generalize it as a term - was to pretend that nothing had happened. The Midtown composers were angry that their symphonies could not command as high fees or frequent performances as the symphonies of dead people like Dvorak, Brahms, and so on, but they bravely held out, hoping that the state of affairs would merely be temporary. The Uptown response was to withdraw from the commercial market entirely and set up a separate support system with academia as its basis. There has always been a little hypocrisy in the Uptown venture, since most of the Uptown composers thought, with no particular rationale as to how this should work, that commercial success, or at least fame, ought to naturally follow success in academic circles. Unfortunately - from the Downtown point of view - withdrawing from the commercial market also seemed to mean withdrawing from non-musical society.
This was the crux of the dilemma, and the massive challenge that Downtown composers instinctively agreed to take on. The Downtowners did not want to remove themselves from engagement with the wider society, as the Uptowners had; nor did they consent to be hypocritical, as both alternative groups seemed to them. We sought, for the most part, to create a non-elitist music that nonmusicians could understand (at least, that was a theoretical goal; admittedly, one sometimes casually abandoned). And yet, we wanted to create an ever-renewing music that would not fall into the categories defined by the commercial music industry. To avoid falling into commercial pressures, and to get by without the support of the classical music organizations, we had to make our music virtually self-sufficient. And thus we created what to many more traditional musicians seemed a "very ascetic art developed in the loopholes of poverty and isolation, as counter-balance against the business culture which tends to cover the whole world."
Well, after 1985 commercial pressures were about as difficult to avoid in Downtown Manhattan as rhinoceroses. As the recording industry put more and more of a stranglehold on the creativity of pop musicians through the 1980s and '90s, there became less and less danger of Downtown composers "selling out." The increasing emphasis on profit over cultural value since Ronald Reagan was elected has resulted in a continual raising of the bar for what music's instant appeal must be to justify a recording company taking an interest. A label that might once have been satisfied to sell 500 copies of an avant-garde record now insisted on sales of 2000 compact discs; next year, 5000; the next year, 20,000. As every intelligent pop music fan knows, the idea of taking a chance on an unknown band and nurturing it through several sleeper albums in hopes of a long-term payoff has become a laughable anachronism. Adorno's predictions of the corporate world's damnable impact on culture took 40 years to become obvious, but they have been abundantly vindicated.
A personal point of comparison: when I was a student in the 1970s, a lot of the new music I was most excited about was on major record labels like Columbia, Deutsche Grammophon, Nonesuch. By the time I started at the Voice in 1986, these labels had little new music to offer and I was reviewing discs on new-music specialty labels like Lovely Music, New World, and New Albion. By the mid-1990s, New World and New Albion especially were passing by much of the most interesting new music, which was coming to me on tiny labels like O.O., Atavistic, and Mode not regularly available in record stores, but findable on the internet. By the turn of the century, most of the music I've been crucially interested in has come to me on labels run by the composer him- or herself, like Mikel Rouse's Exit Music, sold out of boxes in the composer's basement. The feeling that during the course of my lifetime new music has been pushed from the mainstream further and further out into the totally unfunded edges of society is very palpable. Without the explosion that has taken place in self-publishing technology, it would doubtless feel like there was no new creative music being made at all.
All aesthetic differences and bitter stylistic quarrels aside, this is the economic background against which Downtown music must be understood. The central issues from which the rainbow of Downtown styles became diffracted are: 1. accessibility, and 2. distribution. Accessibility refers to what kind of music you make in response to this economic problem, distribution to what you do with the music after making it to get it to its audience.
Accessibility is the code word for the major aesthetic disagreements that have occasionally wracked Downtown. The minimalist who writes pretty, predictable music believes in seducing the listener in hopes of eventually gaining a wide audience. The free improviser who makes ugly, wrenching, transgressive music doesn't care about a wide audience, but only about devoted listeners who are "serious," no matter how small a group that vague word might define. (The conceptualist who creates no tangible musical result may be happy with no audience at all but a few friends; this was a more sustainable aesthetic in the 1970s, when rents were cheap.) The issue is, who is your audience? Do you write for your friends? for like-minded disaffected outsiders everywhere? for musical "intellectuals" (whatever that term may connote)? for people with lots of money (certainly a strategy)? for devoted music lovers? for potentially all mankind? Given a group of strangers assembled in front of your stage, do you feel an impulse to seduce, engage, enlighten, challenge, or insult them? On such decisions hinge many more technical and stylistic musical issues. Across all musical boundaries, few will deny that there is some type of cause-and-effect relationship between musical idiom and size and depth of audience.
And yet, complicating that is the problem of distribution. Suppose you write music that could appeal to thousands of music lovers, but your can't get your music out to those thousands. Isn't it partly the case that the public will accept whatever is sufficiently hyped to them by the culture industry, and that bad music is as easily sold as good? A revealing moment came in the late 1980s when Nonesuch sent out thousands of copies of Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (a rather maudlin effort, to my tastes, but one easily enjoyed, and which had been composed much earlier in 1976) to British taste-makers and found themselves with - surprise! - a classical best-seller on their hands. How many new-music compact discs, given the same treatment, might garner the same results? Not all of them, surely - there is a limit to the number of nonmusicians (and even musicians) who are going to have a blast enduring the noise onslaught of Borbetomagus. Even a gorgeously sensuous work like John Luther Adams' In the White Silence will prove too featureless and intentionally nondramatic for some listeners, especially the most classical. But composers are haunted, with good reason and much anecdotal evidence, by the suspicion that there is a large, untapped new-music audience out there, invisible beyond the unscalable wall of corporate distribution tactics. I get this feeling myself frequently: giving a lecture I'll play examples of music by Adams, William Duckworth, Beth Anderson, Elodie Lauten, and others, and afterward be mobbed by people asking me where to get those CDs. Few people are aware that such beautiful music exists; play it for them, and enthusiasms will sprout full-blown like desert plants after a rain. Many of the CDs I play aren't available, however, and the potential audience goes home disappointed, giving up after a quick internet search.
And so distribution strategies vary both in relation to and independently of accessibility issues. It was an instructive Downtown morality tale in the late 1990s when the Bang on a Can festival signed up an exciting deal with the recording giant Sony, didn't deliver the kind of sales Sony was hoping for, didn't get treated very well, and finally retreated to form their own label, Cantaloupe. The message was clear: the corporate world is not currently a friendly place to new creativity, and even if you can crowbar your way into it, you may be better off doing it yourself. "The compact disc," as Charles Amirkhanian likes to say, "has become a composer's calling card." Many composers find it easier - and very nearly as lucrative - to pass out their discs for free or at small charge at festivals, conferences, and solo concerts as to try to market them through retail outlets. Some composers seem happy to remain part of a closed scene, with few outside the local Downtown audiences taking notice. Others keep chasing after traditional means of music distribution such as publishers and major labels - many of these composers seem to end up bitter. Some band together to form ensembles, festivals, or record labels, with considerable short-term success but a pretty much inevitable burn-out rate. Still others use technology to become entirely self-sufficient, creating their own CDs and (in the extraordinary case of Mikel Rouse) even complete films. Even in the case of such success stories, it can be heart-breaking to see so much hard work run up against the impermeable barrier of finding commercial distribution.
As for my critical coverage of this scene, I might as well admit that, while as a historian I try to be even-handed, as a critic-cum-struggling-young-composer I very definitely took sides. I was generally on the side of accessibility; I fancied myself not believing that music should appeal to the ignorant masses, like Yanni's, but rather imagined an ideal audience of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, the sensitive people who might occasionally attend a play or see a museum exhibition because it sounded interesting; readers of books. It seemed to me that music, without necessarily being pretty or familiar-sounding, should be clear, distinct, transparent enough to get its idea across to these people. I became the enemy of anything murky, accidental, confused, insular, self-indulgent, anything that threatened to keep new music confined to a cultural ghetto. Steve Reich and Philip Glass had broken out of the Downtown ghetto and become famous and widely heard. I imagined, because I did, that every composer harbored similar ambitions, which is of course not true. I felt that to accomplish this took a certain amount of musical discipline. John Zorn, I suppose, in not only his music but his entrepreneurial activities, was the herald of the opposite point of view: that composers should ignore audiences, make whatever kind of music appeals to them, and rely on distribution to maintain a presence in the general culture. But I have never been an extremist nor a purist. There are plenty of "ugly" and transgressive pieces of music for which I hold a secret fondness, and plenty of favorite composers - Stefan Wolpe, for one - whom I know the general public will never take to its heart.
Overall, I believed, and believe, in a healthy musical and artistic culture to which all contribute: composers, by making their music as clear as possible and listening to it with an objective, audience member's ear; listeners, by taking chances and not always contenting themselves with music they've heard before or that sounds like something they've heard before; and presenters, publishers, and record labels by nurturing new and outlandish-seeming work, even, YES, to an extent that might result in short-term financial loss. There is no more leeway for self-indulgence on the part of a record label than there is for an individual composer. We all have a responsibility to create a lively and sustainable society. To make loads of money off of old and familiar music without nurturing new artists and cultural expressions is like cutting down forests wholesale without planting any new trees. It leads to not only a cultural dead end, but eventually an economic one as well.
* * * * * * *
Having outlined some philosophical and economic background for Downtown music, it only remains to provide the more usual history of styles and movements. Hardly a unitary phenomenon, Downtown music resembles not so much a tradition or social group as a battlefield on which various groups reign ascendant from time to time. First came the conceptualists from around 1960. These reveled in the verbal instruction piece, what came to be jocularly known as "the short form." "This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean," wrote La Monte Young in his Composition 1960 #15 - in fact, that enigmatic line and whatever visions it stirs constitute the entire piece. Young's Composition 1960 # 5 instructs one to "Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.... the composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away." Other conceptualists were more radical, like Takehisa Kosugi's Music for a Revolution: "Scoop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later." Or Nam June Paik's Danger Music No. 5: "Creep into the vagina of a living whale." And yet other conceptualist pieces could be quite entertainingly performed, like Robert Watts' Trace, which consisted of musicians setting their sheet music on fire, or Yoko Ono's Wall Piece for Orchestra of 1962, in which performers hit the wall with their heads.
One of La Monte Young's most (in)famous pieces was Composition 1960 #7, which consisted of the pitches B and F# and an instruction, "to be held for a long time." This, along with his Trio for Strings of 1958 - whose notes were held for minutes at a time - was the beginning of a new movement that around 1970 would acquire the name minimalism. While the early minimalists, some of them all but forgotten today, were a noisy, loud, austere bunch, musically speaking, the Johnny-come-slightly-latelies of the movement, notably Steve Reich and Philip Glass, wrote music that was, for the time, shockingly pretty. Where conceptualism had been perhaps the ultimate anti-corporate music - how could you sell something that was only an action directed by a quizzical aphorism? - minimalism, with its return to ensemble music, however lightly notated, was far more marketable. Tape delay pieces like Terry Riley's Persian Surgery Dervishes; tape loop pieces like Reich's Come Out and Piano Phase; and additive process pieces like Glass's Music in Fifths seemed to offer the basis for an entirely new era in compositional technique, and a basis for a new music that owed nothing to European influence. Within a few years, works like Reich's Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians, Glass's Einstein on the Beach, and Laurie Anderson's O Superman were winning a wide array of fans who had been turned off by most contemporary music.
This is where the term New Music came in, popularized in the late 1970s and confirmed in 1979 by the New Music New York festival at the Kitchen.
The early 1980s saw minimalism turn establishment. Reich and Glass started getting commissions for orchestra pieces and conventional opera-house operas, rarely as compelling, innovative, or exciting as their earlier homemade ensemble music. As younger classically trained composers puzzled about what to do with all this minimalist input, free improvisation rushed in to fill the leadership vacuum. Already in 1979, a saxophonist back from studying in St. Louis named John Zorn had written instruction-based improvisation pieces called Archery and Pool. In 1984 his work in this area would climax with Cobra, an improvisation piece in which each performer at some point would play traffic cop for the others, bringing a fresh new kind of spontaneity and turn-on-a-dime precision into a genre often too bloated with cliches. This represented a 180-degree spin away from minimalism, and, generally, a shift of Downtown activity away from classically trained composers to jazz-based musicians. Where minimalism had sought to supersede modernism, free improvisation was modernism returned with a vengeance, out to conquer new territory. Quite shockingly to many of us, Zorn revealed in interviews that he was as contemptuous of Cage, Oliveros, and minimalism as any Uptowner could be, and that he took his cultural clues not only from free jazzers like Albert Ayler and Anthony Braxton, but from European avant-gardists like Mauricio Kagel and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
In summer of 1986 Zorn had his popular breakthrough with The Big Gundown, a Nonesuch record of crazy Downtown arrangements of film music by Ennio Morricone. In November 1986 I started writing for the Village Voice. In May 1987 the first Bang on a Can festival debuted, organized by three composers: Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang. Bang on a Can signaled (as perhaps did my arrival as well) the beginning of another turnaround, which would become full-blown by 1990. Now the scene was flooded with composers of notated music that was far more complex than minimalism but heavily indebted to it. The conceptualists and minimalists had exhausted the possibilities of solo and composer performance, and the younger artists wanted to write for large ensembles again. In the ensuing outpouring two streams became audible, which I've defined (though I didn't invent either term) as postminimalism and totalism.
The term postminimalism has been used by many writers to refer to music that reminds them of minimalism but is somehow different, usually less strict. My use of it is much more specific. In the late 1980s I began noticing a tremendous amount of music that used steady pulse throughout, simple but nontraditional diatonic tonality, and simple but not obvious numerical structures. That this music was a spinoff from minimalism was clear, but it also incorporated influences from older classical music and several world traditions, including bluegrass, gamelan, African drumming, Japanese gagaku, and others. The first examples of this well-defined style included William Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes (1978-79), Janice Giteck's Breathing Songs from a Turning Sky (1980), Peter Gena's Beethoven in Soho (1980), and Daniel Lentz's The Dream King (1983). Spread out geographically from coast to coast, and mostly born in the 1940s, the exponents of this style formed no unified scene, and mostly didn't know each other (I introduced many of them). The ideas of postminimalism, though, were clearly "in the air."
Totalism - named such by some composer's girlfriend who has vanished into myth, but the name stuck - was a mostly New York movement of younger composers born in the 1950s. Totalism began in Mikel Rouse's works for his Broken Consort ensemble such as Quick Thrust (1984), Lois Vierk's Go Guitars (1981), Michael Gordon's Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not! (1983), and my own Mountain Spirit (1983 - my own output being divided between totalist and postminimalist tendencies). This was a style based in minimalism's limitations of pitch material, but using minimalist patterns as a springboard for considerable rhythmic and tempo complexity. The totalist composers (myself excepted, actually) envied the propulsive energy of rock, and were also often trained in some aspect of non-Western music. Pounding rhythms, either in complex polyrhythms or changing tempo abruptly in a kind of gear-shifting effect, are a common totalist characteristic. Nine-against-eight is a particular favorite, achieved in ensemble performance by keeping an inaudible quarter-note beat going while half the ensemble plays dotted eighth-notes and the other half triplet quarters; it is sometimes amusing to watch a totalist ensemble nod their heads in unison to a beat no one is playing. I've written at length elsewhere about the differences between postminimalist and totalist music [9], and further explication will arise in these articles.
So what about today? The New York scene has already changed again since the mid-1990s, and as my professional activities have eased from the newspaper world into academia, I am no longer its foremost chronicler. My own sense of obsolescence as a critic dawned on me the day DJ-ing was declared an art form. It's not that I don't believe someone could make worthwhile art from spinning vinyl records and CDs. I imagine many possibilities, and I'm floored by the technique involved. (How do they manage to get all those beats from different records in sync? Incredible, and I have no idea how they do it.) It's that, listening to various acclaimed DJ artists, I have trouble telling them apart stylistically, and can't tell what their aesthetic aims are. I can't tell a great DJ artist from a mediocre one, and they all kind of blend into gray for me. Their apologists come with armloads of postmodern deconstructionist jargon whose content I'm suspicious of. But unlike the traditional classical critics who saw themselves as the gatekeepers of the canon, and who saw it as their duty to demolish music they didn't understand, I raise no red flag against today's DJ artists. I'm positive, from talking to them, that their music is an authentic expression. I am simply not the person to write about it. I'm from the wrong generation, and it may not be my music to understand. Or perhaps an opportunity to understand it better will come my way.
Will Downtown music continue to exist? Indubitably. As the United States, under pressure of corporations and rightwing fear-mongers, becomes more and more a country of petrified conformists, the range of possible nonconformity ever widens, and it becomes more crucial than ever to have a music scene where the nonconformist can feel welcome. The bigger question is whether any semblance of Downtown tradition will remain unbroken, or whether the current scene is a total shift toward musicians whose reference points are overwhelmingly from popular musics. As a scene, Downtown music has endured discontinuities before, and may even thrive on them. Perhaps a more urgent question is, will Downtown music continue to be written about? One palpable cultural tragedy of recent years is the steadily declining space in newspapers for arts coverage, which have made getting a concert reviewed - once a matter of course in New York - something of a rarity on the order of winning the lottery. If you have a music scene, and no one writes about it, does it make any noise?
Above all, please don't surmise that the word "Downtown" encompasses anything doctrinaire: it is basically just a set of survival strategies. "The present-day composer refuses to die," quoth Frank Zappa, and as long as composers are determined to survive, as long as there is a corporate behemoth to survive against - there will be a Downtown.
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Footnotes:
1. All the Adorno articles I mention can be found collected in a volume, Essays on Music: Selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert, New Translations by Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002) Quote from p. 384.
2. Ibid., p. 136.
3. Interestingly, he called it "New Music," but this was not-very-widespread usage was discontinuous with what came to be called New Music in the American late 1970s. In the 1950s, "contemporary" and "avant-garde" were the more common terms, at least in America.
4. Ibid., p. 181.
5. Milton Babbitt, Words About Music (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 183.
6. Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New York: The New Press, 2002), p. 226.
7. Quoted in K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists, Phaidon Press (London, 1996), p. 114.
8. See for instance, Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995)
9. See, for instance, my book American Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1997) and my article "Minimal Music, Maximal Impact" on the New Music Box web site, at http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?
Copyright 2005 by Kyle Gann
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