Preface: New Music and the Village Voice

Introduction: The Importance of Being Downtown

Interviews

Shouting at the Dead (interview with Robert Ashley) - October 8, 1991
The Part That Doesn't Fit Is Me (interview with Yoko Ono) - August 11, 1992
Midtown Avant-Gardist (interview with Philip Glass) - October 27, 1992
Trimpin's Machine Age (interview with Trimpin) - April 20, 1993
Dancing with the Audience (interview with Carman Moore) - August 9, 1994
Harps from Heaven (interview with Glenn Branca) - November 22, 1994
Shadowing Capote (interview with Mikel Rouse) - February 7, 1995
The Dance Between (interview with David First) - May 2, 1995
Raising Ghosts (interview with Leroy Jenkins) - May 21, 1996
Opera Meets Oprah (Mikel Rouse's Dennis Cleveland) - November 5, 1996
A Difficult Woman (interview with Maria De Alvear) - May 20, 1997
Monkey Business (interview with Fred Ho) - November 25, 1997

Music and/versus Society

Plundering for Art (John Oswald and sampling's legal problems) - May 1, 1990
Mozarts Live! (Mozart's followers) - June 18, 1991
Killers in the Audience (audience resistance to new music) - January 14, 1992
Letting Euro Go (Distinguishing American classical music from European) - January 21, 1992
What Normal People Hear (Rose Rosengard Subotnick) - July 28, 1992
Dysfunctional Harmony (creativity) - September 14, 1993
Don't Touch that Dahl (classical radio and its discontents) - January 25, 1994
Spin It Around (Trimpin and public art) - February 22, 1994
Paradise at Our Fingertips (John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards) - March 8, 1994
What's Your AQ? (intelligence versus success) - January 17, 1995
Dump the Multicult (the foibles of multiculturalism) - January 24, 1995
No More Heroes (the end of hero-worship) - January 31, 1995
Music of the Excluded Middle (how multiculturalism betrays new music) - June 27, 1995
Medicine Music (the usefulness of music) - August 22, 1995
Who Killed Classical Music? (gumshoe Kyle Gann searches Uptown and Down- for the killer) - January 21, 1997

Musical Politics

Paradigms Lost (Rhys Chatham, John Zorn, and category blurring) - March 28, 1989
Blurred Out (cliches of the '80s) - September 5, 1989
Rock Rules (what was wrong with the '80s) - January 23, 1990
Pulitzer Hacks (Pulitzer Prize winners) - July 30, 1991
Composer's Clearing House (Wayne Peterson's Pulitzer Prize) - May 5, 1992
Obitchuaries (Cage dies, critics stick feet in mouths) - October 13, 1992
Totally Ismic (the birth of totalism) - July 20, 1993
The Last Barbarian (John Cage's posthumous reputation) - November 9, 1993
Berlitz's Downtown for Musicians (Uptown problems with new-music performance) - July 26, 1994
What Are We, Chopped Liver? (the neglect of my generation) - September 13, 1994
The Great Divide (Uptown student composers) - July 9, 1996
Y Not 2K? (nostalgia for modernism) - April 6, 1999
Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead (The new century begins) - January 25, 2000

Aesthetics

Let X = X (minimalism versus serialism) - February 24, 1987
A Tale of Two Sohos (Plato vs. Aristotle in new music) - January 26, 1988
A Secret Manifesto (Fred Lerdahl's cognitive critique of twelve-tone music) - July 26, 1988
The Modernist Dance (left and right brain in music) - July 18, 1989
It's Only As Good As It Sounds (Richard Rorty: relativism and the avant-garde) - February 6, 1990
Noises of Fate (the concept of recontextualization) - July 24, 1990
Sounding the Image (musical image versus musical language) - February 4, 1992
Waiting for Monteverdi (Minimalism's place in history) July 21, 1992
Dads Versus Shadows (James Hillman's creative archetypes) - March 16, 1993
Vexing the Purists (playing in Erik Satie's Vexations) - June 8, 1993
Musical Amnesia Cured! (images in music: Feldman, Shapey, Messiaen) - February 15, 1994
End of the Paper Trail (the increasing irrelevance of notation) - July 25, 1995

Reflections on Books, Figures, and Events

No Shortcuts (John Cage festival at Wesleyan) - May 10, 1988
E.T., Go Home (Owen Jorgensen's Tuning) - June 29, 1993
Composing the Lingo (Harry Partch) - May 7, 1996
Morton Feldman's Abstract Expressions (Lincoln Center's Feldman retrospective) - July 23, 1996
One-Note Wonder (Giacinto Scelsi) - February 25, 1997
Father of Us All (Tommasini's biography of Virgil Thomson) - July 8, 1997
Minimalism Isn't Pretty (Tony Conrad, Charlemagne Palestine) - April 28, 1998
Grand Old Youngster (Steve Reich) - July 20,1999

Concert Reviews

Maximal Spirit (La Monte Young) - June 9, 1987
Big Machines, Little Issues (International Computer Music Conference; Xenakis) - September 29, 1987
First Flight (John Adams's Nixon in China) - December 29, 1987
Admiring the Waterfall (David Garland) - January 5, 1988
Yawn (R.I.P. Hayman) - February 16, 1988
Searching for the Plague (Diamanda Galas) - August 15, 1989
Oceans Without Walls (Laurie Anderson) - October 17, 1989
Insiders, Outsiders, and Old Boys (New Music American 1989) - December 5, 1989
Dark Stormy Night (Nicolas Collins's It Was a Dark and Stormy Night) - March 13, 1990
Let There Be Noise (David Rosenboom, Trichy Sankaran) - May 8, 1990
Music in Time of War (the Composer-to-Composer Institute) August 7, 1990
Don't Worry, Be Hopi (the Hopi home dance) - August 21, 1990
Enough of Nothing (Relache's postminimalism: Vierk, Davidson, Giteck, Childs, Hovda) - April 30, 1991
Voltage High (Ron Kuivila) - December 10, 1991
Isn't That Spatial (Henry Brant's 500: Hidden Hemisphere) - September 15, 1992
The Limits of Craft (Frederic Rzewski and Philip Glass) - December 8, 1992
Opera Is Relative (Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach in revival) - December 15, 1992
Well-Tuned Blues (La Monte Young's Forever Bad Blues Band) - February 2, 1993
Voice of the Unutterable (The S.E.M. Ensemble plays Cage, Varese, and Morton Feldman) - December 28, 1993
How Peculiar? (American Eccentrics festival) - June 14, 1994
Flutes and Flying Branches (Taos Reservation pow-wow) - August 16, 1994
The Tingle of p x mn - 1 (installations by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela) - October 4, 1994
The British Don't Have Oral Sex (Robert Ashley's Now Eleanor's Idea) - December 13, 1994
View from the Gap (the clash of generations at UCSD) - March 21, 1995
Bang! Crunch! Who's on First? (Twisted Tutu) - October 29, 1996
Regarding Henry (Henry Cowell's Musical Worlds: A Centennial Festival) - April 1, 1997
What Our Pulses Say (David Garland) - June 22, 1999
Mistaken Memories (Tony Conrad) - February 13, 2001

Passings

Legacy of the Quiet Touch (obituary for Morton Feldman) - October 6, 1987
The Antidote to Publicity (obituary for Virgil Thomson) - October 17, 1989
That Which Is Fundamental (Julius Eastman, 1940-1990) - January 22, 1991
Philosopher No More (Obituary for John Cage) - August 25, 1992

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