Milestone

I've been missing the Voice artices, but I check your blog frequently. I hope there's a Music Downtown II in the works. The decline of the Voice is a sad thing.

Kyle, your tenure at the VV was awesome. Here is my loving obit.

Also let's not forget that a huge technological
upheavel turned the music criticism landscape topsy-turvy by
1997, as well as purely social and literary and economic
shockwaves that ripsawed through the Village Voice
(and every other print publication during the 90s). To
wit, online sources for new music journalism like Kalvos
& Damien's New Music Bazaar.

http://kalvos.org/

Those guys never got paid a dime for what they did but
they strove heroically to create something vaguely similar
to the old classical music journalism of yore. Now we're off
into interstellar space with something completely different...no
editors, total contempt for expertise

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25

disdain for documented facts

ttp://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=111504A

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4502846.stm

reality defined by lemming stampede

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000067.html

the wild west

http://blog.cbaker.org/?p=32

"facts" that constantly change depending on the phase of the moon

http://slashdot.org/articles/06/07/16/1345246.shtml

no law in the arena, devil take the hindmost, everybody out for hi/rself...
A rioting chaos of a bezillion music websites with no central
fact-checking and no editorial filter. Sequenza 21 remains so completely out of touch with
the developments in new music outside of the central East Coast
of the U.S. that it can't be taken seriously unless you live int he New York/Boston area. So now it's down
to YouTube and MySpace, the Web 2.0 collaborative stuff, the
Wikipedia articles to promote new music and new composers.

We'll see what happens. Pure Athenian-style
democracy boils down to the theory that if you multiply a
million errors together, somehow they'll all cancel out. Didn't
work for Athens. Remember the Sicilian Expedition in 415 B.C.
during the Peloponnesian War?

Fortunately, WE aren't vulnerable to that kind of
self-destruction! We're UNIQUE! We're SPECIAL! We're AMERICANS!
We're -- Oh...no...wait...we've got our own Sicilian Expedition
going on in Iraq right now, as we speak...

Methinks these developments bode ill -- as does Jaron Lanier,
whose article Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online
Collectivism applies with especial force to new music and
remains a must-read for contemporary composers.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

But time will tell.

I'm enjoying 'Music Downtown' very much, but there a few titles on your complete list that I know I have to read. I hope there are plans to make some more of these articles available, online or otherwise.

In the meantime, thanks for the list and the work...

When I was in high school in the '50's, on Long Island, I'd occasionally manage a trip into "the City" during the summer and head straight down to the village to hang out in the bookstores (8th Street, Paperback Gallery, 4 Continents bookshop)
and Cafe Figaro. And I'd always pick up a copy of the VV. But I'd have to sneak it back into the house. My dad thought it was subversive.

Imagine that.

KG replies: Hey, soon after I started there, I bought my parents a gift subscription. The first issue they received had a cover story on diapering and talcum powder among gay men. I think my Dad used to pick the thing up with clothespins.

"Sequenza 21 remains so completely out of touch with
the developments in new music outside of the central East Coast
of the U.S. that it can't be taken seriously unless you live int he New York/Boston area."

I'm a bit late in responding to this thread, but in case McLaren checks in again: It's certainly true that the bulk of the S21 contributions come from northeasterners, and that fact may well skew our coverage, but Jerry Bowles pretty much has an open-door policy on new contributors. Any gaps in our coverage (a woeful lack of female contributors being another obvious one) are not the result of editorial policy, and in many cases are in spite of it. Anybody who wants to contribute some underrepresented viewpoints should e-mail Jerry -- we could use some new blood over there.