Archives for March 2005

It seems that when I wrote, “I realize that people don’t like the differences between Uptown and Downtown music pointed out,” I was partly mistaken. It’s true that some non-Downtowners were put off by the perceived negativity of my post “Downtown Music and Its Misrepresentations.” But here are the responses from Downtown composers:

BRAVO.

“Downtown Music and its Misrepresentations” is one of the finest and
most relevant things I’ve ever read. Thank you for writing and
posting it. Brilliant!

What would we do without you, Kyle?

Don’t stop.

Your analysis of the conventional wisdom that there’s no longer a
difference between Uptown and Downtown is right on the mark.

I love it every time you write about Downtown/Uptown. It makes me smile.

Very much enjoyed the blog entry on BoaC.

Hmmm…. It seems that I’m not the only Downtown composer who’s sick and friggin’ tired of being told that there is no Downtown music anymore; that there’s no difference between Uptown and Downtown anymore; that the Uptown/Downtown issue is irrelevant; that prejudice against Downtown composers no longer exists; that Downtown music is whatever John Zorn does, or whatever Bang on a Can does. What if we quit putting up with it?

I’ve always liked the idea that new music is whatever was composed today, while everything before that is history. John Maxwell Hobbs gives us a chance to try it out. At his Cinema Volta web site he’s making a new ambient piece every day for a year, and posting them as he goes.

I first knew Hobbs as an administrator at the Kitchen. After he left that job, I learned he was a composer, for he made a delightful web site that offered a do-it-yourself ambient music kit – you put in your instrument preferences, and the internet would play the music, ad infinitum. This new ambient stuff is nice too, and he tells you the pros and cons, from his angle, for each piece. Hurry, only ten and a half months left – then it will be old music.

After every article I write about the Uptown/Downtown issue, I receive at least one e-mail telling me my views on the subject are bullshit. All of these messages have one thing in common: the writer knows the music of John Zorn and the Bang on a Can festival. This acquaintance, in his estimation, clearly outweighs my 28 years of involvement with the Downtown scene and makes the writer an authority on Downtown music. This is like reading the speeches of Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman and then announcing, “Now I’m an expert on Leftist political thought.”

Allow me to detail what’s wrong with this formulation. First: Bang on a Can. Speaking as someone who personally knows a few hundred Downtown composers, I can tell you that there is a lot of resentment within the Downtown community against Bang on a Can, and that dozens of my composer friends would be horrified to think that the Bang on a Can festival was anyone’s image of Downtown music. There are large swaths of Downtown music that Bang on a Can has ignored, and major Downtown figures to whom BoaC has barely paid attention. In the festival’s early years it seemed a little oriented toward Downtown composers, but there is a widespread perception that as the festival became more famous and starting associating with Lincoln Center, the curators – David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon – started abandoning younger Downtown composers, associating with famous composers like Louis Andriessen and Steve Reich, and keeping their own music at center stage. Furthermore, there is a lot of feeling that Lang, Wolfe, and Gordon, who studied at Yale with Martin Bresnick, are not themselves Downtown composers at all; although Gordon, who has more of a garage-band background and more minimalist tendencies, is sometimes exempted from this charge.

Now is not the moment to assess the accuracy of these perceptions – I sort of agree, sort of don’t, but I merely report them to note how unfortunate this assumed equivalence of BoaC = Downtown is. In their defense, BoaC has never particularly claimed to represent Downtown. There is nothing about Downtown music in their mission statement, and the only thing they’ll say publicly is that they’re not really interested in the Uptown/Downtown distinction. They always chose the composers they wanted, some from Europe, many from across the country, and many who were new to the New York scene altogether. If I have to think back to how they became identified with Downtown, the biggest culprit may be my own reviews in the Village Voice, for in their early years I was enthusiastic about the new energy they brought in and the new kinds of music they gave voice to.

Meanwhile, there were and are music festivals that do claim to represent Downtown music, most famously New Music America, which was a traveling Downtown music schowcase for eleven years, from 1979 to 1989. Last October’s Sounds Like Now festival explicitly featured the Downtown scene, and there are periodically others, none of them nearly as visible or well-funded as Bang on a Can. Follow any of these festivals and you’ll have every right to voice your opinions on Downtown music. But draw conclusions about Downtown from Bang on a Can, and you’ll insult hundreds of Downtown composers without particularly gratifying the BoaC people.

The issue of John Zorn I’ve addressed elsewhere here. Before Zorn, the Downtown scene could pretty well be characterized by the large roster of composers who comprised the New Music New York festival of 1979: Rhys Chatham, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Charlemagne Palestine, Charles Amirkhanian, Alvin Lucier, Annea Lockwood, Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock, and many others. It was a scene characterized by conceptualism and minimalism, music of intense focus on sound, made by people who were outcasts from the classical music world.

This was not at all Zorn’s type of music: his models in the classical world were Kagel, Stockhausen, and Carter, he was antiminimalist, he objected to the reverence given John Cage. He put together a scene of performers mostly from jazz backgrounds, and created an alternative to the minimalist Downtown scene, one couched in postmodern style mixing and maximalist chaos. It wasn’t that Downtown had never had free improv before – Oliveros and Terry Riley had been experimenting with it, though with emphasis more on sound than virtuosity, more on meditation than chaos. To the horror of many veteran Downtowners, Zorn brought Downtown music back toward the modernism, chaos, and complexity from which the minimalists and conceptualists had already escaped once.

With heavy irony, minimalist Tony Conrad once participated in a late ’80s performance of John Cage’s Songbooks by chanting, “No more Cage! Zorn is the rage!” It did seem for a few years that free improvisers from the jazz world had infiltrated and wiped out the minimalist brand of Downtown music. Zorn created a parallel Downtown scene that took over in the late 1980s, partly through tremendous energy and organizational skills – but also partly because the free improvisers were generally ready to go onstage and perform without rehearsal, and the improvising ideology entailed a belief that anything that resulted was fine. [UPDATE: To his everlasting credit, Zorn has redeemed himself in recent years with Tzadik, a record label 30 times more inclusive than the scene he dominated in the late ’80s.] Eventually, after 1990, free improvisation fell back into being only one component of the scene, ensconced at the Knitting Factory and Tonic, but again just one Downtown strand among many.

Meanwhile, the Downtown scene that had started in 1960, when Yoko Ono opened her loft for La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield to give concerts at, survived and continued. The aesthetics of conceptualists like Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Yoshi Wada, Dick Higgins, and Phil Corner, and of early minimalists like Young, Terry Jennings, Angus Maclise, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock, Tom Johnson, Tony Conrad, Jon Gibson, Dennis Johnson, and John Cale, were inherited by further generations: Meredith Monk, Elodie Lauten, Brenda Hutchinson, Joshua Fried, Bernadette Speach, Daniel Goode (perhaps the most hardcore Downtowner of all), Barbara Benary, David First, Ben Neill, Skip LaPlante, Mikel Rouse, Tom Hamilton, Joshua Fried, Eve Beglarian, William Duckworth, Mary Jane Leach, Linda Fisher, David Borden, Guy Klucevsek, Raphael Mostel, Lois V. Vierk, John Kennedy, Jerome Kitzke, Julius Eastman, Conrad Cummings, Nick Didkovsky, Phil Kline, Diana Meckley, Ben Manley, Ron Kuivila, Nic Collins, David Garland, Carman Moore, Petr Kotik, Laurie Spiegel, Alvin Curran, Corey Dargel, Christine Baczewska, Lenore Von Stein, Peter Gordon, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jerry Hunt, Noah Creshevsky, Shelley Hirsch, Jeffrey Schanzer, Jin Hi Kim, Glenn Branca, Jeffrey Lohn, Wendy Chambers, George Lewis, Diamanda Galas, Annea Lockwood, Patrick Grant, Joseph Celli, David Myers, David Moss, Dary John Mizelle, Todd Levin, Neil Rolnick, Toby Twining, Norman Yamada, Annie Gosfield, Robert Een, Martha Mooke, Judy Dunaway, Beata Moon, Elise Kermani, Fred Ho, Judith Sainte Croix, Maryanne Amacher, Molly Thompson, Paul Lansky, David Beardsley, myself – just to mention the first few dozen who come to mind. And those are just the ones with a presence on the New York scene. There were, and are, Downtowners in cities and towns and wildernesses all over America: Janice Giteck, Daniel Lentz, Carl Stone, Art Jarvinen, Amy Knowles, Stephen Scott, Peter Gena, Ingram Marshall, Mary Ellen Childs, Peter Garland, John Luther Adams, Larry Polansky, Phil Winsor, Laetitia de Compiegne Sonami, Carolyn Yarnell, Dan Becker, Belinda Reynolds, Pamela Z, Erling Wold, Henry Gwiazda, Philip Bimstein, Ellen Fullman, Richard Lerman, Orlando Garcia, Paul Dresher, Paul Epstein, Trimpin, Alison Cameron, Gustavo Matamoros, David Rosenboom, David Rosenbloom, Arnold Dreyblatt, John Oswald, Chris Brown, Susan Parenti, Jewlia Eisenberg, Paul Dolden, John Morton, David Hykes, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, David Dunn, David Gunn, and on and on.

A lot of people who have no contact with the Downtown scene can name four Downtown composers: Zorn, Gordon, Lang, Wolfe. A lot of hardcore Downtowners don’t even consider those four people Downtowners. I won’t agree, and it’s never been my philosophy of Downtown to make those kind of hardline distinctions. But there is a Downtown mainstream in which those four composers never particularly participated, and to which they were not attracted; and there are many reasonable generalizations one could make about Downtown music that would not apply to those four.

So when you come to me saying, “Downtown music is really complex and atonal now, I know because I’ve heard some John Zorn” – or, “Downtown composers are doing just fine, David Lang got some orchestra commissions” – then all I can say to you is, “Why, the Democrats looooooove George W. Bush, because I just talked to Zell Miller!” If you’re familiar with Lauten’s The Death of Don Juan, if you know what kinds of music Beglarian wrote before and after she defected to Downtown, if you know how Josh Fried expanded his theater concept after Travelogue, and you think some of my opinions about Downtown are mistaken, you write to me and we’ll have a good conversation. But if all you think you know about Downtown is John Zorn and Bang on a Can, don’t bother airing your ignorance, because my only reply will be the URL for this blog entry.

Having grown up where football was the local religion, I am an inveterate sports-hater. But John Luther Adams’ response to my “Kittens on the Basketball Court” post may open up, for others, a whole new discussion of sports/music affinities:

Your latest post on Postclassic explains why I’ve never liked
basketball. I’m glad you didn’t pick baseball. It’s much more like the
music I love: slow, boring, and beautiful in its details.

I realize that people don”t like the differences between Uptown and Downtown music pointed out, that it’s a continuous faux pas that I’ve been committing for 25 years. People react as though I keep awkwardly referring to differences between whites and blacks, or rich and poor, that are impolite to bring up. Yet the differences are not racial ones, but matters of personal temperament and especially training and tradition, and thus relevant to education. And if, in one’s life as a writer, one is disallowed to comment on phenomena that forcibly impress themselves on one’s perception, what’s the point of life? At least, by refusing to censor myself for the comfort of my critics, I hurt only myself, and I’ve got tenure anyway.

Yesterday I had an interesting opportunity to listen to music by a Downtown composer in an otherwise completely Uptown context. I had been asked to submit music by composers for a minor job search, and I only knew one who fit the specific qualifications and availability. So we listened to all this music in a blindfold situation, and all the other composers were people whose names, as it later turned out, were unknown to me anyway. The other recommenders, present, were heavily in that Uptown world (or perhaps some would prefer that I more accurately say Midtown, not 12-tone but rather dissonant Romantic), and recommended, of course, only other Uptowners.

Every single one of the Uptown pieces, and we listened to 14 or so, was a study in transition. Each one started at point A and headed immediately towards point B, always focusing the listener on not what was going on at the moment, but your elicited expectations of what was coming up down the road. And the way my colleagues appreciated and criticized the music bore that out: “Wait a minute, I want to see where this is going…. It feels like it never really arrived…. I really liked that transition.” Everything was focused on the skill with which a trajectory was defined and carried out.

By contrast, my one Downtown composer offered no transitions at all. Rather Feldman-influenced, like so much music from my generation, the pieces would do this for awhile, and then that, possibly returning to the first or going somewhere else, but never projecting ahead, never leading to anything, always focused on what the music was doing at the moment. Having introduced a new idea, it would stay with it for a few moments, rather than make you nervous by rushing on to the next thing. The music’s aim seemed to be to define its own sounds and textures, and possibly in retrospect to have created a sound world, but one without crescendos, descrescendos, or climaxes. And my colleagues criticized the music, lightly, for its lack of transition, appreciating the colors and gestures, but talking as though the all-important transitions had been rather ineptly omitted. Too bad such a talented composer didn’t get hooked up with a teacher who taught transitions.

It was like the difference between watching Shaquille O’Neal, or Evel Knievel, and a Zen monk or kitten. The Uptown aesthetic was obsessed with skill: get the BALL in the BASKET, MAKE THAT CURVE, REACH THE GOAL. Define what you’re going to do way up ahead, and then show people how good you are at getting there, at DRIVING HOME YOUR POINT. So for classically trained musicians with all those Uptown expectations, listening to a Downtown piece is like seeing a kitten or Zen monk on a basketball court: “What are you doing? The BASKET’s over THERE. Don’t just stop and smell those gym shoes! Don’t you want to WIN? Don’t you want people to realize how GOOD you are? What do you mean you’re appreciating the symmetry of the court? There IS no symmetry, your basket is OVER AT THAT END.”

Whereas for me, the Uptown pieces were tediously would-be-impressive. Every one would start somewhere and instantly begin to move, and within 20 seconds I’d think, “Oh, I see where this is going,” and then I’d listen for ten minutes while the composer laboriously achieved what he already signaled he was going to do. (Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that I’m also bored by spectator sports.) There were no mysteries, no whimsical inspirations of the moment, no unexpected changes except for sudden upward gear shifts (ALWAYS upward, except to start over at the bottom again for a long new crescendo) in the energy level. Nothing ever settled into a groove, because the music was always moving forward, there were no sections to just “get into” and enjoy. Very, very clearly, young composers are TRAINED in school to write music this way, to think that this… is… what… music… does. And yet I can think of some pretty damn good pieces by Brahms and Stravinsky and other famous dead people that don’t fit this pattern.

Well, that’s fine. They have their music and I have mine. Downtown music will die with my generation, because young musicians are not exposed to it or made aware of it, and I’ll die with it, and will not have to endure the future of eternally goal-oriented music. Meanwhile, ‘ll keep pointing out the differences between Uptown music and Down- to my annoyed and impatient detractors – because kittens are great, and shouldn’t be denigrated or discriminated against because they’re not interested in shooting balls through hoops.