May I blow my own horn a moment? I’ve had precious few reviews of my music in my life, and I just got the first comment about my new CD Long Night from the Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter, in a trope not only gratifying to its recipient, but enviably well phrased:

The piece has rippling quality, like soft light illuminating a quiet room off an antique mirror, on a cloudy afternoon just before Easter, on the way downstream to later. Ambient without being minimal, classical without the powdered wig, and contemporary without being electronic. – David Beardsley

“Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we’re in uncharted territory. We’re governed by public relations.” – Gore Vidal

For 18 years I’ve written for the Village Voice, about Downtown music, for a Downtown audience and those who love Downtown music. In that milieu, I could always shout, any time I wanted, “Geeez, ya wanna know what sucks?! 12-TONE MUSIC!!” And I’d never get any response more threatening than, “YEAAHH, woo!!” Because nobody Downtown gave a damn about 12-tone music. Glenn Branca isn’t going to exclaim, “Omigosh, he can’t say that about poor Schoenberg!” It’s more like, “Schoenberg!? Oh yeah, that guy.”

Now, on the internet, I apparently reach a broader readership. This isn’t what allegedly happens. One pervasive concern about the internet, especially before the last election – excuse me, “election” – was that it was becoming an echo chamber, that the search function made it not only possible but overwhelmingly likely that people would end up talking only to people with the same interests and views. But I seem to have had a far narrower, more focused audience in my print medium than I do on this blog. So I’m learning to say instead, “Geeez, ya wanna know what mostly sucks?!”

One respondent linked my points about 12-tone music to Cage’s chance music, and I replied, “Ouch!” Because Downtown music has a couple of Achilles’ heels, and one of them is chance music. Cage is a Downtown icon, and we loved him dearly. Typically, we love his Constructions for percussion ensemble, his prepared piano music, his use of recordings in Credo in US, his Imaginary Landscape for 12 radios, his 1950 String Quartet, even the fantastic, ever-ready 4’33”. But a lot of Downtown composers will quietly admit that they’re not into the chance music he started writing after 1952.

Now, I will defend down to the last troll Cage’s works of the 1960s and ’70s and ’80s that apply chance methods to theater: Variations IV, Songbooks, Europeras. Those sopranos flying across the stage, blimps wheeling over the audience, different recordings played at the same time, people delivering lectures from ladders: tremendously creative stuff, hilarious, breathtaking. But there is a stage in his music from the 1950s on in which his idea of sounds became isolated single notes, and in which his method became chance dispersal of same. And I realized today while teaching it that that period begins with the Concerto for Prepared Piano of 1951. And of course, in 1950, Cage had his famous encounter with, on the same day, Morton Feldman and the Webern Symphony, Op. 21.

(By the way, thanks to all who wrote in to inform me of various performances of Op. 21 in New York they had heard or knew about. Turns out, far from being rare, readings of that piece fall so thick and fast in Manhattan that you’re lucky if you can zip into the city and out again without hearing a couple. At Christmas it’s even worse, with all the neighborhood sing-along Op. 21’s.)

I think that Cage took from Webern the idea of the isolated single note, and the resulting exploded texture, and that this begins a problematic period in his output. My least favorite mature Cage piece has always been (to the great consternation of some Cage aficionados) his orchestra piece Atlas Eclipticalis, a pointillist field of random notes, lasting up to – in the elegant new S.E.M Ensemble recording – two hours. Couldn’t quite warm up to it when I discovered Cage as a teenager, still can’t today. Other atomized works I’m more ambiguous about: Music of Changes for piano, Etudes Australes for piano, Winter Music for multiple pianos. Since Cage got famous by publishing his 1960 book Silence, that then-recent work was the first music a lot of people associated with him. And its analogy with average, normative 12-tone music is the feeling that it needs to be listened to with a certain attitude. With 12-tone music you trust that the music is very cohesive and integrated on some level, though you can’t necessarily hear how. With Cage’s 1950s chance music, you “let the sounds be themselves,” you surrender yourself to the random interplay of notes, and sometimes you start wondering – “Why am I listening to these rather than some other sounds?”

It varies. Music of Changes I’ve studied, and I know that there are some repeating figures in it because Cage was still working with figures as well as single notes, and I can get a little extra from it by concentrating. I played a little of Etudes Australes in my youth, and I appreciate the choreography of the two hands if I see it live. And in the right mood, I can find this nondemanding music very soothing. The Arditti Quartet’s recording of Four is as calmly lovely as Walden Pond. But even as I was writing my disquisition on 12-tone music, it flashed through my mind that we Downtowners have our own body of music that is an acquired taste, difficult to defend to outsiders. I listen to it; some days I love it; but I never try to sell anyone else on it. And I’ve talked to enough Downtowners about it to know that I’m far from alone in that feeling. So to the respondent who caught me on it: Touché!

An interesting sidelight to our little dodecaphonic discussion (trying to avoid the 3 x 4 number) is the recurrence of the name Luigi Dallapiccola. One hardly ever sees this name on concert programs – Leon Botstein conducted Canti di Prigionia and Canti di Liberatione a year or so ago, and past that I think I have to go back to the ’80s to remember a live performance – and his major works can be impossible to find on recording. So I go along thinking that I’m one of the few who thinks that Dallapiccola wrote better 12-tone music (oops) than Schoenberg, Webern, or Berg, but stoke the coals a little and a lot of sparks fly up. Turns out I’m not at all alone in that opinion.

I admit I find Dallapiccola uneven (like just about everyone else, I guess). One side of his work is sensuous, elegant, transcendant: Piccola Musica Notturna, Sex Carmina Alcaei, Canti di Prigionia, Preghiere, Divertimento in Quattro Esercizi. Another side I find overcomplicated and a little strident: Canti di Liberatione, Tempus Destruendi/Tempus Aedificandi. But the balance is on the transcendent side, and unlike with most 2nd Va. Sch. music, I don’t think about its construction when I listen to it. Also, like Berg only more patently so, he’s sometimes refreshingly anti-purist: in Canti di Prigionia he weaves a 12-tone row around the Dies Irae, with enchanting effect. So why isn’t his music more commonly encountered? Simply because there’s little resemblance between the music world and an actual meritocracy? In any case, the frequency with which his name has come up lately elects him into the Academy d’Underrated by acclamation.

(In Piccola Musica Notturna Dallapiccola calls for a tam-tam piccolo, and one of my best students asked, “Is that like a regular piccolo?” I had to remind her that “piccolo” means “little” in Italian, and that that probably meant a small tam-tam. We did, however, briefly consider the possibility that it was a piccolo struck with a mallet. But I digress.)

I ruffled some feathers with my post about 12-tone music – I wonder if I’m capable of saying anything without ruffling some feathers – I wonder if there’s anything that could be said without ruffling someone’s feathers – I wonder if ruffling feathers is as heinous a crime as a lot of people apparently think – but in at least one sense my words weren’t taken literally enough. One thoughtful respondent compared me to a fundamentalist trying to expunge all memory of 12-tone music the way the Christian right wants to expunge Darwin, Balzac, and any TV show that refers positively to gay families.

Quite the contrary. Educationally, I’m heavily invested in 12-tone music. Year after year I bullheadedly continue teaching Webern’s Piano Variations and Symphony, Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet, Dallapiccola’s Piccola Musica Notturna and Sex Carmina Alcaei, Stravinsky’s Threni and Requiem Canticles, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Babbitt’s Philomel and Post-Partitions. Those pieces mean something to me (except for the Fourth Quartet, which I’ve come to loathe), and I’m proud of knowing (except for Philomel, which I don’t have a score to) how they’re constructed. I don’t advocate locking them away and never bringing them out again. What I do advocate is a revisionist view of music history – and contrary to some things that have been written in response, I’m not commenting on the validity of the music or whether it should be performed or programmed, but how it should be explained as the historical period it now clearly is. After all, we’ve been using the same rhetoric to justify the advent of 12-tone technique since it was prevalent, but our collective view of the genre is greatly altered.

One trope on 12-tone music is that it was a historical inevitability: the individual motive had supplanted an overriding tonal system as the driving force for composition, and Schoenberg needed a new method to unify music in the absence of tonal structure. But as Jonathan Kramer points out in an upcoming book, the idea that music had become totally motive-driven was a fiction invented by Schoenberg himself to justify his new method, based on a “creative misreading” of Brahms. For Schoenberg to look selectively back to Brahms’s motivic technique as precursor to his own method was a natural artistic impulse, but hardly objective; nothing in Mahler, Strauss, Reger, Scriabin, or the other late, late romantics makes the use of a 12-tone row look necessary or inevitable. Quite the contrary, the application of a pitch row as a governing device was a palpably arbitrary move, brilliantly so if you want to look at it that way, but one that patently wrenched music away from its traditional moorings. Following the historical development of harmony through various seventh and ninth chords, one eventually arrives at, not the abstract pitch sets of 12-tone music, but the 11th and 13th chords of bebop, which was the real continuation of harmonic progress from classical principles.

Another 12-tone trope is that the row provided a completely organic way of composing, in which every measure of the music was drawn from the same cell. But Lerdahl, Kramer, and others have made it clear that the textual unity of a page of notes all being forms of, say, the pitch set [0,1,4] does not at all guarantee perceptual unity. And beyond that, postmodern texts and theories have made it apparent to most college graduates by now that unity and organicism are not inherent in a work of art, nor necessary, nor a universal good. One can still cling to Schoenberg’s ideal of total organicism as a matter of taste, but it is an anachronism to claim, in the 21st century, that organicism is a necessary component, or indeed a guarantor, of quality.

Nor was 12-tone music, at least in America, a crucial step on the road to some other kind of music. The major movements since 12-tone music have either been antipodal rejections of it, like minimalism, or retreats from it, like the New Romanticism. One could argue that in Europe 12-tone music led to serialism and then postserialism, but it also seems true that the most successful postserial works were those that abandoned 12-tone technique altogether, like Berio’s Sinfonia, Boulez’s Rituel, Stockhausen’s Stimmung.

Strip away the fiction of historical inevitability, the assumed congruence of textual and perceived unity, and the aesthetic of necessary organicism, and all 12-tone music has left to defend itself with is what any other music has: its inherent attractiveness to the ear and mind and heart, which in 99 percent of the cases is pretty thin. The moral and theoretical underpinnings that buoyed 12-tone music up in mid-century have dissolved. For a piece to employ 12-tone technique can no longer be seen as a virtue in itself, and therefore one has trouble answering the inevitable student question: since 12-tone music clearly doesn’t guarantee more beautiful music, why did so many hundreds of composers feel that they were required to use it, or else risk career disaster? However you couch the answer to that question, it isn’t pretty.

So what I’m looking for is a more charitable way to describe the post-war 12-tone movement phenomenon, one that doesn’t make it sound like a blatant academic mafia, so I can continue teaching my favorite 12-tone pieces without getting skeptical looks and the feeling that my students think I’m selling them a bill of goods. And I think what we need to do is quit teaching 20th-century history with a dishonest thumb on the scale in Schoenberg’s favor. For decades, academic historians have presented the Second Vienna School as central to a European modernist canon, at the expense of dozens of other composers more popular, outside academia, than Schoenberg: Copland, Milhaud, Cowell, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Messiaen, Britten, Weill, Cage, Partch. It’s time to restore these composers to the center of 20th-century music, and redraw 12-tone music as the interesting but infertile cul-de-sac that it was. What I propose is that we take 12-tone out of the “Great Monuments of Western Music” bag, and put it in the “Curious Dead-ends of Music History” bag. That way, when you get a bright senior or grad student who’s already absorbed Partch, Messiaen, Bartok, Cage, et al, you can say, “Hey, wanna see something else? Look at this crazy Webern Symphony with the double canon in the first movement. Isn’t that wild? And this obsessive Babbitt Post-Partitions, built on a ‘super-array’ with every pitch having its own dynamic? Pretty whacked out stuff, eh?” That way we can talk about 12-tone music as an interesting kind of fixation that composers got themselves into, the way we talk about the rhythmically complex music that happened at the court of Avignon from 1400 to 1418. I’d feel so much better about Schoenberg if his reputation were like that of the other 12-tone inventor, Josef Matthias Hauer, whose music I love studying because it’s truly peculiar, and no one pretends it’s terribly important.

Why change the narrative? Because education is to some extent, if not entirely, a free market, and the educator is in part a salesman for culture. My students are incredibly open-minded. I can sell them loads of weird stuff. I can play Schoenberg’s pre-12-tone Erwartung, talk about Viennese angst and hallucinations, and they’re fascinated. They fall, of course, for Le Sacre du Printemps at first hearing, no pleading necessary on my part. I’ve never played Carl Ruggles’s massively dissonant Sun-Treader without at least one student asking for a copy. They find Harry Partch a blast, personally and theoretically. Berio’s Sinfonia blows them away, guaranteed; ditto, Quartet for the End of Time. They even get a kick out of Gruppen for its aspects that are not directly 12-tone-related: the echoes between crescendoing brass from different orchestras, the quirky solos for guitar.

What I can’t sell them, what I’ve never been able to sell them in 16 years, is the idea of 12-tone technique as a method that justifies anything. Webern they almost invariably find cold and precious. The idea that someone came up with a method and everyone else followed it strikes them as ominous, and rightly so. The day Schoenberg devised his first 12-tone row, he wrote in his diary, “Today I have discovered something that will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.” That impulse puts a taint for them on the subsequent history of 12-tone music, as indeed it does for me.

Now of course I never lead with the 12-tone row – I start analyzing Webern or Schoenberg they way you’d analyze any music, looking for germinal ideas, repetitions, similarities. But inevitably some bright boy pipes up, “Is this 12-tone?,” and what am I suppose to say? Lie? And while I do have some affection for Webern’s music, when I start to analyze what that affection consists of, it has a lot to do with having learned it so well in my youth, and having honed my analytical skills on it. I don’t listen to Webern’s music for pleasure, and my opinion has slid downward with each passing year, partly via an accumulation of students’ disenchanted reactions. It’s become more difficult for me to make a case for its beauty, which has not happened with any other music. The 12-tone pieces that do possess immediate appeal – Stravinsky’s Threni and Requiem Canticles, for instance – are usually so atypical as to almost constitute a separate genre. One feels instinctively that they are great pieces despite their use of 12-tone technique, not because of it – and once you admit that, how do you present 12-tone technique sympathetically?

For instance: In Dallapiccola’s Piccola Musica Notturna, the second row statement begins with E and the third ends with E. In between, Dallapiccola reiterates and dwells on row fragments in a languorous, non-Schoenbergian manner. The result is, about 12 slow measures go by in which the pitch E doesn’t appear, and then, when the orchestra suddenly hits a unison E after a short pause, it has a fresh, invigorating effect that is rare in 12-tone music. But if you have to torture and subvert a technique that much to make it yield an effect so modestly gratifying, what is the use of the technique? The obvious implication is, if Dallapiccola could achieve so much manacled to the 12-tone row, imagine how much he could have achieved freed from it! The composer and the piece are easy to praise, but how do you justify the absurd limitations of the method?

Let those whose feathers are hereby ruffled please humor me by considering one question: why do the Second Vienna School seem to have a privileged position when it comes to feather-ruffling? I could say, I find Copland overrated, or Hindemith, or Varèse, and I’m not going to teach him as though he’s very important, and every composer would reply, “Well, to each his own.” I know lots of musicians who consider Ives overrated, and I just shrug, even though he’s my favorite. Composers are not shy about considering Cage or Phil Glass overrated. But when someone considers Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg overrated, there’s an outcry, as though some pact with the profession has been betrayed, as though when I signed up to be a composer I signed a paper pledging to stand fast with my colleagues against the concertgoing public on those three cases. To find Schoenberg overrated isn’t allowed. It’s too threatening to the profession somehow, and this fact in itself leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why is that opinion more heinous to my fellow composers than any other I could express? Unless, maybe – and I’m just speculating here – I’ve tapped into some guilty, unconscious self-deception on their part? Just asking.

As David Mamet says concerning Stanislavsky technique in Some Freaks (and I paraphrase because I can’t put my hands on the book right now), “Whenever a method is claimed by its adherents to be the only and universal and eternal method, you can be sure that that method doesn’t work.” Or Feldman:

In art, it is the system itself that holds out the false promise, that deceives. We might almost say that art is in pain, because it is unable to believe this deception is taking place. The artist feels his work is going badly because he is not reaching technical perfection. Actually, he is looking into the eyes of a deceiver, who constantly throws him back into the dilemma – the paradox. Is it lying to me or not, he asks himself. He ends by believing the lie, in the face of all evidence against it, because he needs this lie to exist in his art.

In other words, now that 12-tone music’s promise to create a new, enduring musical language has been revealed to be a hoax to all but the most blinkered cultist, how do we honestly promote to students the few 12-tone pieces for which we’ve learned to feel some affection?

AFTERTHOUGHT: Perhaps by adding the Dallapiccola example I’ve answered my own question, and perhaps this will be my last written word on this weary subject (one can only hope). Maybe the value of 12-tone method for certain composers is its extreme limitation, which if understood that way can inspire creativity against obstacles, like writing an augmentation canon, or a novel that doesn’t use the letter “e.” The rhetoric of 12-tone music claimed to offer something: unity, organicism, consistency. Instead, it denies something, and only the composer clever enough to outwit it can make anything of it. That deposes 12-tone technique from the level of an analogue for tonality to the level of a technical device, like a canon, and while canons are fascinating (I collect them), they are not considered one of the major musical genres. They are valued not because they are often great music, but for what they achieve despite absurd limitations. (I’ll anticipate you: Nancarrow’s canons are often great music, but his aren’t particularly rule-based.) I’ve been teaching 12-tone music as a language, and perhaps it’s more aptly treated as a technical genre, like canon, fugue, passacaglia – which is just the slighter position I wanted for it, and justifies teaching only the exceptional examples, not the normative ones.

UPDATE: I found the David Mamet quote I wanted, on page 71 of Some Freaks:

We may assume that a school of thought is useless when it is universally accepted as being the only and exclusive possessor of truth.

As of this evening, I have a new compact disc out: Long Night, on Cold Blue, with the formidable Sarah Cahill playing all of three pianos. It’s a CD single, which means I’m really cool – only 25 minutes, and Jim Fox designed a beautiful cover that is perfect for the piece, a pastoral field at twilight with some kind of barn or house burning in the background. It even looks better in person than it does here. Sarah’s playing is beautiful, and it was recorded at Bard College’s Fisher Center, where the acoustics are like ice cream.

I’m really proud of this disc. Long Night dates from 1980 (revised in 1981), written when I was 24, and I always thought it was one of my better pieces, a template for what would come later. Back then I used to call my music a cross between Harold Budd and Morton Feldman (said that to Steve Reich once), but this piece also has some early-totalist qualities in the fact that the three pianos are at different tempos, repeating loops of different lengths against each other. (The piece was also written under the spell of Cluster and Brian Eno, back when ambient was quiet music.) Sarah overdubbed the three parts, which is a nice effect because the pianos aren’t affected by each other’s tempos, and the notes pulse in independent waves in a way that I’ve also sought in my music for Disklavier. Also I wrote some music back in the early ’80s that I still like, long before I moved to the East Coast, and no one knows it. Now they will. The piece will go up on Postclassic Radio post-haste.

Coming soon, another disc: Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, on New World, all Disklavier music.

In mid-semester I take a break from diminished seventh chords and take the students on a little foray into 12-tone technique, analyzing the Webern Piano Variations. I was explaining how rampant 12-tone music was from the 1950s through the ’80s, and one of my savvier freshmen raised his hand and said, “You mean just in academia, right? That music didn’t get played much outside of colleges, did it?”

The next day, Petr Kotik, conductor of the S.E.M. ensemble told me that his then-upcoming performance of Webern’s Op. 21 Symphony, which took place at Zankel Hall Monday night, would be only the third performance of that piece in New York City, ever – the first having been the 1950 performance where Cage met Feldman [sic, but see below]. In 77 years the Webern Symphony has only been played three times in New York, yet every year I teach it at least once in analysis and repertoire classes as though it was a big deal. My students’ll never hear it live. And a new book that I’m reviewing pre-publication (that I’ll be telling you a LOT more about shortly) questions the means and motives by which Arnold Schoenberg became defined as a crucial figure in the canon, presumptively equal to the far more popular Stravinsky. Perhaps it’s time to admit that, not only is 12-tone music stone dead, it was never much more than a fringe cult in the first place? – or at best, the official musical culture of a couple dozen universities?

CORRECTION: Strong doubt has been cast on the statistic about Webern’s Symphony performances in New York – apparently it was first played there in 1929, plus some performances by Boulez in the ’70s. Sorry to have spread misinformation. But composer Art Jarvinen chimes in:

I used to cover 12-tone basics in my Introduction To Composition class until a couple years ago. I realized that most of the students hate the music, don’t like the technique for its own sake, didn’t seem to get much out of the homework assignment, and generally find it all completely irrelevant to their own musical lives. Since I can say almost the same things for myself (with certain notable exceptions) and realized years ago that that stuff is basically dead in the water, I replaced it with another, much more amusing, topic: Plunderphonics.

I’ll be appearing at 5 PM this Sunday, March 20, on a panel called “Reviewing the Reviewers,” about the potential for composer-critics and why there are so few of us anymore. It’s organized by Pauline Oliveros at her gallery at Deep Listening Space, 75 Broadway at the Historic Rondout in Kingston, New York. Also on the panel are Iris Brooks, Beth Anderson, Pauline Oliveros and Al Margolis. Following the concert, “no later than 7:00,” is a concert with music by each of us, and the fantastic pianist Sarah Cahill will give the East-Coast premiere of my piano piece Private Dances. Should be great fun, I always manage to piss somebody off without meaning to.

Composer Galen Brown has posted a very sympathetic response to my “Downtown Music and Its Misrepresentations” post. His sentence, “So Downtowners should at least seriously consider mounting an invasion of the ivory tower, not for dominance but for real inclusion,” is practically a one-sentence biography of me. At a young age I realized that academia was only vulnerable to shots fired from within the walls. Of course, there are some problems with this formulation, since lots of Downtowners don’t really have college teaching qualifications – but a lot more do than you think, and many have spent decades trying to get teaching positions. Between 1984 and 1997 I applied for more than a hundred academic positions before finally getting one.

UPDATE: David Toub has also added his thoughts. In light of some of the comments made over at Sequenza 21, I have to express regret that I used above, in haste, a word I hate: “qualifications.” I clarify that I did not mean a doctorate. One of the things I’m proudest of about Bard is that we do hire faculty, especially practicing artists, without doctorates. One of the best musicians I’ve ever known, cellist Luis Garcia-Renart, just retired from Bard: he had no college degrees at all, but he studied with Casals and Rostropovich. Cage never got a college degree, nor Feldman. By “qualifications” I meant something simpler and perhaps rarer: knowledge of history, and an ability to deal with music from multiple perspectives. Experience. A gluttony for “qualifications” (in the sense of credentials) is one of academia’s great diseases.

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.