I’ve put up one of Gwiazda’s virtual audio works, thefLuteintheworLdthefLuteistheworLd, for you to listen to, but you HAVE to use headphones, with left and right channels in the appropriate ear, to get the piece’s amazing three-dimensional spatial effects.

Henry and I have argued for years about the meaning of modernism. At present, he defines modernism as the assertion that the world is more complex than we can understand; he defines postmodernism as the assertion that the world is more complex than we can understand, and that’s fine, we don’t need to understand it. He’s recently distanced himself from both positions, and feels that we both can understand the world, and urgently need to do so. (I consider this postminimalism, but we haven’t come to agreement on that yet.) Consequently, he’s making animated videos that capture extremely mundane moments in the protagonists’ lives, and drawing attention to small, sensuous details as a way of attuning the viewer to details in his own surroundings. It’s lovely, resonant work, that does make you see the world a little differently afterward.

But Henry’s given up on the new music scene, on the grounds that most composers consider themselves musicians but not artists, and cultivate imitative, recreative thinking rather than creativity. He showed me an article in this week’s Scientific American Mind (Henry is one of the most science-conscious composers I know), which defines creativity as divergent thinking, imaginative leaps into the unknown, but notes that almost all education emphasizes only convergent thinking, which consists of learning well-trodden paths and honing in on singular correct answers. Most of the way we teach composition, Henry feels, is scientifically mistaken, because we teach by examples and models already used by others instead of encouraging off-the-wall thinking and problem solving. Hindemith, he thinks, did tremendous damage to American music by encouraging composers to think of music as a matter of craftsmanship. Henry is himself one of the most off-the-wall, imaginative artists I know, someone whose mind is well accustomed to jumping off at bizarre angles. In the other arts that’s valued; in music, it always seems a little suspect.

Also, like Feldman, Henry has a refreshing way of seeing through the blinkered assumptions of the composing world. A story he told me suggests partly where he got it, from one of his composition teachers at Cincinnati College-Conservatory (where Nancarrow was also educated): one Scott Houston, since departed. On Henry’s oral doctoral exam, Houston asked the question, “Say you’re writing a piece for woodwind quintet. What considerations do you think about when you start out?” Henry muttered something about the relative ranges of the instruments. “Wrong.” He tried eight or nine other platitudes, all greeted with, “Wrong… wrong… wrong.” Finally, in some exasperation, Henry blurted out, “Well to tell you the truth, I’d never write a woodwind quintet, because it’s an ugly combination of instruments.” “DAMN RIGHT!,” shouted Houston, slamming his first on the table. That was the answer he was looking for.

Convergent thinking, true, but what a refreshing example.

I’ll pause a moment to let any Downtown composers finish laughing, but I do get such questions, and I intend to answer them.

This is akin to the “artists need to starve to sharpen their work” theory that some colleges use to justify denying tenured status to art practitioners. I have yet to meet an artist who doesn’t find that paternalistic, condescending, and wrong-headed. Oh, we all know the occasional talented rich boy who never developed his talent because he didn’t need to, and there are stories of composers (George Crumb being somewhat archetypal) whose creative trains were derailed by too much success too early. But those are a completely different matter from supplying an artist with a living wage, or providing a modicum of helpful recognition after years of hard work. Every composer knows how your art improves: produce a lot of it, which requires loads of time and freedom from exhausting day jobs. Everyone knows how you gain the technique needed to increase your work’s scale and ambition: by getting the practical experience of being performed. Denying these to artists does not make them spiritually pure, it stunts their artistic growth. Strip away the sappy, Song of Norway sentimentalism about artistic geniuses, and that’s the common sense that?s left.

I’d bet you that there’s not a composer in Manhattan who wouldn’t prefer being fed and performed to being romanticized. (Please, Downtowners, let me know which of you prefer being romanticized, and I’ll be glad to oblige.) I bet $30,000 would buy you the authenticity of any composer in the East Village. Easy payment plan available. Being considered authentic rebels, little miniature Harry Partches, I guess, is a kind of charming consolation prize for not getting much else, but the picture doesn’t really fit. For instance, I wrote the script for the American Mavericks radio series, but I did so under protest against the stupid word “mavericks.” It implies that Downtown composers, or the American experimentalists, are hermetic, society-scorning loners who eschew all external influences and go their own way. Hardly anything could be further from the truth.

Downtowners are (and experimentalists have always been) just as social, and just as susceptible to each other’s influence, as any other group of musicians. Even Nancarrow – the archetypal maverick, right? – spent his entire life working out rhythmic ideas that Cowell had written about in New Musical Resources, while reading about the latest Continental trends in his subscription to Die Reihe. Cage used those ideas too, and so have John Luther Adams, Mikel Rouse, and Larry Polansky. Cowell begat Cage, who begat Feldman, who begat Bernadette Speach. Partch begat Ben Johnston, who begat me. What’s maverick about that? The point is, Downtown music, American experimental, postclassical, whatever you want to call it, is not a more-street-credible-than-thou moral stance, but a coherent, traceable musical tradition. We steal ideas from each other, we influence each other, we even go, after concerts, to restaurants in large groups and drink and gossip together. But to hear the maverick myth, you’d think that after leaving Merkin Hall we each put on our cowboy hats, turn on our heels, light unfiltered cigarettes, and stalk off to our lonely studios to write music that owed nuthin’ to nobody.

The genealogy of Downtown ideas can be documented. A lot of our scores can be analyzed. A surprising number of us have doctorates. We’re closer to European music than we pretend, or than you realize. Minimalists are all Bruckner fanatics. Hell, we sit around and talk about how we’re the real inheritors of the Mozart-to-Brahms tradition, and how 12-tone music was a misguided aberration, a sick detour. Like Mozart, we go out and perform our own works in odd little spaces, composing for the moment instead of being in thrall to music of a previous century. Uptowners inherited Mozart’s forms, we inherited his attitude. The reason we’re outsiders? We placed our bets shrewdly but unpopularly, on Feldman and Reich rather than Babbitt or Druckman or Harbison. We’re feeling pretty well vindicated these days; we expect to eventually be proved right on Ashley, La Monte Young, and Trimpin as well, but we don’t think that anyone should ever be excommunicated for their opinions and preferences and the models they follow.

Sure, we’re rebels, but more like Solzhenitsyn than Jesse James, not so much striking out on our own as escaping an absurd authoritarian structure. To call Downtowners mavericks and rebels confers too much legitimacy on the Uptown establishment. That establishment does not represent The Inauthenticity of Mass Consciousness in a Corporate Society, and, sorry, it does not require a Radical Understanding of Human Freedom to escape it. It represents very little, in fact: just an outdated educational system held in place by anachronistic social institutions like the orchestra and opera house. All it takes to turn away from it is a willingness to make art out of materials and ideas that come from your daily environment rather than from your education, a refusal to write multimovement string quartets and concertos with the mandated kinds of harmonic, textural, and tempo contrasts. I can’t tell that there’s any such thing as Uptown painting, or Uptown literature. I’m sure the other arts have styles that periodically become the establishment for awhile and then give way to others. But in no other art do artists have to struggle against relentlessly surviving paradigms specifically from 19th-century Europe. Electronic music is the musical area with no real Up-/Downtown distinction because, with the exception of the endearingly quaint genre of musique concrète, there’s no oppressive European inheritance involved. Far from Downtownness being a difficult state to achieve, I’m constantly amazed that the composition world isn’t vastly dominated by Downtowners. It hardly takes nerves of steel to be skeptical of one’s education.

If this blows your romantic image of Downtown, tough luck – we’re more Woody Allen’s than James Dean’s, and I guarantee we would bear up bravely under some funding and recognition. Look at it this way: If poverty and disenfranchisement are such wonderful goads to an artist’s creativity, Downtowners feel guilty hoarding them. We’d be happy to spread them around more equitably.

Whether or not it’s a better explanation, I think it’s one that remains more relevant today. There’s still a reluctance in some music circles to allow anything obvious. Some of the most tedious music by famous and oft-performed composers seems to spend all its time busily hiding its underlying idea. Doing something obvious – a memorable melody, a clear chord progression, a rhythmic groove – makes you vulnerable, because it’s something that the listener can latch onto and criticize and make fun of if it sounds stupid. But it is only the courage to be vulnerable that endears you to an audience, and today’s young composers have that courage more than we did. Why was my generation so afraid to be obvious? Was it a fear imposed on us by our teachers? our peers? or did we do it to ourselves?

And every single one of them, without exception, says and believes that it is wrong to discriminate against composers on the basis of style.

Some of these composers, not all of them, sit on panels for awards and artists’ colonies, serve on search committees for academic positions, make recommendations for commissions. What happens is, say an orchestra piece by John Luther Adams comes up: “Well, thats all on the C major scale, it’s not very sophisticated.” A piece by Beth Anderson: “That piece wanders all over the place, there’s no throughline.” A score by Elodie Lauten: “There aren’t very many dynamic markings here, that piece isn’t really ready for orchestral performance.” A piece by Phill Niblock: “This is just drones, nothing really happens in it.” A piece by Bernadette Speach or Peter Garland: “Too repetitive.” A piece by Joshua Fried: “There’s no score, I don’t really understand what’s happening here.” And so all those composers get passed over for awards, for funding, for jobs, for commissions, on what my Uptown friends are convinced is the basis of quality. They are certain that they are only applying standards that they have developed through their long experience as practical composers. What is really happening is that they dismiss all this music because they have no way to evaluate music written in Downtown idioms. And despite all their best, most honest, most laudable intentions, they discriminate against Downtown music on the basis of its style.

I’m not saying anything controversial or even subjective. I talk to these Uptown friends, and they agree that the reasons I’ve given for their decisions are the correct ones. When I talk to them, they concede that perhaps there’s a style there that they don’t understand. They will admit, under duress, that I may have a point about Downtown music having different notational conventions that, to them, look amateurish – “undermarked” is their term – but may not be. They recognize that some important composers have come from the Downtown scene: Reich, Feldman, Zorn. When a Downtowner reaches that level of adulation by younger composers, they resist acknowledging it for awhile, and then finally decide that it’s OK to consider those people important. But they don’t extrapolate from those exceptional cases to the younger Downtown composers who haven’t “made it” yet. Aside from myself, they are surrounded by dozens of like-minded colleagues, and they feel no pressure to consider Downtown music under a different set of standards. They’re not familiar with the music of composers whom Downtowners consider their important forebears: Niblock, Ashley, Lucier, Oliveros, Branca. They don’t quite understand why Lou Harrison is supposed to be such a big deal, because they find his music aimless and lacking a tension that they don’t know how to do without. They’re resigned to Cage, but don’t teach him. They don’t know how to distinguish between drone pieces, or postminimalist pieces, that are really interesting and others that are merely pedestrian (the way I realize I’m not good at distinguishing a good DJ artist from a mediocre one). They don’t know the reference points of Downtown music. They do their best, but ultimately they’re comparing the music they hear with that of Ligeti, Boulez, Daugherty, Druckman, Harbison, Davies, Carter, Rochberg, and it all sounds lacking, amateurish, unsophisticated. While talking to me, they’ll come around to realizing that they may not know enough about that music to judge it, and they really want to be fair and nondiscriminatory. But when they get back on that panel or committee with their peers, and they hear a CD by Mikel Rouse, they don’t know what to do with it, and they slap it in the reject pile. Some of them, under my influence, even graciously try to represent the Downtown viewpoint on panels, but they don’t really know how to argue for it, and there’s no effect. The ones who are really in the circles of power in American music, being human, don’t have a strong incentive to dilute their own influence by widening those circles – though one of the Grawemeyer winners, truly conscientious and newly aware that Downtown composers don’t have a voice, has gotten me involved in some panels. As I said, lovely people.

Well, so what, right? Downtowners have the same reaction to Uptown music, right? And they’re just as biased.

But the relationship is not symmetrical.

Have you ever heard of a college or university where the faculty was so Downtown that no Uptowner could get a job there? No. Mills College, maybe. The number of Downtown composers who have achieved academic positions in America can be counted on your fingers with some left over, and one of those (myself) only did so, after unsuccessfully applying for more than 100 jobs over 16 years, by pretending to be a musicologist. Contrary to a self-consoling Uptown myth, plenty of Downtowners would love to teach, are qualified, and do apply for the jobs.

Have you ever heard of an award panel that was so dominated by Downtowners that no matter how hard the token Uptowner panelist tried, she couldn’t get an award for any Uptown piece? No. Out of all the composer awards in the country that go to composers, two routinely go to Downtowners: the Herb Alpert Award and the Society for Contemporary Performance Arts (the latter funded, I believe, by the estates of John Cage and Jasper Johns). Thanks goodness for them. It’s great when they go to good composers like David First or Pamela Z or David Dunn, but both these awards are decided by secret nomination, and it’s a little frustrating for Downtowners to sit around and hope for an unexpected bolt from the blue. We need things we can apply for, with some hope of getting them.

Have you ever heard of an orchestra whose Downtown composer-in-residence made sure that all the pieces that got commissioned were by Downtowners? No.

Besides, the Downtown point of reference includes the Uptown view, and the reverse is not true. Most Downtowners learn about the music of Ligeti, Boulez, Harbison, Druckman, Daugherty, Davies, Carter, Rochberg – we can hardly avoid it. We’re educated on the same 12-tone music, the same modern European masters, we hear pieces by the Pulitzer composers. But we’ve also discovered alternative composing aims and strategies of which the Uptowners are unaware. Many of my Uptown friends go their entire lives without hearing music by Niblock, Eliane Radigue, Charlemagne Palestine, Duckworth, Lauten, Lentz. They never get immersed enough in that music to realize that it has its own, different, often quite demanding set of standards.

Some of the hardcore Uptown (non-New Romantic) composers of the past, like Wuorinen and Davidovsky, went on deliberate crusades against music of diverse aesthetics, but that’s not true of my friends. They think they’re simply applying their hard-won knowledge and being fair. So I’m not accusing them of a conspiracy or vendetta or anything dishonorable. They’re just ignorant. Their ignorance, and perhaps a little laziness, puts them in the contradictory stance of being politically liberal but culturally conservative, giving lip service to diversity but perennially reforming musical society in their own narrow image. And, with all the best intentions in the world, they collectively prevent composers from the Downtown scene from participating in the few opportunities that this country affords for composers to make a little money from their work, to make their living from music-related jobs, to buy the time it would take to undertake serious creative work without interruption.

Some people on the internet think I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do. I watch it happen. The composers in positions of power don’t disagree with my assessment. I am well aware that many, many Up- and Midtown composers similarly have a difficult time getting awards, commissions, jobs – but whatever their problems, they are not being discriminated against based on a total misunderstanding of their style and intentions. Education is needed. Consequently, I’m going to continue writing about the problem and talking about it until the situation changes. Any composer who thinks the current status quo is just fine is less liberal than he flatters himself.

Ever since I’ve started writing in this blog about differences between Downtown and Uptown music, Uptown (or at least non-Downtown) bloggers and composers have been ridiculing me for using the term “Downtown music.” Apparently they think that by pretending I’m the only one who still uses the term and making fun of me, they can make the Up-/Downtown distinction look quaint, old-fashioned, and discredited, and make me look like I’m living in the past and haven’t caught up with the new realities. Meanwhile, Downtown composers, who know who they are and still use the term, write to thank me for carrying on the fight.

It is in the interest of whatever class is in power to discredit the idea that there is any distinction between them and the class they are oppressing.

The literature of expostulation, of Catastrophe, is taken to be very serious. But among people carried along in a canoe toward a waterfall, the one who stands up and screams is not the one with the keenest sense of the situation. We are in a place so difficult that perhaps alarm is an indulgence, and a harder thing – composure – is required of us.

This connected with a passage I had heard years earlier in a scene from the Louis Malle film My Dinner with André (a film I rewatch at least once a year), in which André says (at 1:14:47 on the DVD):

How does it affect an audience to put on one of these plays in which you show that people are totally isolated now, and they can’t reach each other, and their lives are desperate? Or how does it affect them to see a play that shows that our world is full of nothing but shocking sexual events and terror and violence? Does that help to wake up a sleeping audience? See, I don’t think so. Because I think it’s very likely that the picture of the world that you’re showing them in a play like that is exactly the picture of the world they have already. You know, they know their own lives and relationships are difficult and painful. If they watch the evening news on television, there what they see is a terrifying, chaotic universe full of rapes and murders and hands cut off by subway cars and children pushing their parents out of windows. So the play tells them that their impression of the world is correct and that there’s absolutely no way out; there’s nothing they can do. They end up feeling passive and impotent….

I keep thinking that what we need is a new language – a language of the heart….

These quotations were given depth and political context by John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards (a book that I’ve bought more than two dozen copies of to give to friends). Saul agrees with André that the institutional purpose of showing a world of terror via television is to make people feel impotent and helpless, and to keep them afraid and politically passive. He also argues (similar to Adorno at times) that elitist art, art that is obscure in its methods and difficult to understand, serves the same purpose, of keeping people from believing that there’s a way to change things. “The wordsmiths who serve our imagination,” writes Saul, and you can substitute composers,

are always devoted to communication. Clarity is always their method. Universality is their aim. The wordsmiths [composers] who serve established power, on the other hand, are always devoted to obscurity. They castrate the public imagination by subjecting [musical] language to a complexity which renders it private.

And he quotes Baudelaire: “Any book which does not address itself to the majority… is a stupid book.”

These are the trains of thought that, over the years, led me to expunge anxiety, alarmism, abstract techniques, and complexity from my music, and to seek out music that does not make use of those qualities. The desideratum that art should “reflect the world we live in” is shallow and self-defeating: might as well try to heal or console a wounded man by groaning along with him. I’ve tried to create and encourage, instead, a music of composure, a music that does not “stand up in the boat and scream,” that does not reinforce fear and despair, but empowers people by being clear and accessible and addressed to everyone – a new language of the heart. And this is why, to the discomfort of so many composers, I have taken a dim view of so many, perhaps a vast majority, of the tendencies of late 20th-century classical composition. The impetus is fueled, neither by innate orneriness (though I will occasionally float a controversial argument to learn what people think) nor by ignorance or nonappreciation of advanced compositional techniques, but by a conviction that music should do what it can to help save the human race.