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A B O U T . . . « Music that Aspires to the Condition of Baseball | Main | A Tune a Day » March 08, 2005 I'm a (since I was 13), a music critic (since I was 27), a and its Misrepresentations musicologist (since I was 32), and a music professor (since I was After every article I write about the Uptown/Downtown issue, I receive at 39).... more least one e-mail telling me my views on the subject are bullshit. All of these READ ME IN THE VOICE Read Kyle Gann's columns from messages have one thing in common: the writer knows the music of John the Village Voice back to Zorn and the festival. This acquaintance, in his estimation, September 1998 clearly outweighs my 28 years of involvement with the Downtown scene and Kyle Gann's Home Page More than you ever wanted to makes the writer an authority on Downtown music. This is like reading the know about me at www.kylegann.com speeches of Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman and then announcing, "Now PostClassic Radio I'm an expert on Leftist political thought." The radio station that goes with the blog, all postclassical music, all the time; see the playlist at Allow me to detail what?s wrong with this formulation. First: Bang on a Can. kylegann.com

Speaking as someone who personally knows a few hundred Downtown Archive 539 entries and counting , I can tell you that there is a lot of resentment within the Contact Downtown community against Bang on a Can, and that dozens of my [email protected] 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 Syndicate this site 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 S E A R C H it seemed a little oriented toward Downtown composers, but there is a widespread perception that as the festival became more famous and starting Search this site: associating with , the curators - , , Michael Gordon - started abandoning younger Downtown composers, Search associating with famous composers like Louis Andriessen and , and keeping their own music at center stage. Furthermore, there is a lot of S I T E S T O S E E feeling that Lang, Wolfe, and Gordon, who studied at Yale with Martin Some sites I like... Bresnick, are not themselves Downtown composers at all; although Gordon, Postclassic Radio! - Kyle who has more of a garage-band background and more minimalist tendencies, Gann's internet radio station that accompanies the blog; see the is sometimes exempted from this charge. playlist at kylegann.com

American Mavericks - the Now is not the moment to assess the accuracy of these perceptions - I sort Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted of agree, sort of don't, but I merely report them to note how unfortunate this by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli) assumed equivalence of BoaC = Downtown is. In their defense, BoaC has Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia never particularly claimed to represent Downtown. There is nothing about of music, interviews, information Downtown music in their mission statement, and the only thing they?ll say by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not publicly is that they're not really interested in the Uptown/Downtown the Usual Suspects distinction. They always chose the composers they wanted, some from Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station Europe, many from across the country, and many who were new to the New New Music Box - the York scene altogether. If I have to think back to how they became identified premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are with Downtown, the biggest culprit may be my own reviews in the Village doing and thinking Voice, for in their early years I was enthusiastic about the new energy they Voice, for in their early years I was enthusiastic about the new energy they The Rest Is Noise - The fine brought in and the new kinds of music they gave voice to. blog of critic Alex Ross William Duckworth's Meanwhile, there were and are music festivals that do claim to represent Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page Downtown music, most famously , which was a traveling of a great postminimalist Downtown music schowcase for eleven years, from 1979 to 1989. Last composer October's Sounds Like Now festival explicitly featured the Downtown scene, 's Home Page - the greatest composer of and there are periodically others, none of them nearly as visible or well- my generation funded as Bang on a Can. Follow any of these festivals and you'll have every Eve Beglarian's Home Page - great Downtown right to voice your opinions on Downtown music. But draw conclusions about compsoer

Downtown from Bang on a Can, and you'll insult hundreds of Downtown Just Intonation Network - composers without particularly gratifying the BoaC people. a meeting place for people interested in alternative tunings

Erling Wold's Web Site - a The issue of I've addressed elsewhere here. Before Zorn, the fine composer of Downtown scene could pretty well be characterized by the large roster of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site composers who comprised the New Music New York festival of 1979: Rhys The Dane Rudhyar Archive Chatham, , Steve Reich, , Meredith Monk, - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a , Charles Amirkhanian, , Annea Lockwood, greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest , Phill Niblock, , and many others. It was a astrologer scene characterized by conceptualism and , music of intense focus Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new on sound, made by people who were outcasts from the classical music world. music and other issues

This was not at all Zorn's type of music: his models in the classical world A J B L O G S were Kagel, Stockhausen, and Carter, he was antiminimalist, he thought John AJBlog Central Cage was overrated. He put together a scene of performers mostly from jazz backgrounds, and created an alternative to the minimalist Downtown scene, Architecture Pixel Points one couched in postmodern style mixing and maximalist chaos. It wasn't that Nancy Levinson on Architecture Downtown had never had free improv before - Oliveros, , and Culture Richard Teitelbaum had been experimenting with it, though with emphasis About Last Night Terry Teachout on the arts in New more on sound than virtuosity, more on meditation than chaos. To the horror York City of many veteran Downtowners, Zorn brought Downtown music back toward Artful Manager Andrew Taylor on the business of the , chaos, and complexity from which the minimalists and Arts & Culture conceptualists had already escaped once. blog riley rock culture approximately Straight Up | With heavy irony, minimalist Tony Conrad once participated in a late '80s Jan Herman - Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude performance of ?s Songbooks by chanting, "No more Cage! Zorn is the rage!" It did seem for a few years that free improvisers from the jazz Dance Seeing Things world had infiltrated and wiped out the minimalist brand of Downtown music. Tobi Tobias on dance et al... Zorn created a parallel Downtown scene that took over in the late 1980s, Media partly through tremendous energy and organizational skills - but also partly Serious Popcorn because the free improvisers were generally ready to go onstage and Martha Bayles on Film... perform without rehearsal, and the improvising ideology entailed a belief that Music Adaptistration anything that resulted was fine. [UPDATE: To his everlasting credit, Zorn has Drew McManus on orchestra redeemed himself in recent years with Tzadik, a record label 30 times more management Sandow inclusive than the scene he dominated in the late '80s.] Eventually, after Greg Sandow on the future of 1990, fell back into being only one component of the Classical Music Rifftides scene, ensconced at the and Tonic, but again just one Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters... Downtown strand among many. PostClassic Kyle Gann on music after the fact Meanwhile, the Downtown scene that had started in 1960, when Visual Arts opened her loft for and to give concerts at, Artopia survived and continued. The aesthetics of conceptualists like Robert Ashley, John Perreault's art diary survived and continued. The aesthetics of conceptualists like Robert Ashley, Modern Art Notes , Alvin Lucier, , , Alison Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog Knowles, Yoshi Wada, , and Phil Corner, and of early minimalists like Young, Terry Jennings, Angus Maclise, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock, , Tony Conrad, Jon Gibson, Dennis Johnson, and John Special AJBlogs Cale, were inherited by further generations: Meredith Monk, , The Future of Classical Music? Brenda Hutchinson, Joshua Fried, Bernadette Speach, Daniel Goode (perhaps Greg Sandow performs a book-in- the most hardcore Downtowner of all), Barbara Benary, David First, Ben progress

Neill, Skip LaPlante, Mikel Rouse, Tom Hamilton, Joshua Fried, Eve Beglarian, Critical Edge William Duckworth, Mary Jane Leach, Linda Fisher, , Guy critics in a critical age May 14-17, 2006 Klucevsek, Raphael Mostel, Lois V. Vierk, John Kennedy, Jerome Kitzke, The Center of the Dance World? , Conrad Cummings, Nick Didkovsky, Phil Kline, Diana an online public conversation Meckley, Ben Manley, , Nic Collins, David Garland, Carman Moore, December 12-16, 2005

Petr Kotik, Laurie Spiegel, Alvin Curran, Corey Dargel, Christine Baczewska, Critical Conversation II Lenore Von Stein, , ?Blue? , Jerry Hunt, Noah classical music critics on the future of music Creshevsky, Shelley Hirsch, Jeffrey Schanzer, Jin Hi Kim, , July 18-22, 2005 Jeffrey Lohn, Wendy Chambers, George Lewis, Diamanda Galas, Annea Midori in Asia Lockwood, Patrick Grant, Joseph Celli, David Myers, David Moss, Dary John conversations from the road June 22-July 3, 2005 Mizelle, Todd Levin, Neil Rolnick, Toby Twining, Norman Yamada, Annie Gosfield, Robert Een, Martha Mooke, Judy Dunaway, Beata Moon, Elise A better case for the Arts? a public conversation Kermani, Fred Ho, Judith Sainte Croix, Maryanne Amacher, Molly Thompson, March 7-11, 2005 Paul Lansky, David Beardsley, myself - just to mention the first few dozen Critical Conversation who come to mind. And those are just the ones with a presence on the New classical music critics on the future of music York scene. There were, and are, Downtowners in cities and towns and July 28-August 7, 2004 wildernesses all over America: Janice Giteck, Daniel Lentz, Carl Stone, Art RoadTrip Jarvinen, Amy Knowles, Stephen Scott, Peter Gena, Ingram Marshall, Mary Sam Bergman on tour with the Ellen Childs, Peter Garland, , , Phil Winsor, Minnesota Orchestra February 9-16, 2004 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 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 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.

Posted by Kyle Gann at March 8, 2005 04:19 PM

COMMENTS

Kyle, I just finished reading music downtown and have compiled a big list of composers to check out because of your book. Now I have an even larger list because of this post. Thanks for being my go to source for all things Downtown. And I have no dog in this debate--I'm an actor and comedian based in Austin, Texas with a hunger for new music.

Posted by: Shannon at July 17, 2006 04:46 PM

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