Battles Around New Music in New York in the Seventies
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Presenting the New: Battles around New Music in New York in the Seventies A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Joshua David Jurkovskis Plocher IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY David Grayson, Adviser December 2012 © Joshua David Jurkovskis Plocher 2012 i Acknowledgements One of the best things about reaching the end of this process is the opportunity to publicly thank the people who have helped to make it happen. More than any other individual, thanks must go to my wife, who has had to put up with more of my rambling than anybody, and has graciously given me half of every weekend for the last several years to keep working. Thank you, too, to my adviser, David Grayson, whose steady support in a shifting institutional environment has been invaluable. To the rest of my committee: Sumanth Gopinath, Kelley Harness, and Richard Leppert, for their advice and willingness to jump back in on this project after every life-inflicted gap. Thanks also to my mother and to my kids, for different reasons. Thanks to the staff at the New York Public Library (the one on 5th Ave. with the lions) for helping me track down the SoHo Weekly News microfilm when it had apparently vanished, and to the professional staff at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and to the Fales Special Collections staff at Bobst Library at New York University. Special thanks to the much smaller archival operation at the Kitchen, where I was assisted at various times by John Migliore and Samara Davis. Thank you to Richard Wandel at the New York Philharmonic Archive for his help. The Graduate Research Partnership Program and departmental travel grant programs helped facilitate my travel to New York. Once I got there, I enjoyed the hospitality and company of friends. Thanks to Pijus Virketis and Katherine Kwok, Ashley Nail and Marshall Moseley, and Tomoko Shannon and Michael Ippolito for putting me up and putting up with me around my stints in libraries and archives. ii Abstract The 1970s often vanish between a “long Sixties” and a “long Eighties.” Their historiographic disappearing act disguises the fact that they were a time of substantial change in the United States—culturally, politically, economically…and musically. “Presenting the New” traces the intersection of material circumstances and artistic production in New York, home to most of the Seventies’ trends in new music. Through Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I conduct a music-sociological examination of the presentation of “new” music in Manhattan. The use of field theory usefully complicates simple Uptown-Downtown narratives by including the “Midtown” institutions of Lincoln Center and examining overlapping constituencies and attempts by agents of all allegiances to expand their geographic and cultural presence. The paper follows the activities of various figures in New York between 1968 and 1980. Pierre Boulez brought European modernism with him as the new music director of the New York Philharmonic before his eventual, ambivalent departure for IRCAM (and replacement by Zubin Mehta). Charles Wuorinen and Henry Sollberger’s Group for Contemporary Music traded Columbia for the Manhattan School of Music, striving to maintain operations despite shifting support. Steve Reich and Philip Glass moved from presenting process minimalism in SoHo’s lofts and galleries to performing at major venues both “classical” and “rock.” Meredith Monk carved and maintained a particular niche from the intersection of multiple media. The Kitchen—SoHo’s premiere venue for video and performance art—became orderly alongside its neighborhood, growing from impromptu video nights to institutionalized festivals. iii Along the way, these artists adjusted their modes of presentation to suit their changing audiences and goals. They also adjusted them to the shape of the field of cultural production, which, like the general social and political field, grew increasingly fragmented over the course of the Seventies. From a largely dualistic battle between adherents of Babbitt and Cage, the struggle to define new music shifted to small, loose associations of composers with myriad aesthetic practices. As the essential questions defining the field of new music multiplied, the definition of “new music” itself changed, losing its distinction from both popular and historical practices. iv Table of Contents List of Figures ......................................................................................................................v Chapter One: The War That Nobody Won ..........................................................................1 Chapter Two: Old Campaigns, New Campaigners ............................................................49 Chapter Three: Shifting Fronts (1972-75) .......................................................................104 Chapter Four: Fireworks and Fragmentation (1976) .......................................................171 Chapter Five: Regrouping (1977-79) ...............................................................................241 Chapter Six: Détente (1979) ............................................................................................297 Chapter Seven: What Was Next, What Was Left ............................................................353 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................393 Appendix One: Prospective Encounters ..........................................................................403 Appendix Two: New Music, New York Composers and Works .....................................405 Appendix Three: Agenda for New Music Conference ....................................................407 v List of Figures Figure 2-1: Manhattan as Cultural Field ............................................................................55 Figure 3-1: Kitchen Calendars (April 1972 and November 1975) ..................................120 Figure 3-2: Poster for the 1974 Kitchen installation of Young’s Dream House .............123 Figure 3-3: New York Philharmonic Display Ad ............................................................152 Figure 3-4: Detail from New York Philharmonic Rug Concerts Flyer ...........................163 Figure 3-5: Cover of “Rugs” Promotional Booklet .........................................................166 Figure 4-1 N.Y. Phil. Subscription Renewal Brochure ’76-’77 (interior) .......................181 Figure 4-2 Quarry Display Ad .........................................................................................220 Figure 5-1 N.Y. Phil. Subscription Renewal Brochure, ’77-’78 (interior) ......................271 Figure 5-2 N.Y. Phil. Subscription Mailer ’78-’79 (cover) .............................................267 Figure 6-1 “Other New Music Events” ............................................................................334 1 CHAPTER ONE: The War That Nobody Won The era seems to have accomplished nothing worth remembering, and nothing remains except the stuff of harmless nostalgia—nostalgia nourished by the remoteness and apparent insignificance of those years. This impression could hardly be more wrong. —Bruce J. Schulman1 The Seventies were a mess in the United States. For all the cultural tumult of the Sixties, the economy had remained sound. In the next decade, the political and cultural convulsions continued, exacerbated by the ebb and eventual fade of the long postwar economic boom. The Seventies began with U.S. military disasters in Vietnam and ended with Americans held hostage in Tehran. In between, the Steel Belt rusted, a president resigned in scandal, and “stagflation” entered the national vocabulary. The Seventies were hardly a bright moment in the nation’s history. They were, though, a pivotal one. Activists and politicians in the Sixties had operated under notions of universal citizenship in the context of persistent economic growth. Their fight was for an equitable division of a growing pie, but also for its shape, a battle for “what comes next?” In the Seventies, it became clear that the pie would not grow indefinitely. Politicians and activists were suddenly fighting not for equitable division, but for their own slices. “What comes next?” gained a tacit qualifier: “for us.” And the “us” was no longer the country as a whole. Few places demonstrate the dissolution of the Sixties’ universal concerns as well as New York City. With its long history of both capitalism and liberalism, the city carried postwar American trends—positive and negative—to excess. New York hit the deepest troughs of the Seventies earlier and harder than the country as a whole, and, under Ed 1 The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press), xii. 2 Koch, somewhat anticipated Ronald Reagan and the nation in emerging from them. The struggles within the city in the Seventies were bitter, pitting evolving constituencies against each other first for unsustainable municipal largesse, then for the scraps left under austerity. By the Seventies’ end, the resource scramble had drifted into the private sector. New music in the Seventies underwent similar changes, most of them apparent in the cultural hothouse of New York. In 1969, Richard Kostelanetz could write a two part series titled “Milton Babbitt and John Cage: Parallels and Paradoxes” for Stereo Review and frame it as the singular debate in the compositional