MUSIC ESSAY: “DOWNTOWN” MUSIC

You Can Always Go “Downtown”

Contemporary classical music encompasses so many genres that it is increasingly hard to determine just what to call it. Having rejected the term “serious music” decades ago, BMI uses “concert music” to refer to a wide range of new works that not only defy simple categorization but also are better off not being pigeonholed. This music is performed by groups ranging from traditional symphony orchestras, long-established string quartets, and academy-based new music groups to composer-led performing ensembles, improvisational networks, or daringly experimental soloists. Often the more adventuresome combine elements of jazz, pop, and rock within an avant-garde context.

If someone describes a certain music to you as “downtown,” you probably aren’t speaking with a musician. The term is more common to music critics, who want to categorize something for you, and to the performance and recording industries, who want to sell something to you.

But clichés of journalism and marketing can be revealing – a cliché, after all, isn’t untrue, just unexplored. When you start exploring “downtown,” however, it seems to reveal very little. It gives no clue as to how a certain music is composed, or even if it’s composed at all. The D-word is applied equally to improvisations by violinist Malcolm Goldstein; the operas of Robert Ashley, in which improvising musicians work within specified parameters; and even the traditionally notated scores by Morton Feldman, performed by an established concert-music ensemble.

“Downtown” is also feeble at preparing you for how the music actually sounds: A raucous set by Elliott Sharp’s band Carbon is as much a downtown delicacy as La Monte Young playing The Well-Tuned Piano, his approximately five-hour aurora borealis of overtones. But not all downtown musics work in extremes: A performance by accordionist Guy Klucevsek, or by Peter Gordon and his Love of Life Orchestra, can be a tuneful, downright entertaining evening.

“Downtown” has come to designate just about any avant-garde/experimental music or performance art (especially when it includes dollops of jazz, rock, world music, etc.); in New York City, a lot of this experimentation was occurring in the southern end of Manhattan, where most of its makers lived. With the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, and Columbia University located further north, “uptown” became the tag for music produced by academia after the model of European modernism. In realty, both downtown and uptown music are played all over New York: You can hear Glenn Branca’s visceral, high-volume music for electric guitar ensemble at Lincoln Center, or a twelve-tone composition by Milton Babbitt performed at the Greenwich House auditorium. Bang on a Can, a relatively new festival held each May in lower Manhattan (this year at the RAPP Arts Center), offers a lively selection of uptown and downtown musics.

Far more divisive than uptown or downtown’s geographical separation is their conceptual split over which structures and sounds are available to composers. Although the downtown scene is typified by a personal-music aesthetic, with the composer as the sole or principal player of his or her music, many of these musicians have written pieces for other performers and ensembles. And without having to recant, either – Laurie Anderson’s It’s Cold Outside for orchestra, John Zorn’s string quartet Cat o’ Nine Tails, and Rhys Chatham’s The Last World for soprano and tape fit in quite naturally with the more personal works of these composers. “The downtown composers think of themselves as incorporating both uptown and downtown notions,” Robert Ashley observes. “Whereas I think uptown composers make a real distinction between downtown and uptown.”

“Blue” Gene Tyranny can support that observation from personal experience. Arguably the quintessential downtown musicmaker, he is a gifted improviser as well as an assured and original composer, whose sound ranges from the pop-derived flash of The World’s Greatest Piano Player to the otherworldly electronics of Harvey Milk (Portrait). A prodigious pianist with a thorough classical training, Tyranny was performing a host of modern and contemporary works (including Satie, Ives, Webern, Cage, Feldman, and Young) while still a teenager; composing too, everything from graph scores to traditional tonal pieces to tape music. In 1961 Tyranny applied to Juilliard. “At the time, I didn’t realize the enormous political thing between the Cageites and the academics themselves. It was very, very strong, and I just walked into it, like this dumb kid from Texas. I’d just got off the plane, and I said, ‘Hi! How y’all? How ya doin’?’ And they had their guns ready. I couldn’t believe it…”

Despite the hostility, Tyranny was accepted by Juilliard. “But I had already made up my mind to catch a bus with the money I had left to go to Ann Arbor.” In Michigan he wound up making music not in the University but in that uptown’s downtown, with the groundbreaking composers of the legendary ONCE Group (including Roger Reynolds, Gordon Mumma, and Robert Ashley).

Although New York may have provided the classifications, the actual species of music are found everywhere. Roulette Intermedium was formed in 1978 by a group of innovative composers at the University of Illinois in Urbana – a downtown not only to the school, but also to the city of Chicago, where they held concerts in galleries and loftspaces. Two of its founders, Jim Staley and David Weinstein, shifted the operation to New York and opened the performance space in Staley’s (yes, downtown) loft. They’ve been presenting concerts at 228 West Broadway since 1981, and have made Roulette a fixture of the city’s new-music scene. The variety of composer-performers and improvisers who appear there ranges from Anne LeBaron to Marilyn Crispell, Robert Dick, Butch Morris, and Bernadette Speach.

One indication of that scene’s vitality is the cooperation possible between its different performance spaces. When Roulette gave its first series, it had the helping co-sponsorship of Experimental Intermedia Foundation. EIF knew perfectly well what the new kids were going through: Formed in 1968 by artists and composers who needed a forum for their work, EIF began giving concerts in 1973 at 224 Centre Street, the loft of EIF’s co-founder, Phill Niblock. Today the space is more active and valued than ever and has just celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with retrospective concerts by Jon Gibson, Rhys Chatham, and many other composers who were heard in EIF’s first six-concert series. “It’s like a rock, like Gibraltar,” says Robert Ashley. “The values are so clean over there: When you go over to Niblock’s, you expect something.”

ROBERT ASHLEY (photo by Nathaniel Tileson)

The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance, and Film first opened its doors in 1971, at a space on Mercer Street. When the building partially collapsed, it was condemned and razed; by 1974, the Kitchen was at Broome Street in Manhattan’s SoHo district.

When the Kitchen outgrew this home, it could not afford the additional SoHo space – as the neighborhood became more fashionable, co-ops, condos, and boutiques multiplied and squeezed out almost everything else. Eventually the Kitchen relocated to 512 West 19th Street: “Way over by the Hudson River, a demonstration of how artists are being pushed out of New York,” asserts executive director Barbara Tsumagari.

Although the Kitchen owns its current space, Tsumagari alludes to a very real problem. EIF is currently in an uncertain real-estate situation; Dance Theater Workshop, a venue for new music as well as dance, resides only a couple of blocks east of the Kitchen, and now it too is in a state of flux. And the real-estate feeding frenzy gripping the city will probably swallow up more spaces before it collapses on itself. The downtown music scene originated in lower Manhattan because living spaces were cheap there. Nothing is cheap there anymore, and a new generation of artists simply cannot afford to live and work in the region that has become their label. One gratifying exception is the Knitting Factory on Houston Street. Booking mostly avant-garde jazz and rock, with a sprinkling of more experimental concert composers, seems to have done the trick. The Knitting factory has been home to such varied artists as John King, Conrad Cummings, Gerry Hemingway, Mark Helias, Elliott Sharp, and Peter Zummo.

Brooklyn has become New York City’s downtown, absorbing the people who have been priced out of Manhattan. What kind of performance scene will develop there remains to be seen; but crossing the East River to hear new music doesn’t seem so weird, thanks to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the last 20 years, BAM has become a home away from home for downtown music: Glenn Branca, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gordon, Steve Reich, and a host of others have given major works there. And in the fall of 1989, BAM will host the tenth anniversary of New Music America. This festival of contemporary music, inaugurated at the Kitchen in 1979, has played cities across the country and is returning to New York in a citywide festival which will also be, in effect, a tribute to the quality and endurance of the series’ co-sponsors: Roulette, EIF, the Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, the Knitting Factory…

(This essay first appeared in BMI Music World, Summer 1989.)

Link to:

Music: Essays: Contents

For more on these composers, see:

Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition

More Cool Sites To Visit! – Music

For more on Robert Ashley, see:

Music Book: Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers

Music Essay: Anne LeBaron, Hyperopera, and Crescent City: Some Historical Perspectives

Music Lecture: My Experiences of Surrealism in 20th-Century American Music

Music: Radio Show #5, Postmodernism, part 2: Minimalism

Music: Radio Show #12, A Tribute to Robert Ashley