Downtown Music

By Kyle Gann

I wrote an entry on Downtown music for Wikipedia, and I liked the

way it came out. Since there it will be subject to other people's
editing and additions, I'm posting the original here as well.

Downtown music is a major subdivision of American music. The

scene the term describes began in 1960, when Yoko Ono - one of
the Fluxus artists, at that time still seven years away from meeting
John Lennon - opened her Soho loft to be used as a performance
space for a series curated by La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield.
Prior to this time, most classical music performances in New York
City occured "uptown" around the area Lincoln Center would soon
occupy. Ono's gesture led to a new performance tradition of
informal performances in nontraditional venues such as lofts and
converted industrial spaces, involving music much more
experimental than that of the more conventional modern classical
series' Uptown.

Downtown music is not distinguished by any particular principle,

but rather by what it does not do: it does not confine itself to the
ensembles, performance tradition, and musical rhetoric of European
classical music, nor to the commercially defined conventions of pop
music. More than a continuous scene, Downtown music has
resembled a battlefield on which, from time to time, various groups
have reigned ascendant. In chronological order of dominance, the
following movements have been prominent Downtown:

Conceptualism - starting with the Fluxus artists, who made pieces

from brief instructions ("the short form") or concepts. For instance,
La Monte Young's "Draw a straight line and follow it"; Robert Watts's
Trace, in which the musicians set fire to the music on their music
stands; Yoko Ono's Wall Piece, in which performers bang their
heads against the wall; or Nam June Paik's classic "Creep into the
vagina of a living whale."

Minimalism - a style of music that began with the repetition of

short motifs, sometimes going out of phase due to slight
differences of speed, and crescendoed into a movement of simple
diatonic music of clearly defined linear processes. Steve Reich and
Philip Glass became the public face of the movement, but the
original minimalists ( La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, John Cale,
Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock) were less characterized by
their music's prettiness and accessibility than by its tremendous
length, volume, and attention-challenging stasis.

Performance art - starting with the enigmatic solo text/music

pieces of Laurie Anderson, which often made innovative (even
subversive) use of electronic technology, many Downtown artists
developed an often humorous or thought-provoking style of solo
performance with conceptualist overtones. This scene coexisted
with minimalism, and due to the dearth of funding opportunities for
Downtown composers, many of them still pursue genres of solo
performance.

Free Improvisation - originating with Terry Riley and Pauline

Oliveros, this scene took over Downtown in the early 1980s, under
the leadship of John Zorn and Elliott Sharp. This music, celebrating
extemporaneity, flourished in a city in which rehearsal space was
expensive and difficult to come by, and provided an outlet for many
jazz-trained/-centered musicians tired of jazz performance
conventions.

Postminimalism - a style of music based on a steady beat and

diatonic harmony, less linear or obvious than minimalism but taking
over its ensemble concept of amplified chamber groups.
Postminimalism was more a far-flung national movement than
anything specific to Manhattan, but William Duckworth and Elodie
Lauten are examples of New York-based postminimalists.

Totalism - another style emerging from minimalism but taking it in

the direction of rhythmic complexity and rock-inspired beat
momentum. Postminimalism and totalism were both bolstered by
the emergence, starting in 1987, of the Bang on a Can festival,
curated by Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon.

The above list of movements and idioms is far from exhaustive - in

particular, it omits the continuous history of electronics in
Downtown music, which have tended toward process-oriented and
interactive music rather than fixed compositions. The history of
sound installations should be taken into account, along with the
more recent advent of DJ-ing as an artform. Likewise, despite its
origin in New York musical politics, "Downtown" music is not solely
specific to Manhattan; many major cities such as Chicago, San
Francisco, even Birmingham, Alabama have alternative, Downtown
music scenes. The only thing that all Downtown music might be
said to have in common is that, at least at the time of its original
appearance, it was too outré - by dint of excessive length, stasis,
simplicity, extemporaneity, consonance, noisiness, pop influence,
vernacular reference, or other purported infraction - to have been
considered "serious" modern music by the people who play modern
music at Juilliard, Columbia University, and Lincoln Center. Another
generalization one could point to is an embrace of the creative
attitudes of John Cage, though this is not universal; Zorn in
particular has downplayed his influence. Some Downtown music,
particularly that of Glass, Reich, Zorn, and Morton Feldman, has
subsequently become widely acknowledged within the more
mainstream history of music.