Music downtown : writings from The Village voice / Kyle Gann.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gann, Kyle.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music--New York (State)--New York--20th century--History and criticism.

Music.

Music--New York (State)--New York--Reviews.

New York (State)--New York.

Genre:

Reviews.

Physical Description:

xix, 314 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2006]

Summary:

This collection represents the cream of the more than five hundred articles written for the Village Voice by Kyle Gann, a leading authority on experimental American music of the late twentieth century. Charged with exploring every facet of cutting-edge music coming out of New York City in the 1980s and '90s, Gann writes about a wide array of timely issues that few critics have addressed.

Contents:

Preface: New Music and the Village Voice xiii

Introduction: the importance of being downtown 1

Interviews 17

Shouting at the Dead: Robert Ashley's Neoplatonist TV Operas 17

The Part That Doesn't Fit Is Me: Yoko Ono, the Inventor of Downtown 23

Midtown Avant-Gardist: Philip Glass Sails Columbus into a Clash of Keys and Cultures 28

Trimpin's Machine Age: A Revolutionary Tinker Revives the Dream of Infinitely Fluid Music 33

Dancing with the Audience: Carman Moore's Mass Attempts to Heal the World 38

Harps from Heaven: Glenn Branca Reemerges from the Thick of Theory 42

Shadowing Capote: Mikel Rouse 50

The Dance Between: David First 55

Raising Ghosts: Leroy Jenkins Brings the African Burial Ground to Life 59

Opera Meets Oprah: Mikel Rouse Hawks Salvation in an Opera for Real People 63

A Difficult Woman: A Cosmic Piano Concerto from the Outspoken Composer of Vagina 66

Monkey Business: Fred Ho De-Europeanizes Opera with Martial Arts 69

Music and/versus society 73

Plundering for Art: Sampling 73

Mozarts Live! "Performing Mozart's Music" 77

Killers in the Audience 79

Letting Euro Go 81

What Normal People Hear: Rose Rosengard Subotnik 84

Dysfunctional Harmony: Repealing the Suppression of Creativity 86

Don't Touch That Dahl: Classical Radio 88

Spin It Around: New Music in the Public's Hands 90

Paradise at Our Fingertips: Voltaire's Bastards 93

What's Your AQ? 95

Dump the Multicult 97

No More Heroes 100

Music of the Excluded Middle 102

Medicine Music: The Uses of Art 104

Who Killed Classical Music? Forget It, Jake-It's Uptown 106

Musical politics 110

Paradigms Lost: Rhys Chatham/John Zorn 110

Blurred Out: On Language 114

Rock Rules: Bandwagonism 116

Pulitzer Hacks: Amateur Composers versus the Professionals 120

Composer's Clearinghouse: The Pulitzer Prize 123

Obitchuaries: Critics Take Their Final Potshots at John Cage 125

Totally Ismic: Totalism 127

The Last Barbarian: John Cage 130

Berlitz's Downtown for Musicians: New-Music Performance 132

What Are We, Chopped Liver? The New Generation 134

The Great Divide: Uptown Composers Are Stuck in the Past 136

Y Not 2K? Nostalgia for Modernism as the Millennium Ends 140

Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead: Modernism Loses Its Grip as the Odometer Turns Over 144

Aesthetics 147

Let X = X: Minimalism versus Serialism 147

A Tale of Two Sohos: Plato/Aristotle 149

A Secret Manifesto: Fred Lerdahl 151

The Modernist Dance: War in the Brain 156

It's Only as Good as It Sounds: Richard Rorty 160

Noises of Fate: You Don't Need a Sampler to Recontextualize 164

Sounding the Image 168

Waiting for Monteverdi: Minimalism 170

Dads versus Shadows: James Hillman 172

Vexing the Purists: Vexations 174

Musical Amnesia Cured! Imagism 177

End of the Paper Trail: Scores 179

Reflections on books, figures, and events 182

No Shortcuts: John Cage 182

E.T., Go Home: Tuning 186

Composing the Lingo: Harry Partch, American Inventor 188

Morton Feldman's Abstract Expressions 192

One-Note Wonder: A New York Retrospective for Italy's Saintly Mystic, Giacinto Scelsi 196

Father of Us All: The Critic as Composer 199

Minimalism Isn't Pretty: Tony Conrad Makes a Truculent Comeback 203

Grand Old Youngster: Turning the Century at Lincoln Center 207

Concert reviews 210

Maximal Spirit: La Monte Young 210

Big Machines, Little Issues: The 1987 International Computer Music Conference 214

First Flight: John Adams 218

Admiring the Waterfall: David Garland 220

Yawn: R.I.P. Hayman 222

Searching for the Plague: Diamanda Galas 224

Oceans without Walls: Laurie Anderson 228

Insiders, Outsiders, and Old Boys: New Music America '89 232

Dark Stormy Night: Nicolas Collins 236

Let There Be Noise: David Rosenboom/Trichy Sankaran 238

Music in Time of War: The Composer-to-Composer Symposium 240

Don't Worry, Be Hopi 244

Enough of Nothing: Postminimalism 247

Voltage High: Ron Kuivila 251

Isn't That Spatial? Henry Brant 253

The Limits of Craft: Frederic Rzewski/Philip Glass 255

Opera Is Relative: Einstein on the Beach 257

Well-Tuned Blues: The Forever Bad Blues Band 260

Voice of the Unutterable: The S.E.M. Ensemble 262

How Peculiar? The American Eccentrics 264

Flutes and Flying Branches: The Taos Pueblo Powwow 266

The Tingle of p x m[superscript n] - 1: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela 269

The British Don't Have Oral Sex: Now Eleanor's Idea 271

View from the Gap: Emerging Voices 273

Bang! Crunch! Who's on First? Twisted Tutu 275

Regarding Henry: The World's First Multicultural Modernist Conservative Patron Saint of Outsiders 278

What Our Pulses Say: David Garland 281

Mistaken Memories: Tony Conrad: One-Idea Composer or Late Bloomer? 284

Passings 286

Legacy of the Quiet Touch: Morton Feldman, 1926-1987 286

The Antidote to Publicity: Virgil Thomson, 1896-1989 288

That Which Is Fundamental: Julius Eastman, 1940-1990 289

Philosopher No More: John Cage (1912-1992) Quietly Started a Spiritual Revolution 293.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

0520229819

0520229827

OCLC:

57208967