Full Description
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, including computer music, multiculturalism and its thorny relation to music, music for the AIDS crisis, the brand-new art of electronic sampling and its legal implications, symphonies for electric guitars, operas based on talk shows, the death of twelve-tone music, and the various streams of music that flowed forth from minimalism. In these articles - including interviews with Yoko Ono, Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, and other leading musical figures - Gann paints a portrait of a bristling era in music history and defines the scruffy, vernacular field of Downtown music from which so much of the most fertile recent American music has come.
Contents
Preface: New Music and the Village Voice Acknowledgments Introduction: The Importance of Being Downtown INTERVIEWS Shouting at the Dead: Robert Ashley's Neoplatonist TV Operas The Part That Doesn't Fit Is Me: Yoko Ono, the Inventor of Downtown Midtown Avant-Gardist: Philip Glass Sails Columbus into a Clash of Keys and Cultures Trimpin's Machine Age: A Revolutionary Tinker Revives the Dream of Infinitely Fluid Music Dancing with the Audience: Carman Moore's Mass Attempts to Heal the World Harps from Heaven: Glenn Branca Reemerges from the Thick of Theory Shadowing Capote: Mikel Rouse The Dance Between: David First Raising Ghosts: Leroy Jenkins Brings the African Burial Ground to Life Opera Meets Oprah: Mikel Rouse Hawks Salvation in an Opera for Real People A Difficult Woman: A Cosmic Piano Concerto from the Outspoken Composer of Vagina Monkey Business: Fred Ho De-Europeanizes Opera with Martial Arts Music and/versus Society Sampling: Plundering for Art Mozarts Live! "Performing Mozart's Music" Killers in the Audience Letting Euro Go What Normal People Hear: Rose Rosengard Subotnik Dysfunctional Harmony: Creativity Don't Touch that Dahl: Classical Radio Spin It Around: New Music in the Public's Hands Paradise at Our Fingertips: Voltaire's Bastards What's Your AQ? Dump the Multicult No More Heroes Music of the Excluded Middle Medicine Music: The Uses of Art Who Killed Classical Music? Forget It, Jake--It's Uptown Musical Politics Paradigms Lost: Rhys Chatham/John Zorn Blurred Out: On Language Rock Rules: Bandwagonism Pulitzer Hacks: Amateurs/Professionals Composer's Clearing House: The Pulitzer Prize Obitchuaries: John Cage Totally Ismic: Totalism The Last Barbarian: John Cage Berlitz's Downtown for Musicians: New-Music Performance What Are We, Chopped Liver? The New Generation The Great Divide: Uptown Composers Are Stuck in the Past Y Not 2K? Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead: Modernism Loses Its Grip as the Odometer Turns Over Aesthetics Let X = X: Minimalism versus Serialism A Tale of Two Sohos: Plato/Aristotle A Secret Manifesto: Fred Lerdahl The Modernist Dance: War in the Brain It's Only as Good as It Sounds: Richard Rorty Noises of Fate: You Don't Need a Sampler to Recontextualize Sounding the Image Waiting for Monteverdi: Minimalism Dads versus Shadows: James Hillman Vexing the Purists: Vexations Musical Amnesia Cured! Imagism End of the Paper Trail: Scores Reflections on Books, Figures, and Events No Shortcuts: John Cage E.T., Go Home: Tuning Composing the Lingo: Harry Partch, American Inventor Modernist: Morton Feldman's Abstract Expressions One-Note Wonder: A New York Retrospective for Italy's Saintly Mystic, Giacinto Scelsi Minimalism Isn't Pretty: Tony Conrad Makes a Truculent Comeback Father of Us All: The Critic as Composer Grand Old Youngster: Turning the Century at Lincoln Center Concert Reviews Maximal Spirit: La Monte Young Big Machines, Little Issues: The 1987 International Computer Music Conference First Flight: John Adams Admiring the Waterfall: David Garland Yawn: R.{ths}I.{ths}P. Hayman Mottos and Models: Morton Feldman/Rhys Chatham/Anthony Coleman Searching for the Plague: Diamanda Galas Oceans without Walls: Laurie Anderson Insiders, Outsiders, and Old Boys: New Music America '89 Dark Stormy Night: Nicolas Collins Let There Be Noise: David Rosenboom/Trichy Sankaran Music in Time of War: The Composer-to-Composer Symposium Don't Worry, Be Hopi Enough of Nothing: Postminimalism Voltage High: Ron Kuivila Isn't That Spatial? Henry Brant The Limits of Craft: Frederic Rzewski/Philip Glass Opera Is Relative: Einstein on the Beach Well-Tuned Blues: The Forever Bad Blues Band Voice of the Unutterable: The S.E.M. Ensemble How Peculiar? The American Eccentrics Flutes and Flying Branches: The Taos Pueblo Powwow The Tingle of p {mult} mn {mi} 1: La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela The British Don't Have Oral Sex: Now Eleanor's Idea View from the Gap: Emerging Voices Regarding Henry: The World's First Multicultural Modernist Conservative Patron Saint of Outsiders What Our Pulses Say: David Garland/Billy Martin Mistaken Memories: Tony Conrad: One-Idea Composer or Late Bloomer? Passings Legacy of the Quiet Touch That Which Is Fundamental: Julius Eastman, 1940--1990 Philosopher No More: He Quietly Started a Spiritual Revolution Index
