Music Downtown: Writings from the Village VoiceThis 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. |
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Results 1-5 of 21
Page 2
... Stockhausen , Boulez , Nono , and others heavily influenced by Anton Webern ) was a critical move- ment , a music that criticized the new position of music : a negation of musi- cal expectations , a refusal to fit into a social role ...
... Stockhausen , Boulez , Nono , and others heavily influenced by Anton Webern ) was a critical move- ment , a music that criticized the new position of music : a negation of musi- cal expectations , a refusal to fit into a social role ...
Page 13
... Stockhausen . In the summer of 1986 Zorn had his popular breakthrough with The Big Gundown , a Nonesuch record of crazy Downtown arrangements of film music by Ennio Morricone . In November 1986 I started writing for the Village Voice ...
... Stockhausen . In the summer of 1986 Zorn had his popular breakthrough with The Big Gundown , a Nonesuch record of crazy Downtown arrangements of film music by Ennio Morricone . In November 1986 I started writing for the Village Voice ...
Page 20
... Stockhausen work of the ' 5os or ' 6os . And , now 61 , Ashley belongs to Stockhausen's generation . " I find it interesting to force those rules on the piece . Of course , I'm a serialist ! What else would I do ? I force it because I ...
... Stockhausen work of the ' 5os or ' 6os . And , now 61 , Ashley belongs to Stockhausen's generation . " I find it interesting to force those rules on the piece . Of course , I'm a serialist ! What else would I do ? I force it because I ...
Page 25
... Stockhausen for inspiration , Ono was ahead of them . Her " Paper Shoes " collage of 1970 , with its freight train modulating into ecstatic drumming into a thunderstorm , is worthy musique concrete , introverted and better sounded - out ...
... Stockhausen for inspiration , Ono was ahead of them . Her " Paper Shoes " collage of 1970 , with its freight train modulating into ecstatic drumming into a thunderstorm , is worthy musique concrete , introverted and better sounded - out ...
Page 33
... Stockhausen , Bartok , and forget other influences which may be subtler but more lasting . Like Debussy . I think about him more now than I ever did . Not a popular idea . " History's curious , because our interests change , and as they ...
... Stockhausen , Bartok , and forget other influences which may be subtler but more lasting . Like Debussy . I think about him more now than I ever did . Not a popular idea . " History's curious , because our interests change , and as they ...
Contents
XI | 59 |
XII | 63 |
XIII | 66 |
XIV | 69 |
XV | 73 |
XVI | 77 |
XVII | 79 |
XVIII | 81 |
XIX | 84 |
XX | 86 |
XXI | 88 |
XXII | 90 |
XXIII | 93 |
XXIV | 95 |
XXV | 97 |
XXVI | 100 |
XXVII | 102 |
XXVIII | 104 |
XXIX | 106 |
XXX | 110 |
XXXIII | 114 |
XXXIV | 116 |
XXXV | 120 |
XXXVI | 123 |
XXXVIII | 125 |
XXXIX | 127 |
XL | 130 |
XLI | 132 |
XLII | 134 |
XLIII | 136 |
XLIV | 140 |
XLV | 144 |
XLVI | 147 |
XLVII | 149 |
XLVIII | 151 |
XLIX | 156 |
L | 160 |
LI | 164 |
LII | 168 |
LXIII | 192 |
LXIV | 196 |
LXV | 199 |
LXVI | 203 |
LXVII | 207 |
LXVIII | 210 |
LXIX | 214 |
LXX | 218 |
LXXI | 220 |
LXXII | 222 |
LXXIII | 224 |
LXXIV | 228 |
LXXV | 232 |
LXXVI | 236 |
LXXVII | 238 |
LXXVIII | 240 |
LXXIX | 244 |
LXXX | 247 |
LXXXI | 251 |
LXXXII | 253 |
LXXXIII | 255 |
LXXXIV | 257 |
LXXXV | 260 |
LXXXVI | 262 |
LXXXVII | 264 |
LXXXVIII | 266 |
LXXXIX | 269 |
XC | 271 |
XCI | 273 |
XCII | 275 |
XCIV | 278 |
XCV | 281 |
XCVI | 284 |
XCVII | 286 |
XCVIII | 288 |
XCIX | 289 |
C | 293 |
CI | 299 |
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Common terms and phrases
12-tone music 20th century academic aesthetic American artists Ashley audience avant-garde Babbitt become Beglarian Boulez Branca Cage's called chords classical music complex concert Cowell creativity critics culture dance Downtown composers Downtown music drones drum Elliott Carter ensemble European feel festival Fluxus going harmony hear heard Henry Cowell idea images improvisation jazz John Cage John Zorn La Monte Young language Laurie Anderson Lincoln Center listening live melody Mikel Rouse Milton Babbitt minimalism minimalist Monte Young Morton Feldman Mozart musicians Nancarrow never new-music notated notes Oliveros once opera orchestra Partch Pauline Oliveros performance Philip Glass piano piece pitch play postminimalism Pulitzer Quartet record Reich rhythm rhythmic rock Rouse Scelsi scene Schoenberg score songs sound Steve Reich Stockhausen structure style Symphony tape technique tempo there's thing tion tonal tradition Trimpin tuning Uptown violin voice write wrote York young composers Zorn
Popular passages
Page 142 - For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
Page 163 - To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.
Page 257 - Form in Music serves to bring about comprehensibility through memorability. Evenness, regularity, symmetry, subdivision, repetition, unity, relationship in rhythm and harmony and even logic — none of these elements produces or even contributes to beauty. But all of them contribute to an organization which makes the presentation of the musical idea intelligible.
Page 257 - Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. Later, of course, as JC Squire sadly added, It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho! Let Einstein be!
Page 184 - I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg. I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.
Page 200 - I replied that the general standard of music reviewing in New York had sunk so far that almost any change might bring improvement. Also I thought perhaps my presence in a post so prominent might stimulate performance of my works.
Page 24 - If my music seems to require physical silence, that is because it requires concentration to yourself — and this requires inner silence which may lead to outer silence as well. I think of my music more as a practice (gyo) than a music.
Page 115 - But the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the "tyranny of such capricious laws"; and in all seriousness, the probability is by no means small that precisely this is "nature...
Page 163 - Another way of making this point is to say that the social process of literalizing a metaphor is duplicated in the fantasy life of an individual. We call something "fantasy" rather than "poetry