Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies

3. Pluralism, Minor Deviations, and Radical Change: The Challenge to Experimental Music in Downtown New York, 1971–85

63 Pluralism, Minor Deviations, and Radical Change The Challenge to Experimental Music in Downtown New York, 1971–85 Tim Lawrence Beginning in 1970 and continuing through the early 1980s, New York City hosted a series of transformative developments in music culture that have few historical parallels, and also continue to resonate to this day.1 Within dance music, DJing and what became known as disco began to germinate in the city’s downtown lofts and dilapidated discotheques at the very start of the period. A short while later Bronx-based disc jockeys (DJs) and dancers came together to forge the early contours of hip-hop.Also dating back to the early 1970s, punk, new wave, and eventually no wave germinated in spots such as Max’s Kansas City, the Mercer Street Arts Center, CBGB, the Mudd Club, Danceteria, and Tier 3. Coinciding with these developments, other musicians took to gathering in nearby loft spaces to explore the outer reaches of jazz, or what became known, somewhat reductively , as “loft jazz,” and across the same period Puerto Rican musicians took Cuban-inspired salsa music forward in the Nuyorican Poets’ Café and the New Rican Village.2 Meanwhile, in a range of neighboring buildings, a group of young composer-instrumentalists engaged with the legacy of the first generation of experimental composers, as well as the more recent work of the so-called minimalist composers, to generate what came to be known as “new music.” Including Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Julius Eastman, Peter Gordon, Jill Kroesen, George Lewis, Garrett List, Arthur Russell, Ned Sublette, David Van Tieghem, and Peter Zummo among its number, this new generation engaged with the music that was unfolding 64 • tomorrow is the question around them, and through their embrace of popular forms stretched experimentalism and composition to the breaking point. The aesthetic and canonical scope of experimental composition received its most influential outline around the time this new group of composers materialized into an embryonic network, when Michael Nyman published Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond in 1974. Distinguishing experimental music from the avant-garde tradition, Nyman noted that in contrast to the work of serialists Boulez and Stockhausen, composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff questioned the traditional unities of composing, performing, and listening. In particular they became interested in the notation of sound-generating ideas rather than exactly repeatable performances and placed a newfound emphasis on chance and indeterminacy; their concern was the uniqueness of the moment, not of a scored idea, and they accordingly sought to create a role for the composer that specified the uniqueness of the realization of their works. This approach contrasted not only with the objectives of avant-garde composers, who sought to freeze the moment of uniqueness, but also with those of the “minimal” composers with whom Nyman concluded his overview (namely, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass).3 Nyman was hardly in a position to comment on the contribution of the new generation of composers, because their work had only just begun . However, although other writers have enjoyed more opportunities to write about this group, its contribution remains largely uncharted.4 The impression is created that experimental composition stopped with the game-changing interventions of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass, so Wim Mertens and Keith Potter have published books dedicated to that group, while in The Rest Is Noise Alex Ross dedicates his penultimate chapter to the minimalists before developing a survey of what has happened since— including but a fleeting reference to the “postminimalists,” who, he writes, have “taken cues variously from funk, punk, heavy metal, electronic and DJ music, and hip-hop.”5 Aside from the imprecision of the “postminimalist” category, which could equally include the more elaborate compositions of Glass (Einstein on the Beach), Reich (Music for 18 Musicians), and Riley (Shri Camel), it has left the post-Cagean experimental canon looking distinctly male, white, and heterosexual, as well as notably curtailed in terms of its encounters with musical forms that are not grounded in composition.6 If both of these outcomes need to be challenged on cultural and aesthetic grounds, so, too, does the elision of what might be the least articulated but most profound contribution of the postminimalists, who refused to categorize the results Pluralism, Minor Deviations, and Radical Change • 65 of their work, and, as will be argued, operated not just as pluralists but as...