Downtown Music - Varieties of Music Within The Downtown Scene

Varieties of Music Within The Downtown Scene

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' 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.
• Art rock or experimental rock – this is a term with several different meanings, depending on one's milieu, but two are most relevant to Downtown music: 1. originally, music made by visual artists, presumably musical amateurs, often tending toward surreal theater, as in the early performances of Glenn Branca and Jeffrey Lohn; and 2. subsequent to Rhys Chatham's influence, a transferral of minimalism to the instruments of rock music, resulting in static pieces played on electric guitars, generally with a backbeat. Groups like DNA, Sonic Youth, Live Skull and the Swans arose from this (and the No Wave) movement. The Velvet Underground, in Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, combined avant-garde, minimalist, drone and rock music with visual arts and avant-garde theater.
• Free improvisation – originating with Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, this scene took over Downtown in the early 1980s, under the leadership 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 art form. 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. One could say that, if, when a composer gets played in New York City, it's likely to be at a Downtown space, then he or she can be called a Downtown composer, regardless of primary residence.