Downtown Music

Downtown music is a subdivision of American music, closely related to experimental music. The scene the term describes began in 1960, when Yoko Ono—one of the Fluxus artists, at that time still seven years away from meeting John Lennon—opened her loft at 112 Chambers Street to be used as a noise music performance space for a series curated by La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield. Prior to this, most classical music performances in New York City occurred "uptown" around the areas that the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center and Columbia University would soon occupy. Ono's gesture led to a new performance tradition of informal performances in nontraditional venues such as lofts and converted industrial spaces, involving music much more experimental than that of the more conventional modern classical series' Uptown. Spaces in Manhattan that supported Downtown music from the 1960s on included the Judson Memorial Church, The Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia, Roulette, the Knitting Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, Tonic, the Gas Station, the Paula Cooper Gallery, and others. Brooklyn Academy of Music has also shown a predilection for composers from the Downtown scene.

Downtown music is not distinguished by any particular principle, but rather by what it does not do: it does not confine itself to the ensembles, performance tradition, and musical rhetoric of European classical music, nor to the commercially defined conventions of pop music. The only thing that all Downtown music might be said to have in common is that, at least at the time of its original appearance, it was too bizarre – by dint of excessive length, stasis, simplicity, extemporaneity, consonance, noisiness, pop influence, vernacular reference, or other purported infraction – to have been considered "serious" modern music by proponents of "uptown" music performed from the 1960s through the 1980s at the Juilliard School, Columbia University, and Lincoln Center, under the direction of the composers Charles Wuorinen and Harvey Sollberger in concerts by The Group for Contemporary Music, and concerts directed by the French conductor and pianist, Jacques-Louis Monod with the Guild of Composers. Another generalization one could point to is an embrace of the creative attitudes of John Cage, though this is not universal; Zorn in particular has downplayed his influence. Some Downtown music, particularly that of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Zorn, and Morton Feldman, has subsequently become widely acknowledged within the more mainstream history of music.