Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Kyle Gann was a music critic for the Village Voice from 1986, and Music Downtown collects ninety-two essays from a total of about five hundred that he filed between then and about 1998. A preface provides background to the author's relationship with the journal, followed by a substantial introduction, 'The Importance of Being Downtown', which sets out the themes of many of the pieces to follow. These are organized as seven groups, the first one and the last two in the familiar journalistic forms of interview, concert review, and obituary, while the remaining four are essays grouped under headings: 'Music and/versus Society', 'Musical Politics', 'Aesthetics', and 'Reflections on Books, Figures, and Events'. Stylishly produced by the University of California Press, the book's cover carries endorsements from Robert Ashley, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Evan Ziporyn, and Robert Fink. The cover renders all names as lower-case letters, suggesting hip modernity and the world of rapid e-mail and text messaging. However, the Village Voice appears to insist that its name is accompanied at all times by the 'registered' symbol, ®. And there may be something in that: 'free' some of this musical scene may be, or think it is, but capitalism is always there to insist on its dues.
When reviewing essay collections, it is usual to allow for the diverse nature of the material gathered, seeing titles and organizing devices as attempts at unity where none was evident at the time of commission. No such strategy is needed here: true to its title the book is an extended study of 'downtown' music, the idea of such music, and the effect of seeing the musical world in light of that idea. Thus it is important to know exactly what is meant by the term 'downtown', and, for this purpose, the introductory essay is exemplary in setting out history and explanation: I suggest that anyone planning to publish a reader on twentieth-century music would be well advised to consider its reprinting. For the purpose of definition the introduction (11-14) spells out what needs to be scrawled on the palm before entering the examination hall: 1 (1960) conceptualism, 2 (1970) minimalism, 3 (1980) free improvisation, 4a (1990) post-minimalism, 4b totalism. The other thing that...