Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
I dont know her name, but a young composer has just shown up in New York.
These divisions reached across thousands of miles: uptown included Paris; downtown extended to California.
But at bottom, New Yorks new music subculture was fiercely, even ridiculously provincial.
With little money or fame at stake, the spoils consisted of nuggets of prestige.
Fortunately, even meaningless feuds eventually peter out.
Eventually, my side lost, thank goodness.
Making the transition from composer to critic led me to put down my pencil and open my ears.
Schools splinter, aesthetic principles get tossed or overhauled, the geography of music shifts.
And yet the participants in all this fragmentation value continuity, too.
I was drawn to Columbia by the music of Mario Davidovsky, then the senior composer on the faculty.
(He later moved to Harvard.)
I had hoped to join a fellowship of composers; instead I found a self-important Order of Modernists.
Babbitt died in 2011 at 94; Carter in 2012 at 101; Boulez in 2016 at 90.
He played jazz clarinet and was rumored to compose while watching baseball on television.
But his down-to-earth demeanor coexisted with a fondness for erudite sentences and music of prickly sophistication.
I handed the piece off to a jazz virtuoso, who promised to learn it but never did.
(I even produced a few.)
Much of it ranged from terrible to okay, but I clung to the possibility of excitement and revelation.
Columbia had taught me to cram my music with obsessive minutiae, to differentiate every millisecond from every other.
Uptowners saw literal repetition as evidence of laziness.
Downtowners believed in repetition as an essential metabolic function, and they indulged in it for hours on end.
That party had long since shut down and moved on by the early 1990s.
Downtown Manhattan had gone bourgie and its rebel leaders had joined the musical equivalents of the Knickerbocker Club.
The Metropolitan Opera commissioned Philip Glasss Christopher Columbus opera,The Voyage, which had its premiere in 1992.
Their influence can be felt in several generations of performers, acolytes, and collaborators.
And then I gave you permission to do whatever you wanted to do.
Thats what one generation can do for the next.
Ned Rorem continued turning out songs in the same elegantly lyrical style he had been employing for decades.
And then there was Bang on a Can.
They started a seat-of-the-pants organization that grew into an establishment force: Bang on a Can.
The movement had its own distinctive pre-hipster style.
As impresarios, they created a new ecosystem.
As composers, they have filled it with some very fine music.
Saxophones and electric keyboards rent the air; trombones uttered glissando roars.
And yet they continue to rely on the happenstance and physical proximity that only a major city can provide.
In music, New York is finally living up to its reputation for globalism, transience, and cosmopolitanism.
Instead, New Yorks new music world just becomes ever more varied and excitingly disorienting.
Venues have multiplied, and I relish not being able to predict what Im going to hear.
Old aesthetic geographies have lost their meaning, and so has the distinction between establishment and guerilla.
(Now hes working on his second opera for the Met.)
Young Brooklynites pack into National Sawdust in Williamsburg to listen with beer in hand.
Suspicious habitues of Carnegie Hall sample the underground offerings at Zankel.
Devotees of Alarm Will Sound or Yarn/Wire or yMusic follow their favorite ensembles around.
The whole messy scene looks more like the pop world than the preserves of classical music.
Audiences for symphony orchestras have traditionally expected perfect performances of precertified masterworks; greatness is the baseline.
But audiences for new music have a more forgiving attitude: if tonights program disappoints, tomorrows may inspire.
