A Moveable Feast

by Ronen Givony

Ours is a uniquely exhilarating moment for music. With the ascendancy of Internet culture, there has never been a time like the present, when so many extraordinary artists, and so much of their music, have been accessible to so many listeners. By any conceivable measure, there has never been a greater number of progressive and forward-thinking composers, ensembles, instrumentalists, record labels, concert presenters, and avenues of distribution for new music—never, in a word, such an embarrassment of riches for the motivated and self-starting listener, or for the composer trying to reach that listener. In the 21st century, anyone with the slightest curiosity or hunger for something new can educate themselves to a staggering and revolutionary degree with music from a thousand-plus years of human experience—early medieval to electronic and modern, and everything in between— all in the same weekend, and without leaving their home. As we are told over and over again, anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and a keyboard—either kind—can go from Anonymous to almost famous, at least to 15 people, overnight.

And yet, ours is also a precarious moment for music. For all our abundance of musical riches, we have gained much in the way of quantity, but lost much in the way of attention, patience, judgment, reflection, and gradual understanding. For all the genuinely liberating change the digital century has unleashed, it has also revealed, or reminded us, how often a community of self-segregating and like-minded individuals can resemble a mob. In the 21st century, we can listen to music on our cell phones, our laptops, and our iPods, but we do so in isolation. More to the point, very little of that music sounds the way it would if we listened on our parents’ bulky old speakers, or heard it being performed right in front of us, in a room full of strangers. The Internet has made possible the age-old dream of the infinite library, but it has also led to a steep decline in reading and the number of hours we give over to new and unfamiliar experiences. Most precarious of all, it has called into question the viability of music as a sustainable art form and profession, as a commodity for which its creators deserve to be compensated. In a time of endless information and connectivity, it is not surprising that our relationships, behavior, and culture—personal, political, and musical—have changed with them.

In strictly geographical terms, the distance between West 65th Street in Manhattan and the indeterminate hamlet known as New York City’s “downtown” has remained more or less unchanged since the evening of September 11, 1969, when Alice Tully Hall opened its doors with a concert of music by Bach, Schumann, and Schubert. In aesthetic and musical terms, however, the distance between the two—or rather, West 65th Street and the rest of the musical universe—has crumbled. If only for the sake of context, it is instructive to map the world of music as it existed in 1969 next to the one we know today—the difference being analogous to our conception of the physical world before and after the telephone, or the Internet.

In 1969, the still-emerging sound of rock and roll was scarcely two decades old. Disco, hip-hop, metal, and punk were several years from being born, and “electronic music” existed in only its most primordial shape. It was the year of Woodstock, Altamont, Abbey Road, Tommy, and Bitches Brew; of instant classics by Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Sly & The Family Stone, Simon and Garfunkel, The Kinks, and Creedence Clearwater Revival; and, incredibly, of debut records by Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, The Jackson Five, and Caetano Veloso.

Not surprisingly, it was also a golden age for the business of classical music—of definitive and bestselling recordings by Rubinstein, Gould, Heifetz, Richter, Horowitz, Karajan, Bernstein, and more—when LPs were not only inexpensive to produce, but enthusiastically consumed by a regular record-buying public. In the world of contemporary composition, there developed an exhaustively documented divide between “uptown” or “academic” composers (Babbitt, Boulez, Carter, Wuorinen) and their long-haired “downtown” counterparts (Young, Riley, Reich, Glass).

Meanwhile, among audiences of both popular and classical music, our knowledge of the music that was listened to by the billions of people living outside Europe and North America was, until the Nonesuch Explorer series, primitive at best. To the extent that the worlds of classical and popular music intersected at all, it was, by definition, understood to be a novelty: The Beatles paying homage to Stockhausen on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s or “Revolution 9” from The White Album, for instance, or John Cale and Lou Reed smuggling the drones of La Monte Young into The Velvet Underground.

For better or worse, such a view of the musical universe—as an opposition of autonomous and isolated binaries, segregated by an artificial but impenetrable wall—was reflected in the concerts that took place at Alice Tully Hall during its opening months. Indeed, of the 41 works of music performed over eleven concerts at the hall from September to December 1969, more than half were composed during the 19th century, a third during the 18th century, and exactly four from 1950 to 1969. With a few exceptions, the composers were exclusively German, French, and Russian. With precisely zero exceptions, they were also exclusively men. Of the three new works commissioned by Lincoln Center for the opening of the hall—New People, for mezzo-soprano, viola, and piano, by the American/Canadian composer Michael Colgrass; Variations for Violin and Piano by the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez; and a piano trio by Darius Milhaud—all stand firmly in the tradition of 20th-century European modernism.

By contrast, to anyone who has heard even a few minutes of the popular or not-so-popular music of the last 40 years, the musical cosmos today can only be described as an unruly and beautifully anarchic collision of sound worlds, influences, and vocabularies, with each becoming daily and inextricably integrated, co-opted, and thereby transformed anew. How could it be otherwise? After all, the four decades separating Alice Tully Hall’s inaugural concert and its reopening have produced more music than the previous millennium before it. Not a little unlike her equivalent in 1969, a young composer or listener growing up today finds herself with an impossible and infinite library of music—a century of jazz, blues, folk, ragtime, bluegrass, gospel, Motown, disco, hip-hop, heavy metal, garage rock, punk rock, Krautrock, psychedelia, ambient, house, and techno from every continent and conceivable micro-genre—not to mention a thousand years of classical music before it.

We need look no further for proof of this evolution than to peruse the list of composers, ensembles, and music being presented in just the first two weeks of Alice Tully Hall’s reopening. There is Bach, Schumann, and Schubert, yes, but also Glenn Kotche, a composer and percussionist who draws equal inspiration from Steve Reich, free jazz, and Balinese gamelan, and is best known to many as the drummer of the experimental rock band Wilco; Osvaldo Golijov, who grew up in an Eastern-European Jewish household in Argentina, went on to study with George Crumb, and today approaches the Western canon through the lens of a multi-ethnic and post-racial 21st-century traveler; the 20-plus musical omnivores of Alarm Will Sound, whose programs leap effortlessly from medieval and Renaissance music to Ligeti, Birtwistle, and the cut-up electronics of Aphex Twin; Los Angeles singer, songwriter, and composer Stew, whose band The Negro Problem once released an album called Post Minstrel Syndrome, and whose hybrid rock musical Passing Strange won him a 2008 Tony Award; local boombox symphonist Phil Kline, who once set the Pentagon poetry of Donald Rumsfeld for a cycle of art songs, along with the unorthodox amplified string quartet known simply as ETHEL; North Indian sitar master Ustad Shujaat Khan performing with the producer Karsh Kale, pianist Vijay Iyer, and bassist Jonathan Maron; and, not least, Steve Reich, whose Four Organs once incited a Carnegie Hall audience to respond (in the words of Harold Schoenberg) with “yells for the music to stop… as though red-hot needles were being inserted under fingernails.” Today, Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians—for this writer, the defining work of our time in not only contemporary concert music, but also the foundation of modern electronic dance music and techno as well—forms the centerpiece of March 3’s marathon New York, New Music, New Hall program.

Although we have built no shortage of firewalls to distinguish them, it takes not more than a few minutes of listening to discern that only artificial social constructions today separate the world of “new music” from the similarly outdated terms of “rock,” “electronic music,” and so on. In the same way that an iPod set to shuffle makes no distinctions or value judgments between the music of Claude Debussy and Thelonious Monk, say, or John Adams and John Coltrane, or Stravinsky and Deerhoof, so, too, have we learned to question the old orthodoxies and hierarchies. If the Grove dictionary defines “chamber music” as “music written for small instrumental ensemble...intended for performance in a small concert hall, before an audience of limited size,” then what exactly distinguishes music for a small instrumental ensemble in Alice Tully Hall from music for similarly small ensembles on the Lower East Side? In the year 2009, why is a quartet with two violins, viola, and cello called “chamber music,” while a quartet with violin, viola, cello, and laptop is called “indie rock?” More to the point: in the 21st century, why is a person who writes music performed for seated audiences (no matter how small) considered a “composer,” while a person who writes music performed for hundreds or thousands of people standing up considered…something else?

Much as we have tried to police the borders of musical expression by boxing up and categorizing it into genres and zip codes, it is music itself, happily, that has resisted our best efforts. To anyone who has spent time with the music of Morton Feldman and Brian Eno, Steve Reich and Radiohead, Kaija Saariaho and Sigur Rós, Louis Andriessen and Fugazi, Arvo Pärt and Stars of the Lid, Conlon Nancarrow and Squarepusher, Iannis Xenakis and Autechre, or Meredith Monk and Björk, the idea that certain music belongs only in certain environments, for certain kinds of people, and under a certain genre or name, now seems hopelessly and blessedly anachronistic. If ours is the best of all possible musical worlds, it is because we have arrived, after a millennium of music-making, at a true artistic meritocracy—one that is governed not by artificial walls, but rather by Duke Ellington’s immortal maxim: “There are two kinds of music: good music, and the other kind.”

Ronen Givony is the founder and artistic director of the Wordless Music series in New York City.