Composers like Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions became more European than the Europeans, and insisted that great American music could only be a continuation of the European tradition - primarily, the 12-tone tradition. The burgeoning American scene was forced underground by the avalanche of famous Europeans, and the post-war era from 1946 to 1960 was a period of intense absorption of continental aesthetics. As soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933, composers like Schoenberg, Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Krenek, and Weill made a bee-line to America, along with hundreds of lesser-known musical emigres. It is difficult to remember at this point that, prior to World War II, America had a thriving compositional community with its own distinctly non-European aesthetic, spearheaded by Henry Cowell, John Becker, Carl Ruggles, George Antheil. Although Downtown music is very difficult to generalize about and Uptown music not much easier, let me attempt to draw out some basic differences. Does that mean that Reich and Glass became Uptown composers? Not at all. Today, the works of Reich and Glass are performed at Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera. Young, Terry Riley, and especially Steve Reich and Philip Glass began performing music in Downtown lofts that was meditative, trance-inducing, and fully notated. The first ambiguities began when conceptualism begat minimalism. In this early phase, differences between Uptown and Downtown music could hardly have been clearer. This was certainly different from what was going on uptown: formal concerts of modern classical music, written in well-defined genres such as piano concerti and string quartets and performed in formal concert attire. In Robert Watts's Trace, the performers set fire to their music. In Ono's Wall Piece, for example, performers would run and hit their heads against a wall. Many of the early performances were by the Fluxus group. Ono's loft provided a big, open space conducive to non-traditional modes of performance. Before 1961, concerts in New York all happened uptown, in the Lincoln Center area. The first season there was curated by La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield. How did Downtown music start? In 1961, Yoko Ono (still an obscure conceptual artist, six years away from meeting John Lennon) offered her loft in Soho for concerts.
I could say Downtown is a state of mind, but musicologically speaking, it's actually a rather well-defined performance practice. There are even occasional downtown composers in Europe, such as Maria de Alvear. There are Downtown composers all over America: Henry Gwiazda in Morehead, Minnesota Art Jarvinen in Los Angeles Peter Gena and Don Malone in Chicago Pamela Z and Carl Stone in San Francisco. But while "Downtown" music refers to music that gets played in downtown Manhattan, not all of that music comes from New York. "Downtown" refers to downtown Manhattan, below 20th Street (I'll pick that as an arbitrary boundary since the Kitchen, an important Downtown performance space, is now on 19th Street). But since the Uptown/Downtown distinction is little acknowledged or understood, the discrimination is allowed to persist. If these composers were black, or women, or Jewish, there would be a public outcry.
I will argue, further, that Downtown composers are victims of widespread discrimination. In fact, I perceive a deep bias against Downtown music on the part of the Uptown classical/academic establishment, one which I will document below. In this article I would like to define what I consider Downtown music, and defend my allegation that deep and pervasive differences between Uptown and Downtown music still exist. I have been accused of drawing a dichotomy between them that doesn't really exist or else used to, but does no longer.
In fact, I have been accused of unnecessarily exacerbating tensions between "Uptown" and "Downtown" composers. I have been much identified with what is called "Downtown" music. The Uptown Prejudice Against Downtown Music Differences between Uptown and Downtown Musicģ.
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