Downtown Music
Bringing the Dawn In #4
“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.” —Jean-Michel Basquiat
Space & Time
When considering the existence of the arts, the word we often center is “why”: Why is something “good” or “bad”? Why do we connect (or fail to connect) with certain works? Why was this work created? This frame overlooks an equally important set of questions – the “how”. How do the arts exist? How are we to differentiate across mediums, when those lines are blurred further every day? How are they to be ontologically organized? It’s difficult to get inside someone’s head – to understand their own connection to what they’re seeing. It’s an easier task to consider how the arts exist before the brain turns stimuli into firing neurons, before the eyes and ears turn light and sound into electrical signals.
In my view, the arts can broadly be categorized by the dimension in which we perceive them across: namely, space or time. Some of the arts exist primarily across the first two dimensions – up & down, side-to-side – like paints & photography. Introduce the third dimension – forward & backward – and you get sculpture. Subtract the third dimension, add the fourth dimension – time – and film emerges. Re-introduce the third dimension for dance and theater. And within the fourth dimension on its own lies poetry, literature, and music.
Artistic mediums that exist in the spatial dimensions – the first three – are reducible to the fundamental unit of the atom, and evolve across the myriad particles that give them shape. One painting differs from another based on what atoms lie above it, to the right of it; the organization of materials across the physical plane. Zooming out from the atomic level, this difference is perceived by the eye by the shapes, colors, subjects, materials, etc. Viewing and understanding these arts is not constrained nor defined by the length of time with which they are viewed. Rather, the time it takes to process a piece of art is a secondary function to how the piece uses its constrained sense of space. These arts exist, physically, tangibly; our eyes wander up and down and across and forward and backward. At times, we can directly interact with them through touch or smell or taste in addition to sight.
The arts that evolve throughout the fourth dimension, time, are those that are given context, shape, meaning by what occurs before and after any specific moment. Their fundamental unit is the split-second, an immeasurably small sense of the present, something which we simultaneously are experiencing infinitely yet cannot comprehend; as soon as we grasp what is occurring in the right now, it is in the past. One piece of music differs from another because of its development over time, and engaging with a piece of music demands a specific exchange of time. Just as it is mechanically impossible for me to reduce a painting down to an atom, I cannot reduce a piece of music down to any specific moment: the context of space is required for the understanding of a painting, and the context of time is required for the understanding and perception of a song.
Of course, you can also broadly categorize this split as the difference between the visual and the aural. But this definition is limiting. It defines our relation to art specifically through our eyes & ears, through those fleshy bits of organ and tissue that protrude from our skull, all things we can live without, all things with which a piece of art will live without. This approach of dimensionality, then, seeks to remedy the rather clinical nature of this sensation-based definition by linking our experience of art with our experience of the most basic, undeniable realities of the universe: space & time. You can go deaf, you can go blind, but you cannot stop the turn of the clock or the spin of the globe.
I’ve always been drawn to the arts that try to do so anyway. Broadly, this is the aim of postmodernism: questioning what we assume to be true, rebelling against values we have been told are innate, breaking the laws of physics. Key works of postmodern art seek not only to disrupt the mediums in which they primarily live within, but also to question the physical definition of these mediums themselves. Two postmodern works that I find particularly fundamental are Marcel Duchamp’s The Fountain & John Cage’s “4’44””. Duchamp questions spatiality: what objects, what bundles of atoms, constitute art, and who decides? Cage, temporality: what sounds, what collections of nanoseconds, constitute music, and – similarly – who makes that definition?
Duchamp reasons that the definition of art is just a semiotic circle – we say something is art, and thus it is so. Cage does something similar, but instead of a pissoir, instead of something that exists in spatial reality, he looks at time itself, constraining it, naming it. Its existence as “music” is actually in its absence, and it’s telling that he titles the piece by its duration rather than by its (lack of) sensory information.
Minimalism
Much of Cage’s work broadly falls within the minimalist movement. Another category, another definition. Sorry. Thankfully, this descriptor, incorporating a wide array of post-neoromantic music from primarily American composers. Kyle Gann, one of the leading writers about American experimental music, describes two of the aesthetic markers of minimalism as phasing & additive processes, though this is hardly an exhaustive framing of the movement.
Phasing is a technique innovated by Steve Reich, in which interlocking instrumental lines are set to different tempi, or given different starting points, and thus the lines come in and out of “phase”. Not dissimilar to the way chord progressions have dissonance and consonance in pitch, phase music emphasizes dissonance and consonance in rhythm. His 1967 composition “Piano Phase” is a prototypical example of this, though “Music for 18 Musicians” is perhaps his best-known work.
The so-called “additive processes” can also be understood as loops, especially evident within the work of Philip Glass. To steal directly from Gann, the general form of additive music is to “play phrase A, repeat it and add phrase B… so eventually you build up a form A, AB, ABC, ABCD, ABCDE.” Gann specifically references Glass’ “Music in Fifths”, but a large portion of Glass’ oeuvre is concerned with looping & additive phrasing – my favorite of his works is the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, though as a multi-hour opera, this work moves beyond solely working with loops and additive phrases.
Although the entire medium of music is given meaning by its existence on the temporal plane, minimalism, understood through the lens of postmodernism, is the school that most directly challenges (or at least, consciously comments on) this ontology. Phasing directly deals with our understanding of time by introducing multiple tempi or temporal frames of reference to a piece. Looping music distorts our sense of time by creating repetitive structures, then directly altering them, drilling a certain phrase in your mind until it is given quasi-tangibility, and then shattering the structure by introducing new, often contradictory, elements. Other branches of minimalist thought similarly seek to reject the bounds of time: beyond Cage’s aforementioned “4’44”, he’s also responsible for works like “As Slow As Possible”, a performance of which began at a church in Germany in 2001 and will finish at some point in the year 2640. Drone music, pioneered by artists like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Tony Conrad similarly looks to distort the time constraints around music by sustaining individual notes or clusters instead of creating meaning through moving notes and phrases. The “minimal” of “minimalism”, then, is about stripping music down to its most basic form in order to emphasize and directly address the relationship between our perception of sound and our perception of time.
Downtown Music
Beyond the inherently punk nature of rebelling against the flow of time, I’m also drawn to this kind of music due to its role in the evolution of the American avant-garde, and later, the evolution of American rock music. The Velvet Underground – who’s song “Sunday Morning” inspired this radio show – was influential in a number of ways, but first and foremost, their mix of avant-garde styles with rock & roll created space for popular culture to have an experimental edge. The Velvets were far from alone in creating this; Andy Warhol’s entire Factory scene explored the elevation of “low arts” into “high arts”, the transmutation of Downtown to Uptown.
The relationship between New York rock music and avant-garde music cannot be understated. The idea of “Downtown music” was used widely in the music press throughout the 60s and 70s to refer to not only the music of the minimalists (Glass, Cage, Reich, et al), but also performance artists like Yoko Ono, creating a dichotomy between the “Uptown music” found at Lincoln Center – the institutions of the high arts (opera, orchestra, ballet) – and the styles found in the lofts, theaters, and clubs of Lower Manhattan. And of course, Downtown Manhattan through the 60s, 70s, and 80s is arguably responsible for a significant chunk of American popular music styles: folk music (Bob Dylan), glam rock & hard rock (Lou Reed), punk (the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop), New Wave (Talking Heads)... the list goes on.
This geographical nomenclature is simultaneously reductive and illuminating. Reductive in that it flattens wide swaths of Manhattan-based musicians, poets, performance artists, composers, and writers into one umbrella. Illuminating in that by that act of flattening, we’re given an explicit web of influences across these scenes. It’s unlikely that Philip Glass and Lou Reed crossed paths, but John Cale – another founding member of the Velvet Underground – worked with La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, a minimalist/drone collective: the Velvet Underground’s music makes great use of Cale’s droning viola, elevating tracks like “Heroin” from brilliant art rock to brilliant performance-art-as-rock. In her memoir Just Kids, Patti Smith notes the melting pot of postmodernists she’d see attend her plays & performances: William S. Burroughs at CBGB, Warhol at La MaMa, Salvador Dali & Harry Smith at the Chelsea Hotel. And of course, venues like Max’s Kansas City also acted as an incubator for the Downtown avant-rock scene, eventually spitting out the synth-punk pioneers Suicide, who in turn influenced Glenn Branca, who led the furious charge of the No Wave scene (along with performance artists & musicians associated with Z Records), a significant alliance in-and-of-itself between 80’s punks, nihilistic poets, and disco queens… But I’m getting away from the point. The degree of separation between the avant-garde and rock music in this era was nonexistent; in many ways, postmodern thought across a variety of disciplines laid the groundwork for the most significant and lasting developments in popular culture throughout the mid-late 20th century into today.
When peers today bemoan the death of the New York music scene, I think what they’re really missing is the lack of serious cross-pollination across different avant-garde disciplines, and the (relative) mainstream acceptance of that synthesis. Of course, part of this equation also relates to the non-existence of a serious, institutional avant-garde “scene” in the city today. The reasons for this are myriad: dramatically inflated cost-of-living has altered the material reality of living in New York (and made it all but an impossibility without some sort of steady job), a pandemic brought the music industry to its knees, the music industry itself has brought the act of music creation to its knees, the Internet has – for better or for worse – driven creative communities online & permanently altered the manner, rhythm, and way that information is exchanged. Largely, the current New York music scene is filled with reruns and revival acts: synth-pop duos, shoegaze kids, Strokers, and DFA heads. Until the postmodern avant-garde is once again able to take the driver’s seat in cultural production, we’ll likely be stuck in the infinite loop of trend cycles for the foreseeable future.
Sunday’s Programming
Ostensibly, this piece was supposed to be some sort of introduction into the music I’m programming for my show this coming Sunday. Instead, its primary aim is, apparently, in classification & hierarchy. Does x composer belong to this scene, or that one? What genre should we call their art? What falls beneath it, what lies above it? These questions are all important, but should constantly be interrogated for their utility. There is purpose in naming these hierarchies: the creation of the arts is an inherently communal practice; it is impossible to avoid influences from those who have come before; nothing is made in a vacuum, and generating these sorts of semantic networks is an exercise in drawing lineages of influence. Additionally, the temporal/spatial classification, and its relation to postmodern art, provides us with a useful framework to understand and evaluate the role of postmodernart, and hopefully provide some sort of matrix to use when evaluating minimalist music especially.
As this essay has hopefully alluded to, I’m taking a different approach with regards to the curation at my coming show this Sunday, December 10th. Instead of selecting tracks and records around a theme, I’m programming two minimalist compositions that we’ll listen to in their entirety.
The first piece will be a 1974 performance of Julius Eastman’s Femenine. Eastman is a minimalist composer, active & frequently in the same circles as Glass, Reich, & the other aforementioned minimalists. Notably, though, Eastman was a gay, Black man. He did not experience remotely the same level of success as his contemporaries. I encourage you to read Mary Jane Leach’s liner notes for the LP here – which provid
e a far more rigorous biography and contextualization of this recording than I could – and feel free to borrow my copy of the record during the listening session this Sunday if you’d like to read them then instead.
The second piece will be the 2021 composition Promises by the electronic composer Floating Points and the jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, performed by the two & the London Symphony Orchestra.
Beyond the two pieces broadly belonging to the minimalist movement (or post-minimalist, considering the date on which the latter composition was released), they also share immediate aesthetic similarities: both pieces are primarily built around a repeating phrase which loops throughout the entirety of the work. Feminine is built around a driving percussive line, Promises around a mystifying piano & synth line. Across both of these works, I encourage you to internalize the repetitive loops. Let them become second nature, easily recallable over the course of the piece; the shape and structure of the works lie within what occurs in response to the repeating phrases, in the subtle improvisations that serve to uplift or shatter the repetitions. If minimalism deals with the physical nature of time, then fall prey to the hypnotic nature of these works; fall out of time.
Wow this was insightful 👏