Presenting the new: battles around new music in New York in the seventies

Abstract

The 1970s often vanish between a “long Sixties” and a “long Eighties.” Their historiographic disappearing act disguises the fact that they were a time of substantial change in the United States—culturally, politically, economically…and musically. “Presenting the New” traces the intersection of material circumstances and artistic production in New York, home to most of the Seventies’ trends in new music. Through Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I conduct a music-sociological examination of the presentation of “new” music in Manhattan. The use of field theory usefully complicates simple Uptown-Downtown narratives by including the “Midtown” institutions of Lincoln Center and examining overlapping constituencies and attempts by agents of all allegiances to expand their geographic and cultural presence. The paper follows the activities of various figures in New York between 1968 and 1980. Pierre Boulez brought European modernism with him as the new music director of the New York Philharmonic before his eventual, ambivalent departure for IRCAM (and replacement by Zubin Mehta). Charles Wuorinen and Henry Sollberger’s Group for Contemporary Music traded Columbia for the Manhattan School of Music, striving to maintain operations despite shifting support. Steve Reich and Philip Glass moved from presenting process minimalism in SoHo’s lofts and galleries to performing at major venues both “classical” and “rock.” Meredith Monk carved and maintained a particular niche from the intersection of multiple media. The Kitchen—SoHo’s premiere venue for video and performance art—became orderly alongside its neighborhood, growing from impromptu video nights to institutionalized festivals. Along the way, these artists adjusted their modes of presentation to suit their changing audiences and goals. They also adjusted them to the shape of the field of cultural production, which, like the general social and political field, grew increasingly fragmented over the course of the Seventies. From a largely dualistic battle between adherents of Babbitt and Cage, the struggle to define new music shifted to small, loose associations of composers with myriad aesthetic practices. As the essential questions defining the field of new music multiplied, the definition of “new music” itself changed, losing its distinction from both popular and historical practices.