Kyle Gann's update to the Uptown/Downtown distinction.

Today I was trying to find a 1998 article by Kyle Gann which describes his idea of uptown vs. downtown composers, to back up some points in my thesis about being inclusive and eclectic as a composer. I found that he’d added an update from last year which is a really liberating read for someone like myself, who finds it difficult to deal with art music’s insistence on fencing itself off from the world.

The whole article is here, but I found this last bit particularly inspiring:

“The way I look at it today is this: Generally speaking, a composer is someone who has learned dozens and hundreds of things that you’re "not supposed” to do in a piece of music. The more trained a composer is, the more prohibitions he tends to carry around in his head, and, the more prohibitions he can rattle off, the higher he tends to float upward in academia and the classical establishment. (For instance, I read recently that a nice composer I like “breaks the taboo against using pre-modern gestures”; I was never aware there was any such taboo. And one of my students was recently told by two composition teachers that he shouldn’t write music with a steady beat: “it’s not sophisticated.”) During a certain historical period, from around 1960 to maybe 1995 or a little later, the composers who didn’t acknowledge all those prohibitions found themselves a scene together in about a half-dozen spaces in lower Manhattan. In part, that scene is no longer there; some of the spaces have moved or ceased to exist; the younger composers who come in now seem to be a heterogeneous bunch about whom it is difficult to generalize. The attitudes I discuss above remain very much with us, I’m afraid, but it is no longer so easy to predict where one will encounter them - or where one might suddenly find oneself freed from them. And indeed, some of the excesses of the Uptown years are now so obvious that they have become difficult to defend as rigidly as they once were. John Adams and Steve Reich have won Pulitzers; the Grawemeyer remains impervious.

It is sad when an artist becomes an artist by internalizing a long list of prohibitions. An artist should be a positive person whose imagination can freely concoct possibilities no one had ever thought of before, and use whatever means are necessary to bring those possibilities to life. Clearly one of the things that’s been wrong with “contemporary music” for a long time now is that composers are less concerned with what they can create than with all the things they’re not supposed to do, all the chords that seem too naive, all the melodies too hummable, all the forms too obvious. Every composition becomes a chain of evasions, an ungenerous process of withholding from the listener anything he might naturally expect, an embarrassment about anything too easily understood. Some composers - quite a few composers, in fact, though in the minority - get the problem with this, and the Downtown spirit is still out there, and still derided by the elitists and sophisticates. But the composers who have that Downtown spirit no longer have their geographic center in Downtown Manhattan, and so we lack a term for the ethos some of us envision.“