Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice

By Kyle Gann

Book Overview

This collection represents the cream of the more than five hundred articles written for the Village Voice by Kyle Gann, a leading authority on experimental American music of the late twentieth century. Charged with exploring every facet of cutting-edge music coming out of New York City in the 1980s and '90s, Gann writes about a wide array of timely issues that few critics have addressed, including computer music, multiculturalism and its thorny relation to music, music for the AIDS crisis, the brand-new art of electronic sampling and its legal implications, symphonies for electric guitars, operas based on talk shows, the death of twelve-tone music, and the various streams of music that flowed forth from minimalism. In these articles--including interviews with Yoko Ono, Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, and other leading musical figures--Gann paints a portrait of a bristling era in music history and defines the scruffy, vernacular field of Downtown music from which so much of the most fertile recent American music has come.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520229827
• ISBN13: 9780520229822
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 333 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.0"