New York City’s downtown music scene contained multitudes. Underground, electric, protean, subversive: How do you write the history of something as fluid as that? It’s been said that you can trace its origins to Soho’s first intermedia loft concerts, organized in 1960 by Yoko Ono and Lamont Young and presented in Ono’s unpainted, unheated, two-thousand square foot Chambers Street loft. Then again, in 1959, Ornette Coleman’s two-week residency at the Five Spot had heralded the birth of free jazz, signaling what Coleman called the shape of jazz to come. If we locate the downtown sound in punk rock, then we could point to early 1972 as a signal moment, when the New York Dolls played Tuesday nights at the Mercer Arts Center, or to the spring of 1975, during a double residency by the Patti Smith Band and Television at the club CBGB. Perhaps 1978 was the year, when the Mudd Club began programming punk/New Wave/No Wave music, visual art, queer theater and performance art, and DJ-ing/dancing, all under one roof. Or did “downtown” coalesce in 1987, when the Knitting Factory opened on Houston Street, drawing in musicians from across the downtown scene and becoming a hotbed of cross-genre improvisation, collaboration, and experimentation?
Manhattan’s late twentieth-century downtown music scene was a congeries of creative circles with different genealogies—circles that overlapped with each other and with downtown theater, dance, writing, visual art, and performance art. Each musical cohort abided by its own principles and practices, but downtown’s ethos of experimentation led artists to interact fluidly, forming new alliances and mitigating genre distinctions in the process. Restless exploration, a refusal of stylistic norms, and a skepticism toward the bastions of commerce and high culture: these are a few of the themes that ran through the downtown music scene as a whole.
The Downtown Collection documents this complex music scene through collecting materials related to the creative and professional lives of individual artists: unreleased audio and video recordings; musical scores, charts, and sketches; and personal papers. The collection also includes ephemera such as concert programs and flyers, which testify to the scene’s musical boundary-crossings and its intermedia character. There are oral history interviews as well as plenty of concert video footage made by artists and other observers of the scene, and there are full runs of local publications–underground press and concert calendars, for example–that covered the music scene. (Some of these publications are also available in digital form through the main library catalog.)
Below are links to three books that give greater context to this history. They are accessible to all NYU students.
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- Hermes, Will. Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever. Macmillan, 2011.
- Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
- Piekut, Benjamin. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. University of California Press, 2011.
Image credit: Poster for Butch Morris with Sheng/Skyscraper, CONDUCTION®, Bowery Poetry Club, New York City, 2003. Fales Library.