Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice

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.