another chapter done!
The Lincoln Center chapter has been laid to rest!
Last dispatch, I outlined my writing process step-by-step — in the time since then, I completed steps 5 and 6, printed a full draft, and did a careful read-through. I’m done with this chapter, for now; it will require a lot more editing down the road, but it’s in the same solid shape as most of the other body chapters. Time to move on to writing my intro and conclusion.
In the final writing steps, the central thrust of the Lincoln Center clicked into place. Each of my chapters has been structured to have a "this chapter reveals" sentence, all of which fit into the larger book argument about new music's marketplace turn. Some academic books will have a specific and different “I argue” in every chapter; what I decided for this project is I’ll have One Big Book Argument, and each chapter adds something or “reveals something” a little bit different in it. Lincoln Center is the second-to-last body chapter of the book, so I'm thinking very carefully about how each chapter intro (and contents) adds some new layer or wrinkle or historical development to the One Big Argument. As of right now, I'm happy with how that worked out in this chapter — here’s an excerpt from the intro:
And this was not a one-off: for the second half of the 1990s, Bang on a Can held many of its New York concerts at Lincoln Center, as part of the center’s embrace of contemporary music under the direction of administrator Jane Moss. The partnership emblematized a new development in new music’s marketplace turn: in the 1990s, some of classical music’s most mainstream organizations turned to contemporary work in the hopes of reaching new audiences. Whereas the Philharmonic’s Horizons festivals of a decade earlier had been prompted by the outside organization Meet the Composer, Lincoln Center’s embrace of the new was entirely of its own volition, after the center had witnessed the appeal of grassroots organizations like Bang on a Can as well the enormous success of a more established rival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music. New music’s marketplace stance had been a rhetorical position promoted by advocacy organizations like Meet the Composer, a goal of upstart organizations like Bang on a Can, an ideology held by composition professors at Yale, and a necessity of the diminished landscape for public arts funding. Now, it would be held by administrative leaders at one of classical music’s most powerful institutions.
That’s still rough-ish writing — I use the word “organizations” too many times. But it does what I want it to. The penultimate sentence essentially telegraphs each previous chapter as a signpost (wow, that is a horrible mixed metaphor) towards the big picture —"a rhetorical position promoted by advocacy organizations like Meet the Composer," is Chapter 2, "a goal of upstart organizations like Bang on a Can," is Chapters 3 and 5, "an ideology held by composition professors at Yale" is Chapter 1, "a necessity of the diminished landscape for public arts funding" is Chapter 4.
The actual writing of each chapter has given me a slightly different take on my One Big Argument, which is why I've saved the intro & conclusion for last. It's pretty normal in the academy to write the intro first, which is often based on a book proposal, dissertation proposal, etc—but I've found that I really need to fully understand the bulk of the thing itself before fully grappling with the implications of the argument. Otherwise, it's all too easy to let your argument guide your evidence, rather than your evidence guide your argument. I think of all my theses/arguments as placeholders—useful for thinking, useful for proposals, useful for applying to conferences, useful for shaping what I'm researching—until most of the thing is written. Fortunately, the general gist of my book's argument has basically remained the same since I first came up with it in 2017 or so, but it's incalculably nuanced and sharpened in the two years of writing since then, and components of it have fallen away as I've realized that they weren't actually supported by my findings.
I've got a few tasks ahead of me, and the big one next will be writing the introduction chapter. For now, though, I'm leafing through existing chapters to compile a list of questions for various “exit interviews” of sorts: returning to people I’ve already talked to, or some new interviewees, to get clarity on areas where I still don’t quite feel like I have the whole story. On Saturday, I’m heading up to MASS MoCA for Bang on a Can’s second-ever media workshop, where I’m co-faculty with the great John Schaefer; it’ll be a weeklong immersion in Bang on a Can’s ongoing summer festival with four awesome writer fellows, who will be writing pieces for WNYC’s website daily about what they see and hear. John and I will be coaching and seminar-ing with them. It was a lot of fun last year — links to all of the writing from those students here! — and I’m pretty stoked. It’ll also be an opportunity for me to conduct some of those aforementioned interviews.
This year, the summer festival culminates in a new endeavor, the LOUD Weekend, a three-day Big Ears-style festival with a stellar line-up. This will have to make it into my book conclusion (which briefly traces Bang on a Can/U.S. new music from 2000 to the present), because it seems to have replaced not only the annual summer marathon that typically takes place at Mass MoCA, but also the New York marathon too — there was no New York marathon this year, which is a rarity in Bang history. (There have been a few years that skipped the marathon in the past.) TBD if this indicates a broader shift away from the marathon format for Bang! (I don’t have any insider knowledge on that front.)
I’ll hopefully send a dispatch from the media workshop next week, perhaps about what’s going on there. John and I assigned a bit of homework to the four writers in advance — they all needed to write a concert review, and read some recent-ish criticism we recommended. Since I’ve just been reading it too, and thinking about why I think it’s good writing, here are a few thoughts on that.
Ann Powers on Joni Mitchell in 2018
This is just such a good piece of criticism: it has a central theme that comes back, again and again, without seeming overbearing and instead continually shedding new light on the artist. It feels like an example of total critical mastery: when you attend a concert already knowing more about the artist than anyone else in the room, and your reflection exudes that body of knowledge (without seeming pedantic!!). A single concert becomes a data point in an all-encompassing biography. (Powers is currently writing a Mitchell book.) My favorite criticism is, in essence, educational: it gives the reader something new to listen for in music they’ve never heard, or music they know well. It’s both a tribute to Mitchell and a reflection on the concept of a tribute, and it becomes about everything, too (“Have you held your grandmother's hand as she gamely goes for a step?”).
Tim Page on Bang on a Can in 1987
As far as I can tell, there were only two reviews of the first Bang festival — Page’s in Newsday, and Bernard Holland’s in the Times. Both are super fascinating for my research, and Page’s review is also a great piece of criticism unto itself. It’s an ideal mixture, providing a big picture overview of a marathon concert as well as very tight descriptions of individual pieces, giving a really strong sense of “being there” along with a broader reflection on “what it all means.” It also weaves in information that Page got from interviews, making it the kind of hybrid feature-review that is especially useful for a historian like me— it’s got some of the earliest quotes from the directors about Bang on a Can. (David Lang saying “We have global aspirations”!!!!). Music criticism is incredibly, incredibly important for historians, and this kind of writing is, I think, among the most useful kind.
Georgia, alas, is not coming to Mass MoCA :(