first things first
Happy July 4! It is very, very hot in DC. We were in Canada last weekend, but now we’re back to the swamp, which the president is filling with his tanks as I write this. Oh well.
I’m wrapping up one final “research push” of the book; I spent a couple days in New York recently at two archival collections, the K. Robert Schwarz papers and the Lincoln Center archives, taking a gigantic batch of pictures. These were the last archives I planned to visit for the book (although who knows, that can always change!). The KRS papers have a ton of valuable contextual info for Bang on a Can and new music, as Schwarz was an important critical voice in the period I’m writing about (I’ll write more about him here soon, I think); the LC stuff is necessary given that I devote a chapter to Bang on a Can’s partnership with Lincoln Center in the mid-’90s. The archivists at Queens College and Lincoln Center were hugely helpful; archivists are the best. I made several hundred scans of what I saw (thanks, FineScanner!) and am sorting through the material now, OCRing everything and taking notes in Scrivener. Here’s one cool thing:
Yes, a couple decades before serving on the Pulitzer jury that awarded Kendrick Lamar, David Lang wrote a piece called Dope Beat with a rapper named Life.
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That’s probably not making it into the book. What is the book, anyway? I’m not going to bore you with an abstract or, god forbid, the proposal. Here’s the short blurb I have on my website:
Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace. Under contract with Oxford University Press. In progress.
Launched by three young composers in 1987 as a grassroots new-music festival, Bang on a Can has since expanded into a non-profit with a multi-million dollar budget that supports contemporary music. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and reception history, this study examines Bang on a Can’s intersections with different institutions––including the academy, the orchestral world, the record industry, and arts funders––in order to argue that new music in the United States turned decidedly towards the marketplace in the 1980s and 1990s. My project offers new insights into the role of institutions in the production of culture; the relationship between funding sources and aesthetic developments; and the transformation of the arts in the United States during the close of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism.
It’s easier to explain by talking about the structure, which is the thing I’m trying to hold together in my head, and continually re-explain to myself to make sure it makes sense, anyway. Industry traces a chronological arc from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, following the three composers who founded Bang on a Can — Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe — as they complete their academic training, start a music festival that produces 12-hour marathon concerts, and grow it into a major force in contemporary classical music in New York and beyond. Their story serves a broader argument — the central thesis of the book — that there was a historical turn among new music’s composers and institutions towards the marketplace in the 1980s and 1990s. (To simplify extremely: towards a broad audience, and thus away from the existing, circumscribed academic/uptown/specialist and experimental/downtown/communal scenes; you are welcome to send me “but you’re wrong!” emails but you will need to read a good swath of the book to understand why I think this argument works).
That argument is augmented by how I see this one organization fitting in with a patchwork of new-music institutions that are also turning the entire apparatus of U.S. contemporary music towards the marketplace; Bang, then, is a microcosm of a larger situation. Each chapter is structured around a different institutional context with which Bang on a Can intersects: the academy (Yale), the orchestral world (the New York Philharmonic’s Horizons festivals), festivals (Bang’s early marathons, and New Music America), funding (Bang’s funding situation amidst the Culture Wars and NEA cutbacks), ensembles (Bang’s All-Stars), presenters (the aforementioned Lincoln Center partnership), and record labels (from indies like CRI to majors like Sony). All of the body chapters except for the Lincoln Center one are now written. (I still need to write my long introduction and conclusion sections too.) Progress!
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Okay, that was a lot. If you made it through those paragraphs, thanks! This newsletter will sometimes be that, and sometimes be ramblings about my writing process, sometimes off-topic junk I read about on Twitter, sometimes dog pics. We’ll see. I got the idea from a conversation with journalist/editor Andy Thomason a couple days ago, who has his own excellent newsletter documenting the process behind writing what looks to be a fascinating new book. I used to blog a long time ago, but that seems like an odd endeavor for this project, and no one reads blogs anymore anyway (I wrote a whole section in my dissertation conclusion about that). I don’t teach in the summers, and I have research leave this fall (for which I am extraordinarily, extraordinarily grateful), which means that I’ve got a lot of book work to do, not a lot of day-to-day accountability, and a lot of ideas stirring in my head that might be worth making semi-public.
So this is a way for me to update friends, family, and strangers about what I’ve been up to — especially since I’m not doing too much tweeting these days, and not writing that much for the public (so I can work on this book!). So at the very least you’ll know from this weekly-ish newsletter that I’m staying busy, doing something that *I* think is important. Hopefully if you read it you’ll learn something about new music, too! I’m hoping that if folks get interested in what I write here, they’ll stay interested in this project, and maybe even buy the book when it comes out, or at least tell their library to get it.
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