new sounds forever
And we’re back! While I was away from social media for a couple weeks, I missed the outpouring of anger about WNYC’s dropping New Sounds, one of the most important forums for contemporary music, which has been hosted by the legendary John Schaefer for 37 years. 37 years!!!! THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS.
New Sounds has been so important for so long that it’s hard to believe it could ever go away; like the New York Times or tap water, it seemed to simply exist, a natural part of our landscape. But like fresh water and accountable journalism, it’s more fragile than we might have thought, in our current neoliberal hellscape.
As many have pointed out, this is of course a stupendously poor decision on the part of WNYC, part of a shortsighted corporate strategy to move towards more news and talk radio, one that overlooks the fact that New Sounds is part of what gives the station distinction, local flair, and historical importance. And that people want to listen to music on the radio. If you’re as mad as I am, write to the station: support@nypublicradio.zendesk.com
I’m hard-pressed to think of any single figure who has done more for American new music in the past four decades than John Schaefer. I’m biased, of course, as we work together as faculty for Bang on a Can’s media workshop, but New Sounds shaped how I listen to music, and it probably shaped how you do too, not to mention how those who you listen to actually make music.
Back in the early 1980s, WNYC director John Beck wanted to distinguish its music programming from their local classical-focused competitors, WQXR and WNCN, and decided new music was one way to do so. In 1984, EAR Magazine devoted an entire issue to new music on the radio; an article by Freda Eisenberg details how Beck enacted a “Modern Classics” policy in 1981, in which 20th century music went shot from under 20% of its programming to more than 85% . Eighty-five percent! It stabilized around 65% by 1984; Beck told EAR that the policy brought “more press attention than anything the station has done in ten or fifteen years.” (Read more about all of that here.) WNYC conscripted the critic Tim Page, already a local legend on Columbia student radio for playing Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who launched his “New, Old, and Unexpected” show in 1981; the station revived its American Music Festival, and began live broadcasts from major new-music events like BAM’s Next Wave and the New York Philharmonic’s Horizons festivals; and it hired the young John Schaefer, who launched New Sounds in 1982. Notably, as EAR put it in 1984, “According to the most recent data, the ‘Modern Classics’ policy has not hurt WNYC’s audience size or fundraising efforts.”
A 2000 profile of Schaefer in the New York Times gives a sense of what John wanted to do back in that moment:
''Tim [Page] was interviewing people like Elliot Carter and playing Steve Reich and Philip Glass and I thought: 'Man, this is a really progressive place. But as long as we've gone this far, why not go farther?' '' Mr. Schaefer says. ''I believed there might be a chance to play some stuff that was even a little further removed from the classical canon but was serious music and deserved to be heard. In those days, people like Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, Harold Budd and John Adams didn't get much airplay. These were people whose music I'd stumbled on and thought was interesting and had real substance to it. Pop music stations wouldn't touch it and no classical stations considered it classical music. And that's basically what 'New Sounds' was. The first shows were on Friday and Saturday nights, from 11 p.m. until 2 a.m., so the station's risk was absolutely zero because there was nothing happening. I mean, at 11 every night, we would play chamber music. And at 11 every night, WQXR and WNCN played chamber music. It was just ridiculous.''
John’s vision was remarkable in its time, and it still is. He came up in a moment in which the more radical thinkers in new music were seeing connections across genres, in which experimenters in minimalism, world music, jazz, and rock were drawing closer towards one another, and he captured that spirit on-air. But he wasn’t just reflecting a historical moment. He was shaping it, too: the kinds of connections we make fluidly today between medieval music and West African drumming and Steve Reich are ones that John has been making in his curatorship for decades. (The massive and wide-ranging CD library at WNYC owes much to Schaefer’s collecting.) Some part of the omnivorous musical culture of the present is indebted to New Sounds; most of us listen with ears that John opened, even if we don’t know it.
John was a champion of Bang on a Can in the late 1980s, putting their festivals and composers on-air when they were still young and unknown, and he did the same for many, many subsequent composers, as folks on Twitter attested. (Judd Greenstein RTed many of the tributes.) My dissertation on indie classical — and, really, “indie classical” itself — wouldn’t have been possible without Soundcheck and New Sounds bringing the likes of Missy Mazzoli, Gabriel Kahane, and Sarah Kirkland Snider on-air when they were barely out of school. Not to mention that New Sounds Live, the concert series that John has been doing in New York forever, has been a major platform for new work.
John has interviewed pretty much everyone, and listened to just about every interesting recording that has come out in the last forty-plus years, which lends him a rare long view on developments in contemporary music — that most young composers doing something cool have a historical precedent that they might not even know about. For most folks doing a radio station for 37 years, that might facilitate a kind of cynicism, but John has instead remained open, eager, and committed in lending his platform to young tinkerers.
And the platform is really, really crucial. The reach of New Sounds — the fact that it was on terrestrial radio for so long — is mindboggling. The show came out at precisely the right moment, when a generation of experimentalists like Anderson, Glass, and Eno were in a moment of celebrity but still unfamiliar to many — John brought them new audiences via WNYC (and later NPR), but also used their fame to draw attention to lesser-known names. The fact that, for decades, people have been able to turn the FM dial and come across Tuvan throat singing and postminimalist pulsing and atonal rock—and suddenly become a lifelong fan of music they’d never heard before, and would never have heard elsewhere—is truly remarkable. John gives a great sense of that, in the 2000 profile:
''I thought that this would be a show for people like me who had grown up on rock music, had begun to realize there was a lot of great other music out there and were really sick of hearing All Things Springsteen on WNEW-FM and virtually nothing else anywhere else on the dial,'' he says. ''So I thought we'd be getting in a mostly younger audience of disaffected rockers. To my surprise -- and everyone's surprise -- we started getting letters from retired people. I got a letter very early on from a guy who said that a Japanese record I'd played by Osamu Kitajima had touched him more deeply than anything since Caruso. This guy had been listening to the radio and WNYC for 60 years, and he was no disaffected rocker. I don't know what it is about architects, but it seems like every other letter I get is on an architect's letterhead. And a lot of artists write in and say, 'I have your show on while I'm in my studio at night.' One guy invited me to his show in SoHo and all his paintings were named for pieces he'd heard on 'New Sounds.' And they were really good, too.''
Adventurous music is losing these places to reach beyond narrow niches, places where creative artists are granted access to new and curious listeners, rather than having to painstakingly build audiences by themselves. It’s not good.
Back in 1987, John wrote a book titled New Sounds, based on his show. It’s still a great read, a thematic introduction to new music through its author’s open ears. (John is a fantastic writer.) I don’t have a copy at home, but I do have a bunch of quotes from it on my computer that I’d like to share with you.
First, a couple excerpts from the book’s preface, where John describes the aesthetic project of his show:
The ‘New Sounds’ radio program started in 1982 as a way of showing people that the term ‘modern music’ didn’t necessarily mean the dry ‘honk-squeak style of the music schools.’
….
Though New Sounds covers a wide range of styles, one basic attitude is common to them all: Music must be able to ‘speak’ to its listeners. The most serious among new-music composers haven’t ignored the dry, academic styles of the avant-garde; they have reacted to them by adopting the avant-garde’s musical values, but have chosen to express them in a different, more accessible language. The musical inbreeding that results from writing works that only other avant-garde musicians can understand is not healthy, and fortunately, the trend now seems to be toward expanding the musical vocabulary once again. Increasingly, composers are finding that it is possible to appeal to more listeners without having to compromise their musical standards.
And I’ll leave you with the book’s visionary final paragraphs:
One final point needs to be made about the field of new music—its inclination toward direct communication doesn’t, or shouldn’t, make the music any less serious in its artistic intentions. Since Beethoven’s time, ‘popular’ music has been distinguished ever more strongly from ‘classical.’ But today music like that of Philip Glass is luring rock fans to the opera house, while Scott Johnson, Glenn Branca, and Paul Dresher are introducing that most ‘popular’ of instruments, the electric guitar, to the concert hall. Of course, there is still much resistance on both sides, and while it’s unlikely that any new-music artist will ever achieve the success of the Bruce Springsteens and Michael Jacksons of the pop music world, the attention being paid by both critics and audiences to music that doesn’t stay put in one category or another is an inspiring sign.
All of which raises an interesting question. The next generation of musicians is already growing up on electronics, Minimalism, Windham Hill; and they’re taking for granted the collision of styles that is still often so exotic to us. What will their new music be like? Will they find even more new categories between which to work? Or will they throw up their collective hands in exasperation and mutter: It’s all been done before?
Music has always had the potential for the unexpected, and there’s no reason to think that we’ve exhausted it. As long as life continues to change, the music it shapes will change too. Unable to stay in one place, musicians will have to look forward. Or, they’ll have to look back; even then, the result will be another generation of new music, because, as the song says, “Everything old is new again.”
I’m listening to New Sounds right now; so should you.