Talk:Downtown music

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Thanks for the compliment, whoever gave it, but I didn't coin the term "Downtown music" - it was coined when I was a child. I was hired in 1986 by the Village Voice to come in and cover a movement that had already been thriving for a quarter-century. Kylegann 28 June 2005 15:26 (UTC)

Actually, as I recall it, use of the term "downtown music" when referring to the avant garde music scene in NYC in the early 60's was in contrast specifically to Columbia University's Group for Contemporary Music concerts at the McMillian Theater. That venue was way uptown, on the Columbia campus.

The Columbia Group specialized in the highly serialized music of Babbitt, Carter, and others in the Columbia sphere.

Jim Tenney, Phil Corner, Malcom Goldstein, Christian Wolff, and others in the Fluxus scene in lower Manhattan gave loft concerts and at the Judson Church (I think some of Phil Corner's Judson concerts from the 60's are now on CD) in the Village. The contrast between the Columbia crowd and the downtown crowd became quite obvious early on, so the sobriquet "downtown" stuck, as in "Where's the concert? uptown or downtown".

You also have to realize that the Uptown/Downtown bifurcation of NYC was everywhere, mostly because of the North/South nature of Manhattan and the subway signs that forced you to go one way of the other (unless you were going east to Queens or Brooklyn). Eventually, "downtown" defined a whole music, but it started out as a destination point on the D train. Richard Friedman June 26, 2005