Few things are inferior to Jeff Koons, thank god.

I've hung around with classical musicians for 45 years and never knew one 
who didn't listen to his peers. Even less true of composers, altho 
differences of school do place barriers. At Columbia, where I went to 
school, there were two contemporary concert series', which meant a concert 
every two weeks. One was run by Wuorinen and Solberger and was very much 
post-Webernian, the other more general. Both played whatit considered 
modernist classics as well, including late stravinsky and Copeland, the 
stuff serial stuff that gets left out of the repertoire. The hall was 
always jammed, and a lot of the crowd were musicians and composers. The 
same was true for several other venues around New York, which, despite some 
hype to the contrary, is the conduit for most of US musical culture. Maybe 
there were similar things going on elsewhere. There was certainly a lot 
going on at Hunter College, which among other things staged a huge 
conference on Ives, with dozens of concerts. Again, I was surrounded in the 
audience by composers and musicians.

One of my teachers was Henry Cowell. He included Cage in his modern music 
course--Cowell had been his student. Everybody who composed was aware of 
Cage, and not just the notated stuff. Maybe it was Cage who wasn't listening.

Satie tried an experiment with repetition. He then did other things, as he 
had before.

Here's another case. I (and my composer friends) was an early aficionado of 
North Indian classical music, beginning with recordings of Ali Akbar Khan 
but going way beyond that. The superstar in the States was of course Ravi 
Shankar. Shankar was (is) a serious musician, tho somewhat of a romantic 
for my taste. He comnstantly complained that while the size of his audience 
in the States was gratifying its musical intelligence left something to be 
desired. See, he didn't think he was playing wallpaper, or trance music, or 
endless repetition, or any variety of thing that was good to get stoned to, 
and he preferred audiences capable of the level of pleasure that comes with 
following the thought process.

Back to the 60s and causation. Five things happened simultaneously in the 
States: an enormous expansion of leisure time for the middle class young, 
an enormous expansion of their monetary resources, ready access to drugs, 
birth control, and, because of Viet Nam, a collapse of trust in the State 
and by extension other sources of authority. This last is worth dwelling on 
for a moment. US middle class culture was saturated with remnants of 
pre-red scare populism, but it had been relegated to the home during that 
chill. A lot of quiescent pinko homes had Spanish Civil War posters hidden 
away, for instance, and the Fireside Song Book, which included among the 
spirituals and folk songs Lincoln Brigade and labor movement numbers, was a 
perennial best seller. Folk music remained a form of political  expression, 
as it had been in the 30s and 40s. With the collapse of confidence in 
authority that hidden impulse surged forth, its path lubricated with sex 
and drugs and lots of money. All kinds of repressed returned.

To be young was very heaven.

And of course a momentum of its own resulted.


At 02:19 PM 11/15/2005, you wrote:
><snip>
>A bit further: while a lot of what's being talked about became widely
>broadcast in the 60s, whenever that was, as one who predates the 60s I can
>tell you that a lot of it was already in place.
>[...]
>What changed was the reception--the means of dissemination became more
>democratic.  [MW]
><snip>
>
>Yes. Authenticity isn't self evident and eras certainly don't appear fully
>formed. In the UK, trad and skiffle both predate the 60s, for example: thus
>the father of a schoolfriend, I discovered, had 78s of Blind Gussie Nesbit;
>this in provincial Britain. Satie's musique d'ameublement predates both
>environments and muzak by a great many years. Duchamp, dada et al are
>obvious forerunners. So too, equally obviously, are the situationists. And
>so on.
>
>Identifying the drivers behind quite why so many different things come
>together is, I suspect, more difficult. I don't think, pace Jon, that jazz,
>folk, film and so forth become admissible simply in belated recognition of
>the skill sets involved. Whilst it is true that the means of dissemination
>became more democratic this describes an effect, not a cause. Cage's
>descriptions of classical musicians who had ceased to listen to one another
>or his presentation of pieces in which the conductor simply waved his arms
>about irrelevantly speak of something other than, say, the greater
>availability of cheap broadcasting and/or recording equipment. My guess is
>that other things became interesting out of _need_, in line with different
>social formations.
>
>As to minimalism, again there was something else going on besides (and often
>instead of) auditory laziness. Thus Satie's *Vexations* becomes interesting
>because _simple repetition_ becomes interesting, not because listeners lose
>the will to get up off their bottoms or need their ears syringed. Works by
>Judd and LeWitt, to put that another way, are more repetitious and
>physically less complex than those of, say, Jeff Koons. Though not, I think,
>inferior.
>
>CW