Kyle Gann was a music critic for the Village Voice from 1986, and Music Downtown collects ninety-two essays from a total of about five hundred that he filed between then and about 1998. A preface provides background to the author's relationship with the journal, followed by a substantial introduction, ‘The Importance of Being Downtown’, which sets out the themes of many of the pieces to follow. These are organized as seven groups, the first one and the last two in the familiar journalistic forms of interview, concert review, and obituary, while the remaining four are essays grouped under headings: ‘Music and/versus Society’, ‘Musical Politics’, ‘Aesthetics’, and ‘Reflections on Books, Figures, and Events’. Stylishly produced by the University of California Press, the book's cover carries endorsements from Robert Ashley, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Evan Ziporyn, and Robert Fink. The cover renders all names as lower-case letters, suggesting hip modernity and the world of rapid e-mail and text messaging. However, the Village Voice appears to insist that its name is accompanied at all times by the ‘registered’ symbol, ®. And there may be something in that: ‘free’ some of this musical scene may be, or think it is, but capitalism is always there to insist on its dues.

When reviewing essay collections, it is usual to allow for the diverse nature of the material gathered, seeing titles and organizing devices as attempts at unity where none was evident at the time of commission. No such strategy is needed here: true to its title the book is an extended study of ‘downtown’ music, the idea of such music, and the effect of seeing the musical world in light of that idea. Thus it is important to know exactly what is meant by the term ‘downtown’, and, for this purpose, the introductory essay is exemplary in setting out history and explanation: I suggest that anyone planning to publish a reader on twentieth-century music would be well advised to consider its reprinting. For the purpose of definition the introduction (11–14) spells out what needs to be scrawled on the palm before entering the examination hall: 1 (1960) conceptualism, 2 (1970) minimalism, 3 (1980) free improvisation, 4a (1990) post-minimalism, 4b totalism. The other thing that needs to be mastered is a three-part structure (at 2–4), that sets out schools of musical production and thought, envisaged as a progression south through Manhattan: Uptown, Midtown, and Downtown, always in capitals. Midtown music refers to composers writing in traditional forms for real instruments, such as orchestras. However, the book tends to suggest that the key relationship is really a dichotomy or choice between Uptown and Downtown: pop fans should perish the thought that these have anything to with Billy Joel or Petula Clark.

Uptown music does very badly in the book as a whole, to the extent that the reader wearies of the onslaught. Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter, in particular, are given short shrift, Babbitt being the butt of jokes. Gann is robust, but also honest in admitting that his particular dislike of such music is partly a reaction to the education that he received as a composer. Despite this, happily if incidentally, he has continued to write music, a selection of which can be both seen and heard on his interesting website. Another target for his forthright criticism is the Pulitzer Prize for composition, which he sees as having been awarded to the wrong sort of composer. The word Uptown encapsulates a number of alternative epithets, all carrying the sense of arid composition supported only by institutional goodwill: ‘academic’ is one for sure, though Gann seems to enjoy lecturing on Downtown music and does spend a fair bit of time in the book on various campuses; more surprising was the word ‘European’ used in disdain (‘tell the European tradition to go to hell’, 17), which seemed to indict a vast region and its people. The reader should not underestimate the length to which Gann is prepared to savage Uptown music in this way: at one point the Third Reich is mentioned (137) and elsewhere a bizarre analogy is made with Ireland's relationship to ‘England’ (141). A pungent command issued against both ‘Europeans and music professors’ is ‘fuck ‘em’ (88).

On the other hand, Downtown music is a term elastic enough to include music as diverse as the conceptual music of La Monte Young, the minimalism of Philip Glass, the free improvisation of John Zorn, and, in a final phase, pieces of music by composers like Mikel Rouse and Gann himself. While Gann is quick to remind us that improvised music is quite distinct from jazz, and that we should be upbraided for assuming otherwise, free improvisation nevertheless seems to be the odd one out. One also thinks of Downtown music as inhabiting lofts and galleries as much as concert halls, and Gann turns out to be sceptical when orchestras do finally succumb to performing pieces by the Downtown gang (132–4). Downtown music comes over as a close-knit community, and Gann seems a dependable and trustworthy advocate: his book can hardly be faulted in that respect. No doubt if one spends so much of one's life devoted to the cause, hyperbole may follow: La Monte Young ‘has earned an unshakable position in the history of music’ (213), he claims, but time will tell. Or else Richard Taruskin will. Taruskin, who was writing for the New York Times at this period, might appreciate the attention Gann pays (88–9) to the spoken accent that surrounds the presentation of classical music even on American radio, in case Brits thought that they had the copyright on posh English accents as the mellow speech equivalent of the classics.

Of course, there is always the question – familiar to any regular reader of the music's equivalent British defenders, The Wire, and quite unknowable in the present – of whether the music to which he so diligently attends is actually any good. (Witness Maria de Alvear, at 68–9: ‘to be a bad composer you have to go through the shit of being bad’.) I hadn't heard of many of the works Gann refers to, and it's a failing, I think, that the book doesn't convey to the reader much about what the music is like in any detail: we read (138) that Gann understands the activity of music analysis as having been too concerned with pitch over other musical elements. As a result the book really is made up largely of ideas about music, political considerations, cultural debates. If anything, the composers Gann meets come over as being more like visual artists prepared to mix their artistic media, and rather self-obsessed. Yoko Ono's marvellously egomaniac comment – ‘the other part of me thinks it's very hard to keep on being me’ (28) – is, one suspects, the tip of an iceberg, and, by and large, one would rather read an essay by Carter or Babbitt than listen to these intrepid explorers of the self.

Gann is also committed to music's being in close contact with a wide audience, though here one wonders about the position of so-called popular music as such, carefully left out of the ‘up, middle, and down’ schema. At page 9 the wettest of modernist dreams – ‘the suspicion that there is a large, untapped new-music audience out there’ – is based on Gann's experience of giving a lecture and ‘being mobbed by people asking me where to get those CDs’. The composers interviewed find euphemisms for popular – vernacular and commercial – but delivered with a venom similar to that hissed towards Uptown music. Adorno's boring old ‘torn halves’ are never far away from these dilemmas, and Gann is quite aware of the danger in dichotomy (79–81). No doubt there are complex issues here: Gann is both approving and disapproving of written scores (180, for instance), and it may simply be that the Village Voice already had Robert Christgau and others looking after pop and rock music. It does mean, though, that quite a lot of so-called ‘left-field’ pop music, which I suppose in New York City might include Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, John Cale, Lou Reed, and David Byrne, is left outside Gann's purview. And there are grey areas: Christgau has ‘consumer guide’ entries for Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, after all, while Gann also covers Laurie Anderson. In the end, though, I'm left wondering if rock music did what some, certainly not all, of the Downtown composers were trying to do. The word vernacular is interesting too, and perhaps worth further exploration. H. Wiley Hitchcock appears on the cover, and ‘vernacular’ was a term that helped structure his excellent Music in the United States,Footnote ¹ one of the series of histories published by Prentice-Hall, where the term also carried the sense of separation from Europe and was part of a canny narrative that prepared the way for Charles Ives, who then becomes the starting-point for the tradition Gann trusts will end Downtown (Gann twice recounts the story of Ives toning down the Third Symphony in order to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947).

Gann's critique of multiculturalism (clearly presented at 97–9) is interesting, seen through the bureaucratic matter of commissioning funds diverted to minority groups: women, people of colour. It all seems rather laboured when set next to hip-hop's ready airing of debates in the African-American community, or the easy and impressive assertiveness of rock-based figures like Patti Smith or Ani DiFranco. It's fair to suggest, in fact, that Gann's experience of concert-going appears often to be a rather joyless thing: writing about this music can make him think of Haydn, and one sometimes wishes that, as a kindness, the Village Voice had sent him to see Annie or Cats, so that he could go home whistling a tune.

External political issues were still to some extent relatively localized during the period that Gann's collection covers: for instance, funding allocated by the National Endowment for the Arts stirs up controversy in a way that an outsider might find hard or dull to follow. Nevertheless, external politics were to hit New York's downtown with a vengeance on 9/11, and it's heartening to read Gann in the Village Voice immediately afterwards, solicitously reporting on his musical friends. Whether Downtown music's practices have altered since is hard to gauge from the book – unfortunately perhaps, for the attack surely brought questions of ‘world music’ and multiculturalism right onto the doorstep.

Music Downtown is mostly for devotees, I suspect, but nonetheless a good book for those interested in the musical politics of composition at the twentieth century's close, depicting a relatively small musical world at war with itself. The book's introduction is required reading. One small criticism: it would have benefited from a closing discography, perhaps of the kind that Greil Marcus or Jon Savage so generously provide, a kind of ‘idiot's guide’ to records and resources. While I can safely claim to be part of Gann's generation, pinned down precisely (134) to those born in the small period of 1954–9, and to share many of the contours of development he describes, I was one of many who found more musical promise and fulfilment in the many different kinds of music that were being sent to Christgau in another office.