Crossing the Divide

Selling modern music as pop culture.

Those who believe in the  historical necessity of stuffy behavior in the concert hall will be alarmed by recent developments at Miller Theatre, the main auditorium at Columbia University…  Since 1997, the artistic director of Miller Theatre has been a youngish impresario named George Steel.  His programming ideas have caused a lot of talk in the music world, and the bigwigs at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall are watching him closely…  

Popular music, these days, is awash in new technologies but short on new ideas.  People who grew up with punk and indie rock, in particular, haven't found much to like in the latest products of the pop-music monolith, which range from the bubblegum pop of the Backstreet Boys to the bubblegum rebellion of Eminem.  Rebels of a certain age have discovered that the electric guitar is not the only instrument that can make a subversive noise.  Walk into a store like Kim's or Other Music, in the Village, and you will see sizable sections devoted to twentieth-century classical music.  Morton Feldman snuggles next to Mouse on Mars.  Another sign of the times is Kid A, the monumentally eerie new album by Radiohead, one of whose tracks could pass for an organ work by Olivier Messiaen.  That song was playing the other day at Virgin Records at Times Square, and if the d.j. had segued into Feldman's Rothko Chapel no one would have noticed…

The real issue, though, is not how music should be presented but how it should be chosen.  Contemporary music in New York was long dominated by militant camps—the 'uptown' twelve-tone composers versus the 'downtown' disciples of John Cage.  The Miller's programming zigzags freely across this now meaningless divide.  The season opened with two complete Reich concerts, the downtownest of them all.  A week later, the Ensemble Sospeso, which has lately emerged as one of New York's best and brightest new-music groups, paid tribute to Louis Andriessen, the Dutch minimalist.  The program drew a hip crowd by including a video short by the indie filmmaker Hal Hartley, entitled The New Math(s).  Andriessen's score showed a turn from hard minimalist beats toward a kind of ambient lyricism.

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