Kyle Gann in some trenchant commentaries on late-twentieth-century music. Gann lumps both “modernists” and “New Romantics” together in the “uptown” category, named for the Upper West Side of New York City, home of Lincoln Center, the Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, and other richly endowed institutions. Downtown composers are those who, in Harry Partch’s words, look for “a way outside”—anti-European, anti-symphonic, anti-operatic. They descend from the free spirits who had long gone their own way on the West Coast. In New York such composers have tended to congregate in
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