This talk examines correspondences between the innovations of the New York School composers (John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff) and those of the painters and sculptors they associated with in the post-war downtown art world. While issues of structure, frame, representation, indeterminacy, surface, abstraction, action, and modularity interested both groups, differences between the composers’ temporal medium and the artists’ physical media led to various partings of the ways as the apparent cohesion of the downtown art world ended in the 1960s, this reflecting broader societal changes as well.

Jeff Perry has been a member of the music theory faculty of the School of Music at Louisiana State University since 1994. Prior to that he taught at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Duke University. He holds degrees in composition from Princeton University and the California Institute of the Arts. His publications focus on the music of John Cage but also include articles on the music of Mel Powell, Peter Westergaard, Schubert, Beethoven, and Paganini. He is a former editor of Music Theory Online. At LSU he is a Paula G. Manship Professor and teaches in the Honors College and the Comparative Literature program. He leads the LSU in London and Edinburgh study abroad program each summer.