Cisco Bradley’s The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is an encyclopedic chronicle of a twenty-six-year period of cultural history, between 1988 and 2014, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, one of the most mythologized neighborhoods in recent New York City history. Beginning in the 1980s, so the mythology goes, Williamsburg’s cheap and plentiful postindustrial real estate enticed artists and musicians from Manhattan to set up do-it-yourself (DIY) spaces where they created new kinds of art, music, and performance. In 2005, the New York City Council rezoned the neighborhood, converting three decades of accumulating cultural capital into a massive influx of financial capital and triggering a wave of evictions and new construction; in 2023, an average studio apartment in Williamsburg rents for $3,800/month, and every venue included in Bradley’s study has closed. As he cogently summarizes, what happened in Williamsburg is a story of “class and racial tension and of acute financial struggle placing working-class Brooklynites, artists...
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Spring 2024
Book Review|
April 01 2024
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, by Cisco Bradley
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront
, by Cisco
Bradley
. Durham, NC
: Duke University Press
, 2023
. iv, 388
pp.
Theodore Gordon
Theodore Gordon
THEODORE GORDON is Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College, City University of New York. His research connects experimental music, critical organology, and science and technology studies. His first book, The Composer’s Black Box: Cybernetics and Instrumentality in American Experimental Music, is under contract with the University of California Press. He performs and improvises with the Buchla Music Easel and the viola.
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Journal of the American Musicological Society (2024) 77 (1): 233–236.
Citation
Theodore Gordon; The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, by Cisco Bradley. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2024; 77 (1): 233–236. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2024.77.1.233
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