Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

New York Dolls.

American punk rock group. Its principal members were David Johansen (b Staten Island, New York, 9 Jan 1950; vocals), Johnny Thunders (John Anthony Genzale; b New York, 15 July 1952; d New Orleans, 23 April 1991; electric guitar) and Sylvain Sylvain (Sil Mizrahi; electric guitar). In a brief and commercially unsuccessful career, the New York Dolls introduced several of the motifs that would characterize both the glam rock and punk rock movements of the 1970s. Like the more successful Kiss, the group members adopted ‘trashy transvestite’ stage clothing and make-up, with Johansen dressed as a parody of Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Musically their sound was a regression to an imagined rock and roll simplicity based around the buzzsaw tone of the twin guitars played by Thunders and Sylvain. Johansen's hoarse vocalizing was buried in the recorded mix designed by Todd Rundgren, the producer of the group's debut album, New York Dolls (Mer., 1973). The group's original compositions veered thematically from conventional romance (Looking for a Kiss) to psychotic states (Personality Crisis). They recorded a second album, Too Much Too Soon (Mer., 1974), before splitting up. Thunders became an erratic participant in the punk scene of the late 1970s, while Johansen re-emerged in the late 1980s as Buster Poindexter, and convincingly recreated the jump band sounds of the 1940s on a series of entertaining recordings.

DAVE LAING

New York Pro Musica Antiqua.

American ensemble of singers and instrumentalists, founded in 1952 by Noah Greenberg. Greenberg hoped to resurrect, by means of scholarship and convincing performances, the then largely neglected music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and early Baroque. Pro Musica developed a large repertory and achieved high standards of virtuosity. Among its artists were Shelley Gruskin and Bernard Krainis (recorders), LaNoue Davenport (recorders and viols), Judith Davidoff (viols), and the singers Bethany Beardslee, Charles Bressler, Jan DeGaetani, Jean Hakes, Russell Oberlin, Sheila Schonbrunn and Robert White. The ensemble created a sensation in the 1957–8 season with its production of the medieval liturgical drama The Play of Daniel and in 1963 with The Play of Herod, both of which opened at the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These works were recorded, televised and performed on the group's tours, which included performances at various European cathedrals (1960), at summer festivals (1963) and in the USSR (1964). The group's office served as a library, research centre and rehearsal studio. Major financial and artistic support came from Lincoln Kirstein and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. Pro Musica was one of three performing organizations (with the Juilliard Quartet and the New York PO) chosen to inaugurate the opening of Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center.

After Greenberg's death in 1966 Pro Musica continued until 1974 under the direction of John White (1966–70), Paul Maynard (1970–72) and George Houle (1972–4), its final performances including Marco da Gagliano's Dafne. Many members of subsequent American early music ensembles had trained with Pro Musica musicians, and their audiences had been created by Greenberg's pioneering efforts. Pro Musica's library went to SUNY, Purchase, its archives to the New York Public Library and its collection of instruments to New York University.

JOHN SHEPARD/RICHARD FRENCH

New York School.

A loose confederation of painters, sculptors, dancers, composers, poets and critics based in New York from approximately 1947 to 1963. Art historians apply the term to a group of artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and others, who collectively established the style of American painting known as Abstract Expressionism. Musicologists apply the term to a group of composers, including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and David Tudor, who shared many aesthetic values with these artists, and in some cases formed deep friendships and synergies with them.

The group of New York School composers, however, was larger than the ‘circle of Cage’. Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe also belonged to the group, serving as mentors and teachers; Lucia Dlugoszewski, a Varèse student, had her compositions first performed by New York School artists; and Ralph Shapey attended some of their gatherings. The group often met at the Cedar Tavern or at The Club (39 East 8th Street), where Cage delivered several lectures, including his celebrated ‘Lecture on Nothing’ (1949), and Varèse presented his ‘Music, an Art-Science’ (1950). Cage and Motherwell co-edited the Abstract Expressionist journal Possibilities, and Cage wrote essays for another of the group's journals, The Tiger's Eye. Varèse contributed an interview to Possibilities, as well as a page of the score of his unfinished Espace. Feldman's seminal essay ‘Sound. Noise. Varèse. Boulez’ appeared in The Club's official journal It is (no.2, 1958, p.46). While Cage, Feldman, Brown and Varèse all painted in an Abstract Expressionist style, as composers their ties to the New York School painters varied. Cage admired the improvisation methods and the non-hierarchical, ‘all-over’ surface of their paintings, yet he disliked their heroic posturing and the autobiographical impulses behind their work. He preferred to link himself with Marcel Duchamp and the dada movement, not to Pollock. Brown's open-form procedure in such works as Twenty-Five Pages (1953), Available Forms I (1961) and Available Forms II (1961–2) owes a great deal to the improvisation method in Pollock's ‘drip’ paintings, yet owes just as much to the mobile sculptures of non-New York School artist Alexander Calder, or to the non-narrative writings of James Joyce. Feldman's connection to the artists was perhaps the strongest. He wrote: ‘the new painting made me desirous of a sound world more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore’ (‘Autobiography’, Essays). His reliance on psycho-automatic instinct and his concern with abstract physical essences derive directly from Philip Guston, Rothko and his other painter friends. He composed soundtracks for Hans Namuth's documentary films Jackson Pollock (1951) and De Kooning (1963) and titled works in homage to painters and poets of the group, including For Franz Kline (1962), Piano Piece (to Philip Guston) (1963), Rothko Chapel (1971) and For Frank O'Hara (1973).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveA (D. Anfam, ‘Abstract Expressionism’)

D. Ashton: The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York, 1973/R)

L. Alcopley: ‘The Club’, ISSUE: A Journal for Artists, no.4 (1985), 45–7

M. Feldman: Essays, ed. W. Zimmermann (Kerpen, 1985) [incl. ‘Autobiography’, 36–40; ‘Give my Regards to Eighth Street]’, 71–8

S. Johnson, ed.: The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts (New York, 2000)

STEVEN JOHNSON, OLIVIA MATTIS