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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the ferment of its immigrant life, a Gershwin who bridged the gaps be–
tween the Broadway stage, the concert hall, Tin Pan Alley, and the opera
house, between pop, classical, and jazz, between the white man's music and
the black man's music.
But Rockwell also shows how the institutional side of New York's
musical life, with its concentrations of commercial power and social snobbery,
could become "intractably conservative." On the classical side, a few agents,
concert managers, and recording executives long exercised a virtual
dictatorship, with "audiences and impressarios focused firmly on Europe and
the past." During the same period, before the rock revolution, all ofAmerican
popular music was dominated by a "standardized and homogenized vernacu–
lar
culture imposed from Manhattan."
Because of New York's virtual monopoly in recording, broadcasting,
and publishing, Rockwell pays close attention to the city's role in disseminating
culture as well as inspiring it. While New York's power as a communications
center is virtually undiminished today, its creative position is challenged by
other cities that cultivate the arts for many of the same reasons New York
did - as an adjunct to their economic growth, a ratification of their cultural
status, and an adornment to their leisure. In the last quarter of a century, the
universities' growing love affair with the arts and the federal endowments'
faith in regionalism have conspired to spread high culture dramatically
through much of the once-philistine heartland. Some of this is thin and timid
stuff, some real patronage of the avant garde. Still, there are now regional
theaters, dance companies, symphony orchestras, and academic arts pro–
grams scattered all across the United States, catering to a more educated,
more sophisticated, more dispersed audience.
Though reputations are still made in the big city, the cost of living has
driven writers, artists, and performers from New York along with some of
their audience. Though there are said to be some 60,000 artists now work–
ing in New York, the trendy character of the art scene, the endless hunger
for the new, has turned the art world into an investment business, and
transformed some of the art itself from a creative mutation, a marginal en–
terprise, into a fabulously marketable commodity. Meanwhile, the Broadway
theater offers unwary tourists not plays but ridiculously expensive enter–
tainment packages. The culture industry is booming, but creative activity
takes place, as usual, around the edges, in small clubs, tiny theaters, and un–
heralded exhibitions.
New York remains what it has always been, at once exciting and un–
bearable - wonderful to live in and wonderful to get away from. New York
artists have usually survived the intolerable pressures of the city by spending
long periods in other places - in Paris, at Black Mountain, Bard, or Berkeley,
in the Springs, Cape Cod, and Martha's Vineyard - generally in tandem with
other refugee New Yorkers. Wherever they are, they're still trying to get
