Conference Agenda

Fifteen years after Vaughan Williams moved to London, he began drafting a composition inspired by the city. A London Symphony (1914) incorporates sonic references to the urban environment, including Big Ben, vendors’ cries, and Music Hall tunes. My paper focuses on these sonic markers and their prominence in the work’s critical reception, arguing that A London Symphony cannot be divorced from London’s material, industrial, and environmental realities.

The sonic references to city life, as discussed in Vaughan Williams’ essay “Who Wants the English Composer?” (1912), were all variously intertwined with resource-extractive industries. The inclusion of Big Ben’s chimes, for instance, conveyed more than a London locale: its aural reference to standardized timekeeping indexed urban industrialism, railway expansion, and London’s dominant position in Britain and its Empire (Pye 2017). The symphonic evocation of the River Thames implies similar connections to material economies: by the time Vaughan Williams moved to London, the river was heavily industrialised and dangerously polluted, and a series of embankment projects cemented the river’s industrial character. Further, the London sounds Vaughan Williams singled out were predominantly produced by members of social classes lower than his own, whose lives were circumscribed by labour in contact with the resources needed to power London’s infrastructure— resources on which Vaughan Williams himself depended.

Grounded in contemporary histories of transportation, trade, and extraction, my reading adds nuance to prior understandings of the work, by highlighting the tensions surrounding Vaughan Williams' own relationship with London’s cityscape and his attempt to confront both the city’s busy energy and the changes wrought by industrial-capital development over time (Atlas 2023; Frogley 2012, 2024; Grimley 2024). Situating the symphony within London’s environmental and extractive histories and emphasizing its imbrication with resource — both human and material— recontextualizes Vaughan Williams’ own understanding of the city and his place within it (Onderdonk 2013; Saylor 2022). My goal is to offer insights into the entanglement of music-cultural and socio-economic conditions, reframing the production and reception of Vaughan Williams’ symphonic cityscape as both created and heard alongside public awareness of the resource extraction practices of national and colonial development.

In 2017, the ACLU threatened to sue the city of Chicago, as it was on track to pass a restrictive bill that would severely limit street musicians from performing in the downtown “Loop.” Though the city has vacillated on these regulations since the early 2000s, these recent debates are so contentious because they directly target a group of young, Black drummers from the Englewood neighborhood that perform on five-gallon hardware buckets: the Chicago Bucket Boys. This group spans hundreds, who typically self-identify through their unique “sound” and their mentorship network that calls on young drummers to make a “positive dollar” with their music. And while many Chicagoans refer to the Bucket Boys as local celebrities and “the face of Chicago,” others describe them as nothing but droning “noise,” rejecting their connection to the city and sparking grassroots campaigns to make changes to the city’s noise ordinance and mobilize the police on the Bucket Boys.

This project uses these ongoing debates to demonstrate how these struggles contest much more than just regulations of “scientific” measures of sound (e.g. regulation of decibel levels of frequency bands). Instead, through interviews with Chicago street musicians, audience observations, and a historical mapping of noise ordinance enforcement, this project argues that struggles surrounding where the Bucket Boys can spread their liberatory “sound of a positive dollar” are also struggles surrounding who is able to be included in the “image” of the city and who has access to the city’s public spaces. While music scholars have been historically removed from debates surrounding noise ordinances, this project uses previous work in acoustemology, acoustic territories, and sonic placemaking to demonstrate how music scholars can enter these conversations and promote new ways of imagining city sound regulations that resist weaponization and retain the “public” in “public spaces.”

The "downtown scene" in New York City is difficult to define, and cannot be characterized as a cohesive community of musicians and composers with similar interests or aesthetic qualities that might tie their music together. Instead, the musical world downtown has historically existed as a network of music scenes. The various communities often overlapped as artists, musicians, and dancers associated with these adjacent practices crossed over to collaborate with each other. In practice, downtown composers were generally involved in the performance of their own music, while uptown composers generally maintained the composer/performer distinction, handing off their music to be performed by others. By the 1980s, the predominately white musicians downtown, working under the guise of “experimentalism,” shifted to be more inclusive of any and all idioms, including but not limited to jazz and free improvisation, noise music, garage rock, blues, and classical composition, an approach that distinguishes the downtown scene during the 1980s and 1990s from its prior incarnations. Most notably, jazz music has been recognized as the major influence on downtown music since the 1980s. Around 1980, the predominitely white, Cage-influenced musician/composers downtown largely embraced Black modes of improvisation. Musicologist George Lewis notes a general shift away from stark delineations between historical conceptions of white and Black experimental musical practices here. In this paper I examine the socio-political relationships between the various musical communities in lower Manhattan during the last two decades of the twentieth century, both how they have diverged and intersected. This includes but is not limited to the loft jazz scene, the DownTown Ensemble, and the communities surrounding the likes of John Zorn and Butch Morris.