New York school
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters and musicians who formed a loose coalition in the 1940's and became very active in the 1950s New York City. Critics suggest that their work was a reaction to the Confessionalist movement in contemporary poetry as well as a poignant message regarding their generation's perspectives on life through poetry, the canvas, and music.
Poets:
Poets most often associated with this group are John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Barbara Guest, Kenward Elmslie, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler. There are also commonalities between the New York School and the earlier Beat Generation poets active in 1940s and 1950s New York City. Poets associated with this distinct group are Jack Kermac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Herbert Huncke. Their poetic subject matter was often light, violent, or observational, many times describing why their generation was so 'beaten down' or fatigued, while their writing style was often described as cosmopolitan and world-traveled. The poets often drew inspiration from Surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movement, in particular the action painting of their friends in the New York City art circle.
Artists:
Painters most often associated with the group are Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Joe Brainard, Mark Rothko and to a lesser extent Grace Hartigan, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. These artists shared the belief that one should be physically enveloped within their art work and each tried to depict their concepts of the necessary or essential aspects of art. A description of Jackson Pollock's work by Alfonso Ossorio, National Gallery of Art, appears to characterize the artists of the New York School: (He has) "broken all the traditions of the past and unified them, . . (he has) gone beyond cubism, beyond Picasso and surrealism, beyond everything that had happened in art...his work expressed both action and contemplation".
Composers:
The term also refers to a circle of composers in the 1950's who orbited around John Cage: Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and David Tudor above all. Their music paralleled the music and events of the Fluxus group, and drew its name from the Abstract Expressionist painters above. What brought these artists together was a faith in the liberation of the unconscious and an excitement drawn from the street energies of Manhattan. These composers broke away from the traditional specificities of earlier classical music to attempt to use all methods of sound and silence. Their compositions became flexible to the point of not specifying instrumentation, scoring or parts. Their philosophy appeared to place the musician and the listener into important creational positions, thus veering away from the passive acceptance of the composer's directions to an active contributor to an interpretive musical style. For example, John Cage would modify traditional instruments, i.e. the piano, so that the instrument would produce sounds aberrational to the traditional pianoforte but in line with the sound production for his pieces. He also would write in periods of silence to be as important as the notes and rhythms of the compostion. John Cage's philosophy of giving each musical sound and silence equality in significance hints at the composer's link to Zen Buddhism and the I Ching philosophies. Flexibility was the key for participants of the New York School and they portrayed music as life as being in a state of flux with a beginning and an end.
Books
- Statutes of Liberty, The New York School of Poets, Geoff Ward, Second Edition, 2001
- The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, Donald Merriam Allen, 1969
- An Anthology of New York Poets, Ron Padgett (ed.) and David Shapiro (ed.), 1970
- Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters, Marjorie Perloff, 1977
- The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, David Lehman, 1998
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