1987 was a somewhat innocuous year for new music. Neither Orwell nor the Berlin Wall, it straddled the change-years, when the high-rollers of ‘60s and ‘70s European music slowed, gradually uncovering a younger, less stodgy, more disseminated and global avant-garde. Europe as an idea—though it wasn’t sure how yet—was under considerable revision, and the aesthetics of the time were similarly unmoored. (That said, it was a comparatively busy year for American music: the death of Morton Feldman in early fall was chased out of the news by the premiere of “Nixon in China” shortly thereafter, followed quickly by Cage’s unveiling of the first two “Europeras” that December.)
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