The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts. Edited by Steven Johnson. New York: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-8153-3364-1 (cloth); ISBN 0-415-93694-2 (pbk.). Pp. ix, 258. $95.00 (cloth); $24.95 (pbk.)

The "New York School" refers primarily to the abstract expressionist artists of the 1940s and 1950s, but the term was soon after applied to a contemporaneous group of musicians who had developed social and professional relationships with the painters. The composers Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff, along with pianist David Tudor, were a closely knit group: they met regularly to share ideas and lend support to each other, they produced concerts of each other's music, and for a time they even lived close to one another. In Michael Nyman's Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (New York: Schirmer Books, 1974), Feldman nostalgically acknowledges that the composers shared an aesthetic bond with the artists:

Anybody who was around in the early fifties with the painters saw that these men had started to explore their own sensibilities, their own plastic language… with that complete independence from other art, that complete inner security to work with what was unknown to them. That was a fantastic aesthetic achievement. I feel that John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and I were very much in that particular spirit. (51)