Culture of New York City
has been described as the cultural capital of the world. Its urban culture is reflected in its size and ethnic diversity. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. Many American cultural movements first emerged in the city. Large numbers of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Russian, and eventually African, Latino, and Asian Americans also migrated to New York throughout the 20th century and continuing into the 21st century, significantly influencing the city's culture and image. The city became the center of stand-up comedy in the early 20th century. The city was the top venue for jazz in the 1940s, expressionism in the 1950s and home to hip hop, punk rock, and the Beat Generation. Along with London's West End, New York City is the global center of musical theatre, often referred to as "Broadway" after the major thoroughfare in Manhattan. The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan, is a designated U.S. National Historic Landmark and National Monument, as the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots and the cradle of the modern gay rights movement.
The city is the birthplace of many cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance in literature and visual art; abstract expressionism in painting; and hip hop, punk, salsa, freestyle, Tin Pan Alley, certain forms of jazz, and disco in music. New York has been considered the dance capital of the world. The city is also frequently the setting for novels, movies, and television programs. New York Fashion Week is one of the world's preeminent fashion events and is afforded extensive coverage by the media.
New York has also frequently been ranked the top fashion capital of the world on the annual list compiled by the Global Language Monitor. Artists have been drawn into the city by opportunity, as the city government funds the arts with a larger annual budget than the National Endowment for the Arts, and New York is the center of the global art market, which grew up along with national and international media centers.
Pace
One of the most common traits attributed to New York is its fast pace, which spawned the term "New York minute". Journalist Walt Whitman characterized New York's streets as being traversed by "hurrying, feverish, electric crowds".Department of Cultural Affairs
The Department of Cultural Affairs, a branch of the government of New York City, is the largest public funder of the arts in the United States. DCLA's funding budget is larger than that of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal government's national arts funding mechanism. DCLA provides funding and support services to about 1,400 art and cultural organizations in the five boroughs, including 375 museums, 96 orchestras, 24 performing arts centers, 7 botanical gardens, 5 zoos and 1 aquarium. Recipients span many disciplines, including the visual, literary and performing arts; public-oriented science and humanities institutions including zoos, botanical gardens and historic and preservation societies; and creative artists at all skill levels who live and work within the city's five boroughs. DCLA also administers the Percent for Art program, which funds public art at building sites. In fiscal year 2007, DCLA's expense budget, used for funding programming at non-profits, was $151.9 million. Its capital budget, used to support projects at 196 cultural organizations throughout the city ranging from roof replacement to new construction, is roughly $867 million for the period between 2007 and 2011.Arts
Music
Beginning with the rise of popular sheet music in the early 20th century, New York's Broadway musical theater and Tin Pan Alley's songcraft, New York became a major center for the American music industry. Since then the city has served as an important center for many different musical topics and genres.New York's status as a center for European classical music can be traced way back to the early 19th century. The New York Philharmonic, formed in 1842, did much to help establish the city's musical reputation. The first two major New York composers were William Fry and George Frederick Bristow, who in 1854 famously criticized the Philharmonic for choosing European composers over American ones. Bristow was committed to developing an American classical music tradition. His most important work was the Rip Van Winkle opera, which most influentially used an American folktale rather than European imitations.
The best-known New York composer, indeed, the best-known American classical composer of any kind, was George Gershwin. Gershwin was a songwriter with Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway theatres, and his works synthesized elements of many styles, including the music of New York's Yiddish theatre, vaudeville, ragtime, operetta, jazz and the post-Romantic music of European composers. Gershwin's work gave American classical music unprecedented international recognition. Following Gershwin, the next major American composer was Aaron Copland from Brooklyn, who used elements of American folk music and jazz in his compositions. His works included the Organ Symphony, which earned him comparisons to Igor Stravinsky, and the music for the ballet Appalachian Spring and the Copland Piano Variations.
The New York blues was a type of blues music characterized by significant jazz influences and a more modernized, urban feel than the country blues. Prominent musicians from this field include Lionel Hampton and Big Joe Turner. In New York, jazz became fused with stride and became highly evolved. Among the first major New York jazz musicians was Fletcher Henderson, whose jazz orchestra, first appearing in 1923, helped invent swing music. The swing style that developed from New York's big jazz bands was catchy and very danceable, and was originally played largely by black orchestras. Later, white bands led by musicians like Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman began to dominate and produced a number of instrumentalists that had a profound effect on the later evolution of jazz. Star vocalists also emerged, mainly women like the bluesy Billie Holiday and the scat singer Ella Fitzgerald.
Beginning in the 1940s, New York was the center of a roots revival in American folk music. Many New Yorkers developed a renewed interest in blues, Appalachian folk music and other roots styles. Greenwich Village, in Lower Manhattan, became a hotbed of American folk music as well as leftist political activism. The performers associated with the Greenwich Village scene had sporadic mainstream success in the 1940s and 1950s; some, like Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers, did well, but most were confined to local coffeehouses and other venues. Performers like Dave Van Ronk and Joan Baez helped expand the scene by appealing to university students. In the early 1960s, Baez was instrumental in introducing the up-and-coming young folk artist Bob Dylan to her audience and he quickly achieved national prominence. By the mid-1960s, folk and rock were merging, with Bob Dylan taking the lead in July 1965, releasing "Like a Rolling Stone", with a distinctive, revolutionary rock sound for its time, steeped in tawdry New York imagery, followed by an electric performance in late July at the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan plugged an entire generation into the milieu of the singer-songwriter, often writing from an urban, distinctly New York point of view. By the mid to late 1960s, bands and singer-songwriters began to proliferate the underground New York art and music scene. The release of The Velvet Underground & Nico in 1967, featuring singer-songerwriter Lou Reed and German singer and collaborator Nico was described as "most prophetic rock album ever made" by Rolling Stone in 2003.
Other New York based singer-songwriters began to emerge, using the urban landscape as their canvass, a backdrop for lyrics in the confessional style of poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In July 1969, Newsweek magazine ran a feature story, "The Girls-Letting Go," describing the groundbreaking music of Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Lotti Golden and Melanie, as a new breed of female troubadour: "what is common to them are the personalized songs they write, like voyages of self discovery, brimming with keen observation and startling in the impact of their poetry." The work of these early New York based singer-songwriters, from Laura Nyro's New York Tendaberry, to Lotti Golden's East Village diaries on Motor-Cycle her 1969 debut on Atlantic Records, has served as inspiration to generations of female singer-songwriters in the rock, folk and jazz traditions.
Disco music developed from the funk, soul and jazz of the 1960s, becoming a distinct genre of music, eschewing the raw sound of a four piece garage band and embracing a new technology that employed driving synthesizers with booming a bass drum that defined the disco sound with a steady quarter note beat, or Four on the floor. It was not unusual for producers to contract local symphony and philharmonic orchestras as well as session musicians to further refine the sound. Disco, a musical idiom that was strongly associated with minorities, became a phenomenon in dance clubs and discothèques in the 1970s. Many of the major disco nightclubs were in New York, including Paradise Garage, Danceteria and Studio 54, attracting notable followers from the art world, such as Andy Warhol, the fashion industry like Karl Lagerfeld, as well as socialites, musicians and intellectuals. This tradition continued in the 1980s with Area, Danceteria, and Limelight.
In the 1970s, punk rock emerged in New York's downtown music scene with seminal bands such as the New York Dolls, Ramones and Patti Smith. Anthrax and Kiss were the best known heavy metal and glam rock performers from the city. The downtown scene developed into the "new wave" style of rock music at downtown clubs like CBGB's. The 1970s were also when the Salsa and Latin Jazz movements grew and branched out to the world. Labels such as the "Fania All Stars", musicians like Tito Puente and Celia Cruz and Ralph Mercado, the creator of the RM&M record label, all contributed to stars like Hector LaVoe, Ruben Blades and many others. The New Yorican Sound, differed somewhat from Salsa that came from Puerto Rico, it was being sung by Puerto Rican Americans from New York and had the swagger of the Big Apple.
Hip hop first emerged in the Bronx in the early 1970s at neighborhood block parties when DJs, like DJ Kool Herc, began isolating percussion breaks in funk and R&B songs and rapping while the audience danced. For many years, New York was the only city with a major hip-hop scene, and all of the early recordings came from New York. People like Kurtis Blow and LL Cool J brought hip hop to the mainstream for the first time, while so-called East Coast rap was defined in the 1980s by artists including Eric B. & Rakim, Kurtis Blow and Run-D.M.C. Major New York stars emerged to go on and produce multi-platinum records, including Puff Daddy, Jay-Z and The Notorious B.I.G., along with acts like Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, Big L, and Busta Rhymes.
New York is also one of only five cities in the United States with permanent professional resident companies in all of the major performing arts disciplines: The Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, and the Public Theater. The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, actually a complex of buildings housing 12 separate companies, is the largest arts institution in the world. It is also home to the internationally renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center. Other notable performance halls include Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
With nearly 8 million people riding the city's subway system each day, New York's transit network is also a major venue for musicians. Each week, more than 100 musicians and ensembles – ranging in genre from classical to Cajun, bluegrass, African, South American and jazz – give over 150 performances sanctioned by New York Transit at 25 locations throughout the subway system.