“The wilting three-story building in Greenwich Village that houses the 13th Street Repertory Company creaked and groaned as its artistic director, Joe Battista, gave a tour of its theater one afternoon in July. The Repertory opened in 1972 and is one of the oldest Off Off Broadway theaters in New York. Mr. Battista walked past its 65 tattered seats and onto its stage. … According to theater lore, Williams stood downstage right shortly before his death and proclaimed that the future of American theater was not on Broadway, but in small playhouses like 13th Street. The building’s cellar is believed to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Mr. Battista, 63, then pointed to the stage lights and made a dramatic gesture with his hands. ‘Theater is dangerous,’ he said. In the Repertory’s musty lobby, the building creaked loudly. A man in his 60s with white hair…

Henry Cow

“Clive Bell, an early friend of Henry Cow in Cambridge who would develop into a gifted improviser in his own right, recalls the presentation of a new work for piano by Roger Smalley, the composer-in-residence at King’s College, Cambridge, during their time there in the late 1960s. It began with the composer drawing complex mathematical diagrams on a blackboard for several minutes. ‘And then he went over to the piano and played this completely wild piece that might as well have been totally improvised, as far as I was concerned,’ Bell recalls. ‘I just thought it was kind of hilarious, that all these diagrams led to this flailing, Cecil Taylor freak-out.’ Bell’s experience represents an increasingly common one for listeners of his generation, especially those rooted in the recording-intensive traditions of African American music such as jazz and rock ’n’ roll. His ears moved transversally across relatively distinct…