Worker militancy and avant-garde politics converged in the 1964 Lower East Side scene.

Evidence

Even as the Voice reported a “new militancy” (members of the just-formed Coffee House Employees Guild, supported by one-time Trotskyists Dave Van Ronk and Terri Thal, were picketing two obscure basket houses), the New York Avant-Garde Festival, primarily organized by cellist and New Music devotee Charlotte Moorman, announced that its second edition at Judson Hall would feature the American premiere of Originale by the renowned West German composer and exponent of electronic music, Karlheinz Stockhausen. There would be pickets there too. Among the signs: FIGHT MUSICAL RACISM! — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 555

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s test case: labor organizing in the coffee houses proves the same micro-conditions — cheap rent, dense proximity — that generated aesthetic invention also generated political militancy.