As the competing orthodoxies of Uptown and Downtown music fight their endless war of attrition, composers are increasingly finding their way outside, to the freer climes of Lower Midtown Music. The Look & Listen Festival, which takes place this weekend at the Robert Miller Gallery on West 26th Street, exemplifies the Lower Midtown sound at its best: accessible and uncompromising, populist and antisocial, fiendishly complex and instantly hummable, ethereally sublime and grindingly hot. OK, I’m making all that up, but the programs for Look & Listen do seem to offer a fine cross-section of freethinking New Yorkish music. Durable classics like Meredith Monk’s Book of Days, Steve Reich’s Four Organs, and Feldman’s Structures (for string quartet) share space with fresh thoughts by such promising youths as Judd Greenstein (not Judy) and Mark Dancigers. eighth blackbird, SO Percussion, the Lark and Daedalus Quartets, and the NOW Ensemble participate. Monk delivers a keynote speech on Thursday, and various composers will speak on panels. You can read all this for yourself.