In 1967, some months after the publication of Cardew’s article on Young in the Musical Times, Mellers took up the twentieth century where he had left off in 1964. He published a work on “renewal in twentieth-century music” titled Caliban Reborn. It aims to give a “fresh vision of reality” (ix). Here the boundary separating art from commerce in his earlier writings further diminishes: Harry Partch and Cage stand alongside jazz and Eastern music, Stockhausen and Feldman, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The young generation of American composers includes, among others, Harold Shapero and Alexei Haieff, who follow the tradition of Stravinsky and Copland; Milton Babbitt and Mel Powell, who fall under Schoenbergian postserialism; Lukas Foss, an eclectic; and even Seymour Shifrin, who draws on jazz. Young still does not participate in the great march of the twentieth century, regardless of what Cardew and his peers have said of him.8
Also in 1967, Peter S. Hansen published the second edition of his Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music, its scope limited to “those composers who have been most influential in the period” (vi), up to 1964. The names that appear here are Varèse, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Cage. Apart from Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, and Feldman (374–76), no one is mentioned after Cage. That same year Barney Childs, who had highlighted the link between Cage and Young the year before in Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1966, 437), published Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music with Elliott Schwartz (Schwartz and Childs 1967). The collection of essays gives pride of place to experimentalism and that music “in which the performer’s role is enlarged” or that makes use of chance techniques (xv). Nonetheless, it presents no writings or interviews of Young. The composer’s name appears only in the credits, for having first published two essays by Richard Maxfield that are reprinted in the book (349–61, originally in Young and Mac Low 1963), and in an interview with Cage, who confirms his interest—even as he emphasizes the difference between their respective works—for Young’s music (335–48, reprinted from Reynolds 1962, 45–52). Although this homage is not insignificant, the students, concertgoers, and musicians for whom the book is intended (vii–viii) learn nothing more about Young.
Two years later, a pedagogical work by Robert D. Wilder titled Twentieth-Century Music (1969) bespoke the impact that the directions taken by these various authors had on music instruction: in 1969, music ended with Cage, or at the latest with Foss.9 It seems that only Cardew and some of his close associates definitively recognized Young’s qualities. Wilder perhaps sided with Hitchcock, who some years earlier had shown very little interest in the composer’s creations, which to him were devoid of any “shred of novelty” (1962, 245–46).
Indeed, the Dadaist connection that Hitchcock made is precisely what certain critics retained through the second half of the 1960s. Some authors chose this approach to write Young’s name into the history of music. In 1966 Gilbert Chase, who had contributed to The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians two years before, published the second edition of America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. There he continued to postulate that the major styles in American music had taken root outside the concert hall—all the more so for folk and popular traditions. This new edition now included Young, who is mentioned as a member of the “neo-Dadaist” wing of avant-garde music, along with George Brecht and Terry (incorrectly referred to as Peter) Jennings (663).10
In 1967 Eric Salzman published an introduction to twentieth-century music in the Prentice-Hall History of Music Series at the request of the series editor, Hitchcock. The series, Hitchcock noted in the foreword, aimed to give a “panoramic view of the history of Western music” (Salzman 1967, v). He mentioned Young in the context of a movement described as antirational and aleatoric, epitomized by Cage. The essence of these compositions consists in their “lack of identity,” Salzman wrote (168), returning to the views he had expressed in The New American Arts two years earlier (1965). The works “proceed in short, inevitable steps from long sets of meaningless directions for meaningless and useless ‘existentialist’ actions to a kind of ‘neo-realist’ Theatre of Aimless Activity, and then to ‘Happenings’ and perhaps on to meaningless, useless real life” (168). Young’s appearance in Salzman’s volume is tentative and hardly laudatory, but nonetheless it marks the second time in two years that the composer figured in a monograph devoted to contemporary music.
Also in 1967, Peter Yates published a work on the evolution of twentieth-century music “from the end of the harmonic era into the present era of sound”—that is, up to performance art and the experimental tradition that brought up the rear toward the end of the decade. Yates was a critic at the magazine Arts and Architecture. His book, he asserted, did not have a musicological orientation; recounting the evolution of twentieth-century music did not call for the traditional notated examples (xi, xiv). He posed the end of the harmonic era as his premise, citing Young’s just-intonation work as proof. “One of his ‘Dream Tortoises’ ” thus became a ritual experience that was “deliberately unmetrical or out of phase” (247, 248). The piece evoked the Hindu Om, Yates found, and it required the listener, in order to understand it, to let go of all preconceived judgments.
It was Young’s third appearance in an account of twentieth-century American music. In the first, he was quite neo-Dadaist; in the second, quite post-Cageian; in the third, he was a harmonist and a ritualist with a “unique” aesthetic. To the extent that we can rely on these authors, we find that in 1967 Young enjoyed a place in the contemporary music landscape, despite the fact that the nature of his music was still poorly understood. Richard Kostelanetz’s writings, however, would soon shed light on its essence, as we will see in chapter 5.
5. Creating Genres
THE THEATRE OF MIXED MEANS AND DREAM MUSIC
THE THEATRE OF MIXED MEANS
In 1968 Richard Kostelanetz, a critic and essayist who wrote for the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Village Voice, among other periodicals, published the first book in the United States to have an entire chapter devoted to Young: The Theatre of Mixed Means (1968). Kostelanetz linked the New York composer to the latest developments in modern music, as Cardew had done; to harmonic theory, as Hitchcock had done; and to the visual arts, following Barbara Rose and some of her colleagues. But here the connections were superficial. For Kostelanetz, as for Smalley in the beginning, Young’s work was not musical. Kostelanetz’s explanation differed from Smalley’s, however: Young’s work was instead part of “the most interesting recent development in American theatre” (xi). The approach taken by Kostelanetz largely contrasted with what was already known about Young. It did not, however, appear out of the blue, having been elaborated on the margins of the music establishment for almost three years. Since 1965 a handful of theorists had enlisted Young and his music in their campaign to recognize new forms of artistic activity transcending the division of art—from film to music, dance to poetry—in fixed categories. Some dubbed these forms happenings, events, or even new theater. Let us take a closer look at them.
New Theatre
To understand the emergence of Kostelanetz’s concepts, we must briefly turn to the Tulane Drama Review, a mouthpiece for the discipline of performance studies that emerged in American universities in the early 1960s.1 In that journal, Young’s work, snubbed by the American music establishment, found its first theatrical and academic celebration in the United States. It won acclaim from Richard Schechner, who would found and direct the Performance Group some years later, and Michael Kirby, who subsequently joined him.2 The two editors devoted the winter 1965 issue of the Tulane Drama Review to a “new