Young himself was among the issue’s contributors. There he presented “Lecture 1960” (Young 1965), the transcription of a talk he gave at a summer workshop held by the choreographer Ann (now Anna) Halprin. It consisted of a series of commentaries on his early works, in particular—for example, Composition 1960 #5, with the butterfly (see sidebar 2). Published in the form of an article in a university journal, Young’s lecture enabled the academy, to whom the talk was now addressed, to assess, through the artist’s own words, the theatrical nature of his so-called word pieces.3
Neither the lecture nor Kirby’s introduction to the issue explicitly made an aesthetic connection between Cage, the word pieces, and Young’s interest in continuous sounds (which had drawn Hitchcock’s attention; see chapter 4). The connection was at most implicit: it was in 1960, during Young’s theatrical or Cageian period—Cage having, in effect, authorized “any activity or event” to be part of a concert (Kirby 1965, 25)—that Young had confirmed his turn to “extended sounds.”
Nor was the link between “any activity or event” and Young’s “extended sounds” what interested Kirby and his collaborators. In their writings, Young above all fit within the framework of the “new theatre,” which, we read, shook up the relation between performer and audience and integrated the work in its environment.4 For Kirby, Young’s 1960 Compositions, conceived in the form of instructions, primarily highlighted the interpretative act and the performer’s relation to space and audience. When Susan Sontag mentioned Young in the same journal two years later,5 she translated his aesthetic in the same way: in terms of the recent idea, in theater as in cinema, of art as an act of violence, reversing the audience’s former passive relation to the work (1967, 37).6 Kostelanetz confronted the New York composer’s work in a similar vein.
“Cisum”
Earlier on, however, Kostelanetz understood Young’s work differently. Indeed, in 1965, as the editor of The New American Arts, he advocated a more strictly musical approach to Young’s work: that of Salzman, the composer and critic assigned to the chapter on music. Salzman had already mentioned Young’s music in hardly complimentary terms in the New York Times (1961). In his chapter for the 1965 anthology, although he included Young among the representatives of a “new American art,” Salzman did not revise his opinion: Young’s work was a pathetic successor to that of Cage, who himself only told “90 tiny funny stories” on his recording Indeterminacy (Folkways 1959). Such works, Salzman asserted, were “non-music music [that] takes everything that music does and does it backwards” (1965, 261).
Although highly critical of Young, Salzman offered an argument linking the composer’s work with Cage’s aesthetic of sound: “Where music may be defined as an organization of sound, a piece of ‘cisum’ may consist of non-sound or silence;7 where a piece of music would be a finite event in time, there are compositions which imply an indeterminate or possibly infinite length; there is even a piece which consists of two notes with the direction: ‘Hold this for a long time.’ ” Thus the link between the Cageian silence of 4’33” and Young’s Composition 1960 #7 was formed.
Toward Another Theater
Although Kostelanetz sided with Salzman’s musical ideas in 1965, soon after he chose a different path, one mapped out in particular by those who defended a theatrical conception of Young’s work. Just one year later, Kostelanetz published an article in the theater section of the monthly magazine Art Voices in which he rehabilitated Young’s aesthetic. He presented Young as one of the principal representatives of a current that he himself was gradually constructing: the Theatre of Mixed Means (Kostelanetz 1966). Kostelanetz campaigned for the use of that name instead of happening. The latter term, Kostelanetz argued, created after the works of Allan Kaprow, referred to unplanned results that characterized only certain branches of the movement. By contrast, the concept of Theatre of Mixed Means isolated the movement’s central feature: the use of elements as varied as music, dance, sculpture, and film (23).
To make the connection between Young’s work and theater, Kostelanetz focused not on the word pieces mentioned by Kirby but rather on The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, from Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. This piece, Kostelanetz asserted, lay at the center of this new aesthetic: it was multisensorial and contained visual and olfactory dimensions. Like Kirby—and unlike Salzman—Kostelanetz proposed an approach to Young’s work that moved away from a strict musical reading. He himself was unconvinced that the musical meaning of Young’s sound would be relevant to the audience. He preferred a theatrical conception of Young’s work. Thus, according to the critic, Young’s precursor was no longer so much Cage as Antonin Artaud. Like the latter, Young exploited electronic sensorial overload to move his audience. Lacking a greater openness to the sensorial qualities of art, he continued, the audience or the critic, indifferent or scandalized, could not properly grasp Young’s work.
In 1967 Kostelanetz confirmed his admiration for Young in Perspectives of New Music, where he wrote an entire article castigating his colleagues in music literature for their incompetence, ignorance, and nepotism (125–26). In between two sections of criticism, he reiterated his interest in Young’s piece The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which he professed to “enjoy and admire as mixed-means theatrical events in which the composer’s ‘notes’ are a partial contribution to the total experience” (123–24).
Young’s Mixed Means
In 1968, these “mixed-means theatrical events” were precisely the subject of Kostelanetz’s book The Theatre of Mixed Means. The “genre” forged by the critic (xii) brought together artists as well-known as Cage, Halprin, Robert Rauschenberg, Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Ken Dewey, Young, Robert Whitman, and the USCO collective; it also constituted “the most interesting recent development in American theatre” (xi). In this work, Kostelanetz finally distanced himself from critiques he made in The New American Arts: “My opinion . . . was based upon inadequate research, some unfortunate experience, and a bias toward the theatre of literature I had learned about in college. Since then, I have seen many more examples of mixed-means performances, most of which pleased and excited me considerably” (xii). Kostelanetz explained his past error as a result of having “split the critical work into categories—cinema, fiction, dance, poetry, painting, theatre, and music,” whereas “so much that is currently artistically advanced today straddles, if not transcends, these traditional divisions” (xii–xiii). Since the publication of The New American Arts in 1965, the work of performance studies advocates had clearly made an impact.
In his portrayal of Young, Kostelanetz relied on the writings of Cardew (1964, 1966), Yates (1967), Johnston (1964), and Jean Vanden Heuvel (1966). But the conclusions he drew about Young were very different from theirs. Cardew had placed Young’s work within chance music and linked the composer to serialism, while for Johnston and Vanden Heuvel his music was a hallucinatory experience inspired by the East, and for Yates it was a ritual-harmonic experience that was “deliberately unmetrical or out of phase” (Yates 1967, 248). Kostelanetz, however, translated Young’s aesthetic in other terms, framed by other conceptions. For him Young was, without a doubt, one of the representatives of a new Theatre of Mixed Means; his piece The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys figured “among the most exciting theatrical presentations” (Kostelanetz 1968, xii). Kostelanetz’s high praise for Young elevated his own concept, even as he subtly drew on the works that preceded him.
He returned to earlier observations regarding Young’s serial training with Stein and Stockhausen, Young’s electronics experience with Stockhausen as well as with Richard Maxfield, and his interest in classical Indian and Japanese music (184).8 In his interview with Young, he also brought in the composer’s first music experiences and his involvement with jazz in the 1950s.9 Indeed, we learn, as a saxophonist Young had made the rounds of clubs for a time