Ultimately, the other aesthetics that Young subsequently touched on amounted to biographical detours as well. Webern drew Young away from jazz at the end of the 1950s. The discovery of classical Indian and Japanese music enabled him to turn his back on the twelve-tone technique. Cage’s aesthetic offered him another exit: Young’s pieces from 1959 and 1960 were in large part the product of the “immediate impact” of his exposure to Cage’s music (194). This discovery led to The Tortoise, a “performance” in which Young and his associates chanted a chord “of intrinsically infinite duration, amplified to the threshold of aural pain” (212). The demonstration has reached its destination.
On reading Young’s interview, however, we find that the nature of his connection to theater remains nebulous. What interested Young above all were the sound and the manifestation of its harmonic components (197), much more than the centrality of the performer, the audience, and their environment evoked by Kirby or the “multi-sensory involvement” and theatrical mixed means mentioned by Kostelanetz (184, 183). Moreover, Young did not fit within any preexisting movement: “The Theatre of Eternal Music is establishing a tradition of its own,” he asserted (216).
The thirty-five pages of analysis and interview with Young, unprecedented at the time, formed part of a work attempting to build this new Theatre of Mixed Means. The cultural establishment, however, greeted them with an indifference similar to Kostelanetz’s own vis-à-vis that group in Perspectives of New Music the year before. His book received almost no reviews in periodicals that were still rigidly divided among theater, music, and poetry. The existence of a genre that would shatter these “traditional forms of classification” (xiii) was not discussed further or adopted, at least in the short term. The Theatre of Mixed Means remains merely a book written in 1968 by Kostelanetz.10
DREAM MUSIC
In the period when, almost simultaneously, Cardew, Hitchcock, the New York art critics, and Kostelanetz seized on Young’s work—portraying it in contrasting, if not contradictory, ways—the composer too strove to define his own music. He did so in a series of texts collected in Selected Writings, published by Heiner Friedrich in Munich (Young and Zazeela 1969).11 The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys appears regularly at the center of his writings, but in a completely different framework from that designed by Kostelanetz to support his theatrical conception of Young’s work. In fact, the composer refers more often to Dream Music and Dream House. And although Dream House incorporates luminous creations by Young’s wife, the light artist Marian Zazeela, in Young’s writings it is above all a place that holds sound. His music, Young asserted, constituted “a radical departure from European and even much Eastern music” (15). The cards were reshuffled once more.
Young maintained that the foundation of this music was harmony: “not European harmony,”12 but that which emerged via harmonics “when any simple fundamental is produced” (5). This harmony was heard even before humans made music. The drone was thus the first sound, and dream houses were those places where the drone could be ceaselessly (re)incarnated for tens of thousands of years. This music could thus be played eternally, “just as the Tortoise has continued for millions of years past” (16). The music was produced by sine wave oscillators that generated a continuous live electronic sound environment and a series of chants that added other frequencies (11).
As opposed to Kostelanetz, who, to develop his mixed-means genre, emphasized the hybrid nature of the composer’s work, Young underlined its sonic nature. Even so, since 1965 Zazeela’s work in the piece had acquired its own importance (13). The visual dimension was indeed present, notably in The Tortoise, which Young sometimes defined as “a total environmental set of frequency structures in the media of sound and light” (11): the work combined the dissemination of sinusoidal signals and chants with the installation of “floating sculptures” and “dichroic sources” favoring color frequencies that corresponded to the music (11). The listener also participated in the play of frequencies, the composer maintained, by producing slight air currents, for example, that subtly shifted the mobiles and the luminous frequencies (14). This description meshed well with the theatrical genre of Kostelanetz, who was unsure that the musical meaning of Young’s sound would be relevant to the audience (Kostelanetz 1966, 23).
At the end of the 1960s The Tortoise was the subject of at least three different readings (not including the various approaches to Young’s complete works): a strictly musical and harmonic reading, by Hitchcock in the Musical Quarterly; a theatrical one, by Kostelanetz in his writings; and finally Young’s own, focusing first on the sonic aspects and then on the visual ones. In all three cases, conceptions clashed: music versus theater, European harmony versus natural harmonics, and so on. The more the New York composer’s work was studied, the less any consensus on the content and meaning of his music seemed possible.
Sidebar 2
Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.
When the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside.
The composition may be any length but if an unlimited amount of time is available, the doors and windows may be opened before the butterfly is turned loose and the composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away.
La Monte Young, Composition 1960 #5, in Young and Mac Low (1963).
6. Taking Sides over a New Medium
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
At the end of the 1960s, serial music and the developments in so-called aleatoric or indeterminate music that arose in the wake of Cage’s works continued to divide the contemporary landscape outlined by the music establishment. Indeed, Young’s music was often read and understood according to one orientation or the other. Meanwhile, however, a medium that many authors ignored had recently begun to take shape as a genre in its own right: electronic music. Apart from the writings of Schaeffer ([1952] 2012), Stockhausen (in his journal Die Reihe, since 1955), and Cage himself (1961), little had been published on the subject. Even then, as Robert Emmet Dolan attests in Music in Modern Media (1967), most of those works focused on technical considerations. In 1968, however, Hugh Davies published the Répertoire international des musiques électroacoustiques, a work that sought to inventory the production of electronic music at the time. Surprisingly, it associated Young with the movement, whereas critics up to that point had conceived the evolution of his music in quite different spheres. Davies’s inventory describes certain of his Compositions from 1960 as “electronic creations” and characterizes The Tortoise as an “amplified” work. Young was in fact an electronic musician, according to Davies, and he was, moreover, far from being the only musician to be recruited by the defenders of the medium. New names appeared in articles and works devoted to the subject. Among many others, we note especially Terry Riley and a composer named Steve Reich. What is the history of this “alternative” reading of Young’s work? How could a conception so far from what had been said about the composer up to that point have emerged at the end of the 1960s and, moreover, firmly take hold over the following years? By exploring the network formed around the writings of those who championed the electronic medium, we begin to see how.
ELECTRONIC CREATIONS
When Davies published the Répertoire international des musiques électroacoustiques (1968b), he had already spent at least four years campaigning for recognition of the genre. In 1964 he published “A Discography of Electronic Music and Musique Concrète.” Between 1964 and 1966, he succeeded Cardew as Stockhausen’s assistant, and in 1967, when Cardew was named professor at the Royal Academy of Music, he became the director of