Davies’s mission in publishing the Répertoire was to encompass “all the electronic music ever composed in the almost twenty years since composers first began to work in this medium” (1968b, iv).2 Included among these pieces are 2 Sounds from 1960, described as a “realization by Terry Riley and La Monte Young” (169, 239), along with Young’s Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. and Composition 1960 #9 (also from 1960) and “electronic realizations” by Young (212, 218, 239). The electronic realizations, we read, were performed by a group called the Theatre of Eternal Music. That ensemble, we also learn, performed a series of “amplified” works by the composer, such as The Second Dream of High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (1962), Studies in the Bowed Disc (1963), and The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964). While his colleague Cardew was presenting Young’s work in connection with Stockhausen’s theory of statistical fields, Davies focused instead on Young’s medium of communication. In so doing he subtly modified the nature of Young’s work, turning Young into one of the representatives of this new movement that he sought to promote.
Riley’s individual works, regularly seen in conjunction with Young’s in London concert announcements, also appear in Davies’s book. Davies includes his Concert for Two Pianists and Five Tape Recorders, from 1960 (177), and the piece I Can’t Stop, from 1966, which Davies labels “pop” (220). He also lists a “jazz” piece by Riley, Shemooshe (from 1966), as well as Dorian Reeds (from 1965), which he calls a “tape feedback loop” (220). In the Répertoire, Young and Riley stand alongside a good number of New Yorkers, notably Tony Conrad, Dick Higgins, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Cage. Among them we also find the name Steve Reich. Four of Reich’s works from 1966–67 are cited but not described: Come Out, Melodica, Saxophone Phase, Four Pianos. and Buy Art Buy Art (220).
In the months following its publication, Davies’s work—copublished by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales of l’ORTF (the French public radio and television agency) in Paris, the Independent Electronic Music Center in New York, and MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London—won recognition as an authority, eliciting the interest of many champions of electronic music (Emmerson and Smalley 2001). It was reprinted, with no added commentary, in one of the pioneering journals in the field, Electronic Music Review. Meanwhile, Davies took part in another publication that was to become equally indispensable: A Bibliography of Electronic Music, by Lowell M. Cross (1968). It included The Anthology of Chance Operations by Young and Jackson Mac Low (1963), which contained both Young’s and Riley’s works (121). Two years later Davies furthered his campaign, this time working outside the confines of the musicological establishment. He contributed to the electronic music discography in the summer 1970 issue of BMI: The Many Worlds of Music (Frank 1970). In particular, Davies added works by Cage, Ichiyanagi, Maxfield, and Pauline Oliveros, as well as by Riley (Reed Streams [1965], A Rainbow in a Curved Air and Poppy No Good and the Phantom Band [1969]) and Reich (Come Out, It’s Gonna Rain [1965] and Violin Phase [1967]).
ELECTRONIC MUSIC REVIEW AND THE COMPOSER
Among the earliest defenders of the genre that Davies helped to forge in the late 1960s was Robert Moog, who had recently invented the eponymous synthesizer, and Reynold Weidenaar, an electronic music composer (Kostelanetz 2001, 659). Together the two published the Electronic Music Review, which reprinted Davies’s Répertoire in 1968, marking the first appearance of Young, Riley, and Reich in the journal.3
In July 1968, in the journal’s seventh issue, the composer Roger Reynolds continued the work of positioning Young in the electronic genre. At that time Reynolds was known for having founded the group ONCE with Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma (Sollberger 2001) and for conducting the interview in which Cage expressed his admiration for Young. Reynolds, like Davies, was also known as an electronic musician (see, in particular, Clarke 1965). In an article for the Electronic Music Review, “It(’)s Time” (1968), he contributed to the association of The Tortoise with electronic music. Young’s connection to the genre solidified—and so did Reich’s. In the same issue of the journal, Tod Dockstader wrote about a compilation titled New Sounds in Electronic Music (1967), in which Reich’s piece Come Out appeared alongside compositions by Maxfield and Oliveros (Dockstader 1968, 33).
In June 1969, a year after Electronic Music Review published its final issue on the East Coast, The Composer made its debut on the West Coast. The journal was published at the instigation of David Cope, who was one of the editors along with Allen Strange, among others. The journal’s aim was to “establish the elements of dialogue between the factions (radical and moderate) of those individuals concerned with the craft and art of creating with sound” (see The Composer 1, no. 1 [1969]: 3). As the articles and reports that made up the journal’s first issue suggest, this “creat[ion] with sound” essentially meant machine-assisted creations. The journal was published for six years, until 1975. In the course of The Composer’s fifteen issues, Young, Riley, and Reich were among the many who appeared in its pages. There Reich was sometimes associated with “live electronics” or cited among the composers for “solo ensemble” whose pieces “use a combination of live and pre-recorded music” (Turetzky 1970, 67).
MAGNETIC TAPE
Although the connection between electronic music and composers such as Young, Riley, and Reich did not amount to much in 1970—an inventory, a bibliography, and mentions in two journals—a 1972 book by Allen Strange provided a bit more support. At the time Strange had just been named professor and director of the electronic music studios at San Jose State University (Ruppenthal and Patterson 2001). His book Electronic Music was published by William C. Brown Company (1972), the publisher of New Directions in Music by David Cope, a work that associated Riley with “live electronics” groups (1971, 48). Here, instead of offering an aesthetic discussion of electronic music, Strange opted to present different techniques used by a series of composers representing the genre. Unlike his colleague Cope, Strange mentioned neither Riley’s manipulation of electronics in live performances nor Young’s “electronic creations” that Davies had inventoried four years before. He did, however, discuss Reich, whom he described as the composer making the most imaginative use of tape loops (1972, 120).4
The year that Strange’s monograph came out, Herbert Russcol published his own introduction to electronic music, The Liberation of Sound (1972). Russcol relied especially on the works of Lowell Cross (1967) and Davies (1968). Unlike them, however, he saw Young not as an electronic musician but rather as a representative of mixed-media composition, as Salzman (1967) and Kostelanetz (1968) had also seen him. Young, we read, was one of the figures who had recently opened the borders of music (Russcol 1972, 114). The old divisions, particularly between “classical” and “popular” music, were coming down, thanks to the general availability of electronic materials that were now used in both (115). The composer whom Russcol associated most with electronic music was Reich, with Violin Phase and It’s Gonna Rain, in particular (220–21)—works that recalled Riley’s In C, he wrote, and that “allow us to hear things that ordinarily escape us—rather as a microscope enlarges tiny fragments and reveals hidden beauties that we could not otherwise behold” (221).
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
In 1973 Elliott Schwartz helped to further interest in the electronic movement with his book Electronic Music: A Listener’s Guide (1973). Schwartz was a graduate of Columbia University and had studied and worked with Otto Luening, Henry Brant, and Edgard Varèse. In the mid-1960s he began composing works that made use of tapes as well