In the early 1970s, many composers were enlisted in the effort to win recognition for electronic music. Young, whose work had been used to support the foundations of performance art as well as the validity of a new movement in the visual arts, was among these composers. So were Riley and Reich, who had received little mention before then. At the time, however, the general public knew of no connection between the composers. At most a connoisseur might be aware that Young and Riley had collaborated in the Theatre of Eternal Music or that Riley and Reich had worked together in the context of the premiere of In C in 1964. All three may have been electronic musicians, but dozens of other composers made use of the same medium. Soon, however, another author would postulate that the music establishment had overlooked a major detail: all three were part of the same New York Hypnotic School, which had very little to do with electronic music. This author was Tom Johnson.
7. The New York Hypnotic School
FOUNDING A MOVEMENT
By the beginning of the 1970s, Young, Riley, and Reich had been active on the American musical scene for almost ten years.1 Critics and musicologists followed their work closely. Although many of them had celebrated the works of each of these composers, few had established a clear connection between these works. At most, the composers were discussed together in analyses of electronic music (as well as in a few articles in the New York press, such as Henahan [1969a; 1969b; 1969c] and Davis [1970]). Not everyone, however, recognized their inclusion in the electronic movement. As we have seen with Young, very different, sometimes contradictory, readings of a composer’s work coexisted. One New York author had nonetheless recently declared that a single aesthetic united these composers. That author was Tom Johnson, who worked for the popular newsweekly the Village Voice. For him, they formed together the New York Hypnotic School. In 1972, he even asserted that “the term define[s] one of the more important areas of new music. [It] should refer primarily to La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. . . . They all have the same basic concern, which can be described as flat, static, minimal, and hypnotic” (1972, repr. in Johnson 1991, 29).2 Far from being discouraged by the profusion of divergent readings of the composers’ works or by the complete absence of a proven relation among them, the critic outlined his own stylistic genealogy: “There is a direct line of influence from Young, to Riley, to Steve Reich and Phil Glass,” he claimed (1973, repr. in Johnson 1991, 56). This genealogy, unlike those that had often been proposed, began with neither Cage nor Stockhausen; the latter had in fact made no impression on Young, Johnson told his readers (1974, repr. in Johnson 1991, 81). The Hypnotic School, as he defined it, quite simply broke with the past (1991, 29). What, then, is the history of Johnson’s extravagant proposal?
THE VILLAGE VOICE
After the contributions of Jill Johnston and John Perreault on Young in the mid-1960s (see chapter 3), the Village Voice regularly mentioned the composer. Riley and Reich were not left out, either. Before Johnson, however, few writers in the Village Voice had attempted to unite them in a single “school.” Although Carman Moore evoked Reich’s “reiterative” work several times (1966; 1967; 1969), he never related it to the stasis of Young’s music or that of Young’s disciple Terry Jennings, on whose work he also commented (1968). Also, unlike Johnston and Perreault, Moore did not develop the analogy with the visual arts; he focused solely on the composers and their music. Like Perreault, however, Moore alluded to their aesthetic connections with jazz, raga, and even rock. The critic—a composer who would become known for incorporating elements of jazz and blues in his own music (Wyatt 2001)—noted as well that the composers shared certain traits with popular music, such as the use of repetition and high volumes.
Thus, in Moore’s writing we find no mention of Cage, the aleatory, or indeterminacy among the future “hypnotics.” Ron Rosenbaum, another critic for the Village Voice, confirmed in 1970 that for years already, Young’s music was no longer seen in the context of Cage, Fluxus, or Dada (6). The composer, we read, no longer needed to incorporate any sound or any gesture in his music to expand its frontiers. The battle had been won long ago. Young’s “Dream Music” now unfolded beyond it, focusing essentially on a single, eternal sound.
At the dawn of the 1970s, Johnson had not yet made the connection between those whom he would soon call the “hypnotics.” When he reviewed Reich’s Drumming on December 9, 1971, one of the rare “long complex piece[s] of new music [to receive] a standing ovation,” he described the performers’ “amazing precision,” the “unity” of the piece, and its “unpretentious climax,” but he did not broach any of the traits that would soon define the “school” to which the composer belonged (1971, repr. in Johnson 1991, 20).3 At the time, the characteristics of Reich’s music were, in Johnson’s writing, shared by numerous other musicians: Alvin and Mary Lucier, whose pieces “all work on a static dynamic plane” (1972, repr. in Johnson 1991, 23); Frederic Rzewski and his repetitive music, simple and regular (1991, 25); Phill Niblock and his “sustained sounds” (1991, 26); Rhys Chatham and his drones (1991, 28); and so on. Indeed, an aesthetic appears to have emerged in Johnson’s chronicles of music in the Village Voice: repetition, stasis, and minimalism were among the criteria uniting these “new musics” for which he had become the ambassador. Nonetheless, in the summer of 1972 the critic still saw only one “hypnotic” musician, strictly speaking, in New York: Philip Glass, a composer whose name the music establishment had barely heard before (1991, 24).
“LA MONTE YOUNG, STEVE REICH, TERRY RILEY, PHILIP GLASS”
In the September 7, 1972, issue of the Village Voice, Johnson published “La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass,” the article that marked the birth of the New York Hypnotic School (repr. in Johnson 1991, 29). The designation had received scant attention in music literature up to that time. Its use had been occasional at best, and hardly complimentary (see especially Henahan 1969c). But for Johnson, the school constituted “one of the more important areas of new music” (Johnson 1991, 29). A typically New York school, it excluded Rzewski, Philip Corner, and David Behrman (because their work did not clearly fit the criteria set by Johnson), as well as Gavin Bryars (since he was British). It was defined by four terms: flatness, stasis, minimalism, and hypnotism. Beyond that, it mattered little whether the music featured traditional scales or not, a regular beat or the absence of rhythmic articulation, acoustic or electronic resources. The music was flat, Johnson explained, because there was no attempt to build to a climax or produce tension and relaxation. It was static because it was nondirectional, even though changes arose throughout its development. It was minimal in that it never evolved very far beyond its starting point. Finally and especially, it was hypnotic, Johnson asserted, because it lulled the listener into a trancelike state.