No Documents, No Escape. Christophe Levaux

article, Johnson repeatedly evoked these various traits as they developed toward success—distinctive traits that were never boring, Johnson regularly affirmed—in the work of numerous composers of this new music. This music, however, was still only that of Young and his three colleagues.⁴ These composers, moreover, completely broke from tradition; their music had nothing to do with either contemporary music or jazz (Johnson 1991, 29).⁵ If their static, nondeveloping forms had roots anywhere, they were to be found in non-Western music (1973, repr. in Johnson 1991, 35–36).

      At the end of 1974, a controversy arose within Johnson’s own writings: until then, “minimalism” had been one aspect among others that characterized the four New York composers, while for him the “minimalists,” strictly speaking, were California composers, such as Harold Budd or Michael Byron (1973, repr. in Johnson 1991, 58–59). These latter, heirs to Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Silvestre Revueltas, and Dane Rudhyar, went “far beyond” the New Yorkers in their processes of sound reduction. Nonetheless, on December 30, 1974, Johnson labeled the music of the New York Hypnotics—with David Behrman now in their ranks—as minimal, further declaring that this minimalism was one of the major currents of new music (1974, repr. in Johnson 1991, 94). Shortly thereafter, this view would be reinforced by the British author Michael Nyman, whose book Experimental Music had just come out in the United States (1974). In that monograph, Nyman too grouped Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass under the “minimalist” label.

      The story of Johnson and the Hypnotic School is in some ways a variant of that of Cardew and his ties to Young: after having promoted a typically New York movement deserving of a place in the Western art music tradition, the critic put on his composer hat, largely influenced by the movement he had defended. In 1972 Johnson premiered his Four-Note Opera in New York, a piece whose static and minimal nature the New York Times did not fail to note (Ericson 1972). At the same time, he exhorted music teachers to turn toward the creative possibilities of avant-garde music, publishing two of his pieces in that vein, by way of example, in the Music Educators Journal (Johnson 1972). In 1974 the New York Times described his 1971 composition An Hour for Piano as “meditative.”⁶ It belongs, we read, within a general movement of “austerity,” employing “modular repetition” and “deliberately limited materials,” in the wake of Reich and Glass (Rockwell 1974a). In 1976, Spaces and Septapede (1969) were described as “free from the concept of climax as a structural necessity” (Burge 1976). These compositions by Johnson, a former student of Morton Feldman, seem to have taken a hypnotic or minimal turn. The opportunity was not slight, as he himself had noted: this music would probably “reach a wider audience than most contemporary music has” (Johnson 1991, 29).

8. Untying the Bonds

      PROCESS MUSIC

      books by composers, including this one, are probably of most interest to those already interested in the composer’s music.

      (Reich 1974, vii)