It appears that Young’s recent works interested no other British critics besides his habitual champion. For Cardew in 1966, Young’s body of work seemed to end in 1962, with X for Henry Flynt and Death Chant (1960). Mentions of Young in Cardew’s subsequent articles again referred to his pre-1962 compositions rather than his work with his “various associates” (Cardew 1967; 1968).
IMPROVISATIONS
The connection between Cardew and Young did not, however, disappear; instead, it operated at a different level. Some of the characteristics that Cardew had formerly attributed to Young’s music can, in fact, be noted in Cardew’s descriptions of his own works in the late 1960s.
In 1966, Cardew joined a group whose music was described as “continuous improvisation which admits all sounds” (Parsons 1968, 430). The group was AMM, with Keith Rowe, Lou Gare, and Eddie Prévost.10 Like Young’s group, as described by Cardew (1966, 960), AMM used amplification to transform sounds and produce new ones (Parsons 1968, 430). In spring 1968 Cardew’s own group—the Cornelius Cardew Ensemble—performed Young’s music (Death Chant) along with that of another American composer, Terry Riley (In C, 1964).11 A year later he founded his own improvisation group, the Scratch Orchestra, and published the ensemble’s “Constitution” (Cardew 1969). There he again emphasized his interest in Young’s music as well as Riley’s. Both figure prominently in the list of works played by the ensemble (Cardew 1969, 619). Once again, the aesthetics of these composers, as Cardew conveyed them, seemed intimately linked to his own: for example, the Scratch Orchestra’s music, like Young’s, was concert music in which each of the members was encouraged to contribute accompaniments “performable continuously for indefinite periods” (617). The notation was free, and its place was secondary, while improvisation played a decisive role (619). One important element, however, seemed to distinguish the Scratch Orchestra from Young’s group: the former indulged in the performance of “popular classics”—Beethoven, Mozart, and even John Cage—cut up or freely rearranged, particularly through improvisation (617–18).12
When he published his “Constitution” in 1969, Cardew had been teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, Morley College of Art, and Maidstone College of Art for several months. The composers Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton were students of his whom he invited to join the Scratch Orchestra. Many others joined as well: Gavin Bryars, Michael Chant, Brian Dennis, Brian Eno, Christopher Hobbs, Michael Nyman, Jill and Tom Phillips, Hugh Schrapnel, Dave Smith, John Tilbury, and John White figure among the students or collaborators of Cardew who swelled the orchestra’s ranks.13 Many of these would themselves become teachers: Bryars and Parsons at Portsmouth; Nyman at Trent Polytechnic, Maidstone, and Goldsmith’s College; Tilbury at South West Essex Technical College, Kingston, Portsmouth, and Falmouth; White at Leicester Polytechnic. Most of them created their own groups in Cardew’s footsteps: White, Hobbs, and Schrapnel were together again in Promenade Theatre Orchestra; Bryars, Eno, and Nyman in Portsmouth Sinfonia.14
It was the end of the 1960s and beginning of the ’70s. Cardew’s work of musical militancy was about to take a political turn, in the literal sense, when he turned his back on the avant--garde to focus on the creation of music to serve the Marxist cause.15 At that time any aesthetic bonds he had managed to forge between his work and Stockhausen’s broke. In 1974 Cardew gave a talk that was broadcast on BBC radio and published in its magazine, the Listener; he then republished it in a collection of his essays (1974). The lecture (as well as the book) was titled “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism” and denounced the composer’s participation in imperialism through his cosmic composition Refrain (1959), which Cardew saw as disconnected from the painful contradictions of the real world. The aesthetic union of Cardew and Stockhausen became even more difficult when a former student of Cardew’s who was active at the Listener published a book titled Experimental Music (Nyman 1974). In it Nyman solidified the contrast between the hypercontrol characterizing Stockhausen’s music and the freedom that marked that of Cardew, Cage, and the “experimentalists.” The book was a resounding success, and the notion of a link between the two composers faded into oblivion.16
AFTER CARDEW
In the wake of Cardew, many others stepped up to fortify the standing of Young or that of their former teacher in the landscape of contemporary music. Howard Skempton defended his teacher as well as Young against Smalley’s criticisms in 1967;17 in 1968 in the Musical Times, Jill Phillips described a gathering of “extraordinarily talented and devoted” musicians as well as the “good moments” in the performance of Death Chant, a “minimalist” work by the American composer (Phillips 1968a), while students from Morley College and Maidstone College of Art presented Young’s Trio for Strings in May 1969 at the Round House (Musical Times 110, no. 1515 [May 1969]: 552).18 One of the most fervent defenders of the aesthetic that Cardew promoted was one of his first students, Michael Parsons. Parsons focused his attention on a composer whom Cardew had closely associated with Young: Terry Riley. In May 1968, Parsons reviewed a concert of works by Young and Riley performed by the Cornelius Cardew Ensemble at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In this review, he established a connection between Riley’s In C (1964) and Cageian chance by appealing to the audience to link them (Parsons 1968). For In C, Riley had specified a series of musical cells transcribed in traditional notation; he also provided a long series of instructions as to the structure and performance of the piece.19 Parsons reinterpreted the composer’s musical text to highlight its indeterminate aspects.20 Indeed, it is up to the listener, he wrote, to “find his own significance” in the direct experience he has of a work (429). The repetitions of In C, Parsons asserted, had nothing to do with a structuring into motifs or an attempt to organize sound. These continual repetitions became lost in a jumble of sound that had to be seen “as a world of immediate sensation.” Thus, by mobilizing the audience and its direct experience of the sonic jumble, Parsons managed to reconcile the repetitions, cells, and structures with Cageian chance.21
Cardew’s work in promoting Young’s music (and that of some of his associates, such as Riley) in Britain over the course of the 1960s, continued by some of his disciples, clearly paid off. Over the years Smalley, who had stood up for Stockhausen to castigate Cardew and Young in 1967, gradually revised his judgment. Already in 1968 he seemed much less critical of Young. He asserted that Stockhausen’s Hymnen, stemming from his search for a “World-music,” was particularly influenced by the American composer (563). In 1969, on the model of AMM (Mark 2012, 99–100), Smalley founded Intermodulation, an improvisation group, with Tim Souster, a composer who had promoted the work of Cardew and Young on the BBC Third Programme as well as in the journal Tempo (Souster 1968–69, 6).22 The group played Cardew, Riley, and Stockhausen.23 In 1972 Smalley dubbed Cardew “the most important English composer since Dunstable,” or at least “the first composer since that time who has radiated rather than absorbed influences” (1972c, 593). He then asserted that the section “On the Role of the Instructions in the Interpretation of Indeterminate Music,” published in Treatise Handbook (Cardew 1971, xiv–xvi) and “principally concerned with La Monte Young’s X for Henry Flynt . . . should be required reading for those critics who dismiss this music with an air of philistine indifference” (593).24 Some months later, again following Cardew in his Treatise Handbook (1971, xx), he posited that “perhaps it is the simplification rather than the elaboration of musical language which is now the most fruitful way forward.” Riley’s music and especially Young’s had convinced him (Smalley 1972d). The former detractor laid down his arms.
LA MONTE YOUNG, COMPOSER OF ART MUSIC
In the Britain of the late 1960s and early ’70s, as we have seen, a range of forces combined to validate Young’s standing as a member of the music establishment. What happened in Britain from 1967 to 1972 that might have helped change the perceived nature of an American body