The presence of Young and his work in the American contemporary music landscape as seen from Britain now rested on a solid mound of facts whose legitimacy was questioned less and less. If there were still those who would dispute Young’s place in the music establishment, they would have to confront a long chain of alliances formed over the entire decade. The importance that some wished to give to Young had been realized: in the British music establishment of the early 1970s, Young had clearly become a composer to be taken seriously. “Seriously,” too, because even though jazz, improvisation, group, performer/composer, and audience are among the many terms that dot the pages written on Young and his associates, their work still tends to be placed on the serious side of the boundary separating popular and serious music.25
The La Monte Young who was promulgated in Britain through Cardew’s campaign was essentially the pre-1962 composer (with his Compositions of 1960, Poem, X for Henry Flynt, and Death Chant). Although the emergence and success of improvisation groups seen as sharing some of the qualities of Young’s later experimentations were recognized, this trend received less attention. An aesthetic relying on the collective playing of one or two sustained sounds—electrified, no less—remained difficult to defend, even through a Cageian “analysis grid.” In the early 1970s, however ill-defined the outlines of his music may have been, it was the early Young who, in Great Britain, won his place in the world of art music.
Sidebar 1
COMPOSITION 1960 #3
Announce to the audience when the piece will begin and end if there is a limit on duration. It may be of any duration.
Then announce that everyone may do whatever he wishes for the duration of the composition.
5-14-60
COMPOSITION 1960 #10
to Bob Morris
Draw a straight line and follow it.
October 1960
La Monte Young, Composition 1960 #3 and #10.
3. Transcribing Music
NEW YORK AVANT-GARDISTS AND MONOTONALITY
NEW YORK AVANT-GARDISTS
The American music establishment, like the British, did not fail to note Young’s first steps into the avant-garde at the beginning of the 1960s. In 1962 the composer was mentioned in the Musical Times’ American competitor, the Musical Quarterly. At that time the latter journal was directed, as it had been since 1915, by the music publisher Schirmer. Like the Musical Times, it sought to reach both professional musicians and music lovers. Hugh Wiley Hitchcock, a specialist in Marc-Antoine Charpentier teaching at Hunter College in New York (Morgan 2001b), was a regular contributor. He gave Young a far less favorable welcome in the journal than his British colleagues did. Reporting on the “ultra-modern” concert series ONCE—A Festival of Musical Premieres, he wrote that the pieces by Young and by Terry Jennings, musicians associated with the “Cage-Tudor-Maxfield New York Group,” “communicated not a shred of novelty, iconoclasm, or even good old nonsensical Dada. Their self-conscious and slightly sheepish doings were tired, effete, lacking in conviction, humor, anger, involvement—or, indeed, any expression or evocation of human emotion. They seem to have confused inaction with oriental tranquillity, lack of responsibility with the detachment of Zen” (Hitchcock 1962, 245–46).
Paul Cooper, a composer who, like Hitchcock, had studied at the University of Michigan, also attended the concert of Young and Jennings. His review, published in the Ann Arbor News, was even harsher. “Total indignation,” “thoroughly degenerate,” “in brinkmanship of insanity” are the terms he used to describe the performance of these “two over-aged juvenile delinquents [who] slouched into town attempting to represent the avant-garde of New York” (quoted in Flynt 1996, 73). Their approach was not new, he wrote: “The Dadaists and surrealists of the 20’s and 30’s were infinitely more imaginative.” In any case, Cooper continued, “I for one refuse to believe that a movement based on combined negative philosophies of East and West filtered through talentless, unprincipled personalities should achieve more than an agonized reappraisal from serious composers. . . . Some pianissimo pokings at the piano . . . some exploration of the squealing possibilities of a single reed saxophone; . . . reciting of ‘words, words, words . . .’ for approximately 10 minutes”—for Cooper, this list spoke for itself. “At times we succumbed to oral ridicule, needless to say,” he commented. “But . . . there can be no question of its having any value either for music, theater, or humor.” For Cooper, as for Hitchcock, the clear lack of savoir faire and the inability of Young and his collaborators to transcend the aesthetic limits that others had crossed before them denied their music any credibility.
Three years later, in 1965, Hitchcock again wrote on a concert by Young for the Musical Quarterly. This time the concert was given at the Carnegie Recital Hall as part of a series organized by Lukas Foss, inviting the “best young American performer/composers” (Hitchcock 1965, 530). Even though Young had recently “turned to classical Indian acoustical and intervallic theory for inspiration” (538), Hitchcock introduced him via his association with Cage.1 Young, he wrote, presented one of the “farthest-out” pieces in the series: The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. Hitchcock offered a brief analysis of the piece, describing the intervallic construction of its drones as well as the resultant “static ‘harmonic’ music” (539). He then translated the work in the form of a staff with no bar line, presenting four whole notes whose ratios were 36/35/32/24—on this staff, more or less G/F#/F/C (fig. 1).
Figure 1. La Monte Young, The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, transcription by Hugh Wiley Hitchcock (Hitchcock 1965, 539).
Hitchcock’s piece rendered a triple reduction: through his own words, through the transcription of the score, and when just isolating the “ten minutes’-worth” performed. Through it, Young’s work appeared rather unconvincing, to say the least. These four notes—deprived of their harmonics, the arrival of which Hitchcock admitted not having the patience to wait for;2 stripped of their volume, their indeterminate nature, and their significance in Indian symbolism; uprooted from their performance context to be analyzed in a journal of the music establishment—would long be ignored. By approaching Young’s music solely in terms of harmonic analysis (without, however, considering the subject of harmonics itself), Hitchcock led the reader down a single path. In so doing, he helped exclude the composer from an “avant-garde” of his own design.
MONOTONALITY
Over the second half of the 1960s, a series of New York art critics sought to promote a pictorial and sculptural trend that they called ABC Art, reject art, or minimal art.3 These critics were Jill Johnston, Barbara Rose, John Perreault, and Lucy Lippard. They wrote in Art News, the Village Voice, Art International, Artforum, Arts Magazine, and Art in America. Most of them did not conceive this trend within strict disciplinary boundaries. For some, minimalism was indeed not only artistic but also musical.
It all began in 1964 with an article by Jill Johnston, a critic for the journal Art News and the news weekly Village Voice. Johnston covered painting and sculpture for the former and dance for the latter.4 On November 19, however, she ventured out of her usual fields and authored a music column in the Village Voice. Her piece, titled “La Monte Young,” famously marks the composer’s first appearance in that weekly paper (Johnston 1964). Johnston, who a year earlier had mentioned the visual art of one of Young’s former music partners, Walter De Maria (1963),