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), did not explicitly link the two modes of artistic expression: apart from his “Neo-Dada” pieces in 1960, Young’s work—“that may well be, as [Young] says, a major new development in musical history”—evoked above all, in her view, the musical stasis of the East, or even of Morton Feldman’s work (14). Nevertheless, the fact that a New York art critic was attentive to Young’s music was hardly insignificant.
A year later another art critic, Barbara Rose—a regular contributor to Art International, Artforum, and (as Johnston would also become, some years later) Art in America—established a clear connection between Young’s music and the visual arts.5 Rose, at that time married to the painter Frank Stella, whom she helped to become one of the great representatives of pictorial minimalism, wrote “ABC Art,” an essay devoted to a “new sensibility” (1965, 58), in which she traced its lineage.6 For Rose this “new sensibility,” whose “blank, neutral, mechanical impersonality contrasts so violently with the romantic, biographical abstract expressionist style which preceded,” had taken root in the work of Kazimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp, whose procedures “radically altered the course of art history.” For some, we learn, this sensibility went by the name of minimal art. Rose borrowed the term from the philosopher Richard Wollheim, who had written about it a few months earlier (Wollheim 1965). Indeed, she shared a number of his views: if the public resisted this art, it was essentially because of “the spectator’s sense that the artist has not worked hard enough or put enough effort in his art” (Rose 1965, 58). Although these works were perceived as inferior, their art content was “intentionally low.” She quoted John Ashbery: “What matters is the artists’ will to discover, rather than the manual skills” (58). If visual artists such as Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Richard Artschwager, and Andy Warhol owed a debt to Kazimir Malevich or Marcel Duchamp, then dancers and composers—for they also participated in the movement—were all indebted to Cage. Rose considered Young one of these composers, or even the only one. His Dream Music concerts, which lasted several days, could be likened to Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963), as well as to Satie’s music, in particular his Vexations of 1893. This aesthetic of experimentation and inertia, Rose added, “seems applicable to a certain amount of avant-garde activity of the moment” (65).
To which part of the avant-garde? We do not find out. Nor would we find out when John Perreault, art critic for the Village Voice and Arts Magazine, followed in the footsteps of Johnston and Rose three years later. Perreault (1968), too, discusseed Young’s work. He borrowed a number of analytical elements from the two critics:7 the influence of Cage and Duchamp, as well as that of the East, in particular.8 He also took up the link between music and the visual arts—the unchanging sound of Young’s pieces, he wrote, invited the listener to an aesthetic experience resembling that of painting (29)—but he likewise did not extend his argument to encompass other artists. This music, which he called “mono-tonal,” in reference to monochromes, was Young’s alone.9 That same year Lucy Lippard, another critic associated with Art Forum, Art International, and Art in America, and also the wife of another minimal artist, Robert Ryman, made her contribution in the Hudson Review (1968). There she associated Young with the visual art of Larry Poons. But for Lippard it was not a question of “minimalism” or “ABC Art,” but rather “reject art.”
The attempt to translate Young’s aesthetic in terms of visual art and to integrate the composer with pictorial minimalism surely helped to form his cultural cachet in the 1960s New York art scene (just as it helped, by invoking the figure of a prominent composer, to reinforce the foundations of the pictorial movement). But this attempt did not extend beyond his own work, which was regularly portrayed as that of a former neo-Dadaist converted to the musical charms of the East (see esp. Perrault 1968).
4. 1967
GIANTS?
What did contemporary American music mean at the twilight of the 1960s? What ideas were established on the subject at the time? Having considered this question for the beginning of the decade (chapter 1), let us now look at where matters stood some months after Cardew’s article on the “giant” Young appeared in the November 1966 issue of the Musical Times.
The American contemporary musical landscape had changed since the beginning of the 1960s. Seven years had passed; new musicians, new composers and their works had been grafted onto the stock. But more than that, if we look closely, we see that the foundations of the former landscape, which had seemed so stable, had shifted. It seems, for example, that Cage’s position and the place of popular music had perhaps been ill-defined in the former cultural panorama.
MUSIC IN A NEW FOUND LAND
In 1964, Cage’s name—the Cage of chance and indeterminacy—was inscribed in gold letters in Music in a New Found Land, a book by Wilfrid Mellers, a composer, prolific author, and head of the music department at the University of York.1 The recent importance of Cage’s aesthetic in American music was not the only new fact that Mellers presented; his work also emphasized the notion that popular music constituted one of the country’s most significant musical
