Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane, as well as George Gershwin’s musical comedies and Leonard Bernstein’s musical dramas. According to Mellers’s 1964 account, the image of the previous decade’s music as portrayed by others had subtly changed. Indeed, he was not content merely to transmit the more or less established conceptions of authors such as Chase (1955); he slightly modified their nature. Previous authors had omitted Cage’s aleatoric and indeterminate work; Mellers corrected their “error.” He also established the dominant place of that “world of commerce” that many authors had left out.
In 1964, when Mellers published his book, the fine adjustments he had made to the portrait of the musical landscape were as yet valid only for him, along with his publishers, Barrie & Rockliff in London and Alfred A. Knopf in New York. The predominant place he accorded to Cageian chance and indeterminacy, as well as to popular music over the course of the 1950s, needed to be confirmed by others before it could firmly take root. And for other authors to take up Mellers’s views, he needed to incite their interest. That is precisely what happened over the following years: in the Musical Times, for example, Peter Dickinson, the “pro-Cageian” theorist and composer, delighted in seeing his mentor appear in Mellers’s book (1964, 660). While most other authors, Dickinson wrote, had quite simply left Cage’s recent developments in the shadows, Mellers finally treated it “seriously.” Dickinson’s was but one declaration of support among others: little by little, thanks to their validation by other authors, the paradigms presented in Music in a New Found Land would become staples of contemporary musical thought.2
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WITH YOUNG
In 1967, Young’s position in American music was similar to that of Cage a bit earlier: his “greatness” was self-evident only in the eyes of certain people, namely Cardew and a few New York art critics. They were, at least, almost the only ones to have publicly affirmed that view. For that claim to gain wider recognition, Cardew had to incite the interest of other protagonists, who would then adopt and transmit his conceptions. As we have already seen, Cardew did so through his students and collaborators over the last third of the 1960s. But what was the situation beyond his circle of initiates?
Prior to 1967, Young appears to have attracted little interest among other authors. The ninth edition of The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians by the musicologist Oscar Thompson (1964),3 one of the most complete and popular music encyclopedias,4 makes no mention of Young in 1964. The same is true of the fourth edition of Our American Music by John Tasker Howard the following year (1965), even though its aim was to give an almost exhaustive history and to include recent music developments in the United States, particularly in popular music.5 In 1966, when William Austin presented an overview of music since Debussy, published by Norton, he likewise made no place for Young.6 The most interesting developments in American music were, according to Austin, to be found in the compositions of Walter Piston, Henry Cowell, Roger Sessions, and Elliott Carter (442). Austin’s work marked a milestone; in Hitchcock’s words, “For the first time, twentieth-century music has been treated with the same scholarly standards, the same bibliographical controls, the same careful historical method as earlier periods of Western music history” (1966, 254).7 That same year the thirteenth volume of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart came out, containing an entry on the United States (“Vereinigte Staaten,” cols. 1467–86). There we find no very different content from what one was wont to read at the beginning of the decade: experimental, electronic, and twelve-tone musicians as well as a bit on the musical comedy—these were all one needed to know about American music (Broder 1966, cols. 1478–79).
In 1967, some months after the publication of Cardew’s article on Young in the Musical Times, Mellers took up the twentieth century where he had left off in 1964. He published a work on “renewal in twentieth-century music” titled Caliban Reborn. It aims to give a “fresh vision of reality” (ix). Here the boundary separating art from commerce in his earlier writings further diminishes: Harry Partch and Cage stand alongside jazz and Eastern music, Stockhausen and Feldman, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The young generation of American composers includes, among others, Harold Shapero and Alexei Haieff, who follow the tradition of Stravinsky and Copland; Milton Babbitt and Mel Powell, who fall under Schoenbergian postserialism; Lukas Foss, an eclectic; and even Seymour Shifrin, who draws on jazz. Young still does not participate in the great march of the twentieth century, regardless of what Cardew and his peers have said of him.8
Also in 1967, Peter S. Hansen published the second edition of his Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music, its scope limited to “those composers who have been most influential in the period” (vi), up to 1964. The names that appear here are Varèse, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Cage. Apart from Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, and Feldman (374–76), no one is mentioned after Cage. That same year Barney Childs, who had highlighted the link between Cage and Young the year before in Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1966, 437), published Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music with Elliott Schwartz (Schwartz and Childs 1967). The collection of essays gives pride of place to experimentalism and that music “in which the performer’s role is enlarged” or that makes use of chance techniques (xv). Nonetheless, it presents no writings or interviews of Young. The composer’s name appears only in the credits, for having first published two essays by Richard Maxfield that are reprinted in the book (349–61, originally in Young and Mac Low 1963), and in an interview with Cage, who confirms his interest—even as he emphasizes the difference between their respective works—for Young’s music (335–48, reprinted from Reynolds 1962, 45–52). Although this homage is not insignificant, the students, concertgoers, and musicians for whom the book is intended (vii–viii) learn nothing more about Young.
Two years later, a pedagogical work by Robert D. Wilder titled Twentieth-Century Music (1969) bespoke the impact that the directions taken by these various authors had on music instruction: in 1969, music ended with Cage, or at the latest with Foss.9 It seems that only Cardew and some of his close associates definitively recognized Young’s qualities. Wilder perhaps sided with Hitchcock, who some years earlier had shown very little interest in the composer’s creations, which to him were devoid of any “shred of novelty” (1962, 245–46).
Indeed, the Dadaist connection that Hitchcock made is precisely what certain critics retained through the second half of the 1960s. Some authors chose this approach to write Young’s name into the history of music. In 1966 Gilbert Chase, who had contributed to The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians two years before, published the second edition of America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. There he continued to postulate that the major styles in American music had taken root outside the concert hall—all the more so for folk and popular traditions. This new edition now included Young, who is mentioned as a member of the “neo-Dadaist” wing of avant-garde music, along with George Brecht and Terry (incorrectly referred to as Peter) Jennings (663).10
In 1967 Eric Salzman published an introduction to twentieth-century music in the Prentice-Hall History of Music Series at the request of the series editor, Hitchcock. The series, Hitchcock noted in the foreword, aimed to give a “panoramic view of the history of Western music” (Salzman 1967, v). He mentioned Young in the context of a movement described as antirational and aleatoric, epitomized by Cage. The essence of these compositions consists in their “lack of identity,” Salzman wrote (168), returning to the views he had expressed in The New American Arts two years earlier (1965). The works “proceed in short, inevitable steps from long sets of meaningless directions for meaningless and useless ‘existentialist’ actions to a kind of ‘neo-realist’ Theatre of Aimless Activity, and then to ‘Happenings’ and perhaps on to meaningless, useless real life” (168). Young’s appearance in Salzman’s volume is tentative and hardly laudatory, but nonetheless it marks the second time in two years that the composer figured in a monograph devoted to contemporary music.
Also in 1967, Peter Yates published a work on the evolution of twentieth-century
