end of the decade. Yates was a critic at the magazine Arts and Architecture. His book, he asserted, did not have a musicological orientation; recounting the evolution of twentieth-century music did not call for the traditional notated examples (xi, xiv). He posed the end of the harmonic era as his premise, citing Young’s just-intonation work as proof. “One of his ‘Dream Tortoises’ ” thus became a ritual experience that was “deliberately unmetrical or out of phase” (247, 248). The piece evoked the Hindu Om, Yates found, and it required the listener, in order to understand it, to let go of all preconceived judgments.
It was Young’s third appearance in an account of twentieth-century American music. In the first, he was quite neo-Dadaist; in the second, quite post-Cageian; in the third, he was a harmonist and a ritualist with a “unique” aesthetic. To the extent that we can rely on these authors, we find that in 1967 Young enjoyed a place in the contemporary music landscape, despite the fact that the nature of his music was still poorly understood. Richard Kostelanetz’s writings, however, would soon shed light on its essence, as we will see in chapter 5.
5. Creating Genres
THE THEATRE OF MIXED MEANS AND DREAM MUSIC
THE THEATRE OF MIXED MEANS
In 1968 Richard Kostelanetz, a critic and essayist who wrote for the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Village Voice, among other periodicals, published the first book in the United States to have an entire chapter devoted to Young: The Theatre of Mixed Means (1968). Kostelanetz linked the New York composer to the latest developments in modern music, as Cardew had done; to harmonic theory, as Hitchcock had done; and to the visual arts, following Barbara Rose and some of her colleagues. But here the connections were superficial. For Kostelanetz, as for Smalley in the beginning, Young’s work was not musical. Kostelanetz’s explanation differed from Smalley’s, however: Young’s work was instead part of “the most interesting recent development in American theatre” (xi). The approach taken by Kostelanetz largely contrasted with what was already known about Young. It did not, however, appear out of the blue, having been elaborated on the margins of the music establishment for almost three years. Since 1965 a handful of theorists had enlisted Young and his music in their campaign to recognize new forms of artistic activity transcending the division of art—from film to music, dance to poetry—in fixed categories. Some dubbed these forms happenings, events, or even new theater. Let us take a closer look at them.
New Theatre
To understand the emergence of Kostelanetz’s concepts, we must briefly turn to the Tulane Drama Review, a mouthpiece for the discipline of performance studies that emerged in American universities in the early 1960s.1 In that journal, Young’s work, snubbed by the American music establishment, found its first theatrical and academic celebration in the United States. It won acclaim from Richard Schechner, who would found and direct the Performance Group some years later, and Michael Kirby, who subsequently joined him.2 The two editors devoted the winter 1965 issue of the Tulane Drama Review to a “new theatre,” naming Young one of its main representatives, following Cage, in particular. For after Cage had enabled silence to become music in 4’33, “any activity or event may be presented as part of a music concert,” we learn. Thus, “Young may use a butterfly as his sound source” (Kirby 1965, 25).
Young himself was among the issue’s contributors. There he presented “Lecture 1960” (Young 1965), the transcription of a talk he gave at a summer workshop held by the choreographer Ann (now Anna) Halprin. It consisted of a series of commentaries on his early works, in particular—for example, Composition 1960 #5, with the butterfly (see sidebar 2). Published in the form of an article in a university journal, Young’s lecture enabled the academy, to whom the talk was now addressed, to assess, through the artist’s own words, the theatrical nature of his so-called word pieces.3
Neither the lecture nor Kirby’s introduction to the issue explicitly made an aesthetic connection between Cage, the word pieces, and Young’s interest in continuous sounds (which had drawn Hitchcock’s attention; see chapter 4). The connection was at most implicit: it was in 1960, during Young’s theatrical or Cageian period—Cage having, in effect, authorized “any activity or event” to be part of a concert (Kirby 1965, 25)—that Young had confirmed his turn to “extended sounds.”
Nor was the link between “any activity or event” and Young’s “extended sounds” what interested Kirby and his collaborators. In their writings, Young above all fit within the framework of the “new theatre,” which, we read, shook up the relation between performer and audience and integrated the work in its environment.4 For Kirby, Young’s 1960 Compositions, conceived in the form of instructions, primarily highlighted the interpretative act and the performer’s relation to space and audience. When Susan Sontag mentioned Young in the same journal two years later,5 she translated his aesthetic in the same way: in terms of the recent idea, in theater as in cinema, of art as an act of violence, reversing the audience’s former passive relation to the work (1967, 37).6 Kostelanetz confronted the New York composer’s work in a similar vein.
“Cisum”
Earlier on, however, Kostelanetz understood Young’s work differently. Indeed, in 1965, as the editor of The New American Arts, he advocated a more strictly musical approach to Young’s work: that of Salzman, the composer and critic assigned to the chapter on music. Salzman had already mentioned Young’s music in hardly complimentary terms in the New York Times (1961). In his chapter for the 1965 anthology, although he included Young among the representatives of a “new American art,” Salzman did not revise his opinion: Young’s work was a pathetic successor to that of Cage, who himself only told “90 tiny funny stories” on his recording Indeterminacy (Folkways 1959). Such works, Salzman asserted, were “non-music music [that] takes everything that music does and does it backwards” (1965, 261).
Although highly critical of Young, Salzman offered an argument linking the composer’s work with Cage’s aesthetic of sound: “Where music may be defined as an organization of sound, a piece of ‘cisum’ may consist of non-sound or silence;7 where a piece of music would be a finite event in time, there are compositions which imply an indeterminate or possibly infinite length; there is even a piece which consists of two notes with the direction: ‘Hold this for a long time.’ ” Thus the link between the Cageian silence of 4’33” and Young’s Composition 1960 #7 was formed.
Toward Another Theater
Although Kostelanetz sided with Salzman’s musical ideas in 1965, soon after he chose a different path, one mapped out in particular by those who defended a theatrical conception of Young’s work. Just one year later, Kostelanetz published an article in the theater section of the monthly magazine Art Voices in which he rehabilitated Young’s aesthetic. He presented Young as one of the principal representatives of a current that he himself was gradually constructing: the Theatre of Mixed Means (Kostelanetz 1966). Kostelanetz campaigned for the use of that name instead of happening. The latter term, Kostelanetz argued, created after the works of Allan Kaprow, referred to unplanned results that characterized only certain branches of the movement. By contrast, the concept of Theatre of Mixed Means isolated the movement’s central feature: the use of elements as varied as music, dance, sculpture, and film (23).
To make the connection between Young’s work and theater, Kostelanetz focused not on the word pieces mentioned by Kirby but rather on The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, from Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. This
