proposed an approach to Young’s work that moved away from a strict musical reading. He himself was unconvinced that the musical meaning of Young’s sound would be relevant to the audience. He preferred a theatrical conception of Young’s work. Thus, according to the critic, Young’s precursor was no longer so much Cage as Antonin Artaud. Like the latter, Young exploited electronic sensorial overload to move his audience. Lacking a greater openness to the sensorial qualities of art, he continued, the audience or the critic, indifferent or scandalized, could not properly grasp Young’s work.
In 1967 Kostelanetz confirmed his admiration for Young in Perspectives of New Music, where he wrote an entire article castigating his colleagues in music literature for their incompetence, ignorance, and nepotism (125–26). In between two sections of criticism, he reiterated his interest in Young’s piece The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which he professed to “enjoy and admire as mixed-means theatrical events in which the composer’s ‘notes’ are a partial contribution to the total experience” (123–24).
Young’s Mixed Means
In 1968, these “mixed-means theatrical events” were precisely the subject of Kostelanetz’s book The Theatre of Mixed Means. The “genre” forged by the critic (xii) brought together artists as well-known as Cage, Halprin, Robert Rauschenberg, Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Ken Dewey, Young, Robert Whitman, and the USCO collective; it also constituted “the most interesting recent development in American theatre” (xi). In this work, Kostelanetz finally distanced himself from critiques he made in The New American Arts: “My opinion . . . was based upon inadequate research, some unfortunate experience, and a bias toward the theatre of literature I had learned about in college. Since then, I have seen many more examples of mixed-means performances, most of which pleased and excited me considerably” (xii). Kostelanetz explained his past error as a result of having “split the critical work into categories—cinema, fiction, dance, poetry, painting, theatre, and music,” whereas “so much that is currently artistically advanced today straddles, if not transcends, these traditional divisions” (xii–xiii). Since the publication of The New American Arts in 1965, the work of performance studies advocates had clearly made an impact.
In his portrayal of Young, Kostelanetz relied on the writings of Cardew (1964, 1966), Yates (1967), Johnston (1964), and Jean Vanden Heuvel (1966). But the conclusions he drew about Young were very different from theirs. Cardew had placed Young’s work within chance music and linked the composer to serialism, while for Johnston and Vanden Heuvel his music was a hallucinatory experience inspired by the East, and for Yates it was a ritual-harmonic experience that was “deliberately unmetrical or out of phase” (Yates 1967, 248). Kostelanetz, however, translated Young’s aesthetic in other terms, framed by other conceptions. For him Young was, without a doubt, one of the representatives of a new Theatre of Mixed Means; his piece The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys figured “among the most exciting theatrical presentations” (Kostelanetz 1968, xii). Kostelanetz’s high praise for Young elevated his own concept, even as he subtly drew on the works that preceded him.
He returned to earlier observations regarding Young’s serial training with Stein and Stockhausen, Young’s electronics experience with Stockhausen as well as with Richard Maxfield, and his interest in classical Indian and Japanese music (184).8 In his interview with Young, he also brought in the composer’s first music experiences and his involvement with jazz in the 1950s.9 Indeed, we learn, as a saxophonist Young had made the rounds of clubs for a time with such figures as Billy Higgins and Don Cherry. Subsequently, however, he was no longer interested in the genre except “from a listening and speaking point of view” (187). Although his high school ambition was to break through in jazz, he gave it up in favor of “more serious composition” (187). Jazz was merely a biographical detour. Young was a skilled artist, an educated composer who could discuss and theorize on his work—work in which, regardless of what the critics said, all sensual reference was banished. Extreme volumes were simply a means of putting sound under a microscope, not a condition for hallucinatory bodily experiences or even a provocation.
Ultimately, the other aesthetics that Young subsequently touched on amounted to biographical detours as well. Webern drew Young away from jazz at the end of the 1950s. The discovery of classical Indian and Japanese music enabled him to turn his back on the twelve-tone technique. Cage’s aesthetic offered him another exit: Young’s pieces from 1959 and 1960 were in large part the product of the “immediate impact” of his exposure to Cage’s music (194). This discovery led to The Tortoise, a “performance” in which Young and his associates chanted a chord “of intrinsically infinite duration, amplified to the threshold of aural pain” (212). The demonstration has reached its destination.
On reading Young’s interview, however, we find that the nature of his connection to theater remains nebulous. What interested Young above all were the sound and the manifestation of its harmonic components (197), much more than the centrality of the performer, the audience, and their environment evoked by Kirby or the “multi-sensory involvement” and theatrical mixed means mentioned by Kostelanetz (184, 183). Moreover, Young did not fit within any preexisting movement: “The Theatre of Eternal Music is establishing a tradition of its own,” he asserted (216).
The thirty-five pages of analysis and interview with Young, unprecedented at the time, formed part of a work attempting to build this new Theatre of Mixed Means. The cultural establishment, however, greeted them with an indifference similar to Kostelanetz’s own vis-à-vis that group in Perspectives of New Music the year before. His book received almost no reviews in periodicals that were still rigidly divided among theater, music, and poetry. The existence of a genre that would shatter these “traditional forms of classification” (xiii) was not discussed further or adopted, at least in the short term. The Theatre of Mixed Means remains merely a book written in 1968 by Kostelanetz.10
DREAM MUSIC
In the period when, almost simultaneously, Cardew, Hitchcock, the New York art critics, and Kostelanetz seized on Young’s work—portraying it in contrasting, if not contradictory, ways—the composer too strove to define his own music. He did so in a series of texts collected in Selected Writings, published by Heiner Friedrich in Munich (Young and Zazeela 1969).11 The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys appears regularly at the center of his writings, but in a completely different framework from that designed by Kostelanetz to support his theatrical conception of Young’s work. In fact, the composer refers more often to Dream Music and Dream House. And although Dream House incorporates luminous creations by Young’s wife, the light artist Marian Zazeela, in Young’s writings it is above all a place that holds sound. His music, Young asserted, constituted “a radical departure from European and even much Eastern music” (15). The cards were reshuffled once more.
Young maintained that the foundation of this music was harmony: “not European harmony,”12 but that which emerged via harmonics “when any simple fundamental is produced” (5). This harmony was heard even before humans made music. The drone was thus the first sound, and dream houses were those places where the drone could be ceaselessly (re)incarnated for tens of thousands of years. This music could thus be played eternally, “just as the Tortoise has continued for millions of years past” (16). The music was produced by sine wave oscillators that generated a continuous live electronic sound environment and a series of chants that added other frequencies (11).
As opposed to Kostelanetz, who, to develop his mixed-means genre, emphasized the hybrid nature of the composer’s work, Young underlined its sonic nature. Even so, since 1965 Zazeela’s work in the piece had acquired its own importance (13). The visual dimension was indeed present, notably in The Tortoise, which Young sometimes defined as “a total environmental set of frequency structures in the media of sound and light” (11): the work combined the dissemination of sinusoidal signals and chants with the installation of “floating sculptures” and “dichroic
