the composer maintained, by producing slight air currents, for example, that subtly shifted the mobiles and the luminous frequencies (14). This description meshed well with the theatrical genre of Kostelanetz, who was unsure that the musical meaning of Young’s sound would be relevant to the audience (Kostelanetz 1966, 23).
At the end of the 1960s The Tortoise was the subject of at least three different readings (not including the various approaches to Young’s complete works): a strictly musical and harmonic reading, by Hitchcock in the Musical Quarterly; a theatrical one, by Kostelanetz in his writings; and finally Young’s own, focusing first on the sonic aspects and then on the visual ones. In all three cases, conceptions clashed: music versus theater, European harmony versus natural harmonics, and so on. The more the New York composer’s work was studied, the less any consensus on the content and meaning of his music seemed possible.
Sidebar 2
Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.
When the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside.
The composition may be any length but if an unlimited amount of time is available, the doors and windows may be opened before the butterfly is turned loose and the composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away.
La Monte Young, Composition 1960 #5, in Young and Mac Low (1963).
6. Taking Sides over a New Medium
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
At the end of the 1960s, serial music and the developments in so-called aleatoric or indeterminate music that arose in the wake of Cage’s works continued to divide the contemporary landscape outlined by the music establishment. Indeed, Young’s music was often read and understood according to one orientation or the other. Meanwhile, however, a medium that many authors ignored had recently begun to take shape as a genre in its own right: electronic music. Apart from the writings of Schaeffer ([1952] 2012), Stockhausen (in his journal Die Reihe, since 1955), and Cage himself (1961), little had been published on the subject. Even then, as Robert Emmet Dolan attests in Music in Modern Media (1967), most of those works focused on technical considerations. In 1968, however, Hugh Davies published the Répertoire international des musiques électroacoustiques, a work that sought to inventory the production of electronic music at the time. Surprisingly, it associated Young with the movement, whereas critics up to that point had conceived the evolution of his music in quite different spheres. Davies’s inventory describes certain of his Compositions from 1960 as “electronic creations” and characterizes The Tortoise as an “amplified” work. Young was in fact an electronic musician, according to Davies, and he was, moreover, far from being the only musician to be recruited by the defenders of the medium. New names appeared in articles and works devoted to the subject. Among many others, we note especially Terry Riley and a composer named Steve Reich. What is the history of this “alternative” reading of Young’s work? How could a conception so far from what had been said about the composer up to that point have emerged at the end of the 1960s and, moreover, firmly take hold over the following years? By exploring the network formed around the writings of those who championed the electronic medium, we begin to see how.
ELECTRONIC CREATIONS
When Davies published the Répertoire international des musiques électroacoustiques (1968b), he had already spent at least four years campaigning for recognition of the genre. In 1964 he published “A Discography of Electronic Music and Musique Concrète.” Between 1964 and 1966, he succeeded Cardew as Stockhausen’s assistant, and in 1967, when Cardew was named professor at the Royal Academy of Music, he became the director of the electronic music studio at Goldsmiths’ College (University of London). At that point it had been one year since Cardew mentioned Young’s work in “One Sound” (1966) and even longer since he had been organizing concerts of the American composer’s work in London. In 1968, pieces by Young, Cardew, and Davies were featured in a concert series in the capital (see Musical Times 109, no. 1499 [January 1968]: 94). That same year, Davies founded his own group, as Cardew had done with AMM. But unlike AMM, Davies’s group, Gentle Fire, was “electronic” (Davies 2011, 53).1 Davies was indeed an electronic musician; he said so loud and clear in the Musical Times, where he also announced his intention to promulgate these new sounds, which he himself represented, in England (Davies 1968a).
Davies’s mission in publishing the Répertoire was to encompass “all the electronic music ever composed in the almost twenty years since composers first began to work in this medium” (1968b, iv).2 Included among these pieces are 2 Sounds from 1960, described as a “realization by Terry Riley and La Monte Young” (169, 239), along with Young’s Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. and Composition 1960 #9 (also from 1960) and “electronic realizations” by Young (212, 218, 239). The electronic realizations, we read, were performed by a group called the Theatre of Eternal Music. That ensemble, we also learn, performed a series of “amplified” works by the composer, such as The Second Dream of High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (1962), Studies in the Bowed Disc (1963), and The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964). While his colleague Cardew was presenting Young’s work in connection with Stockhausen’s theory of statistical fields, Davies focused instead on Young’s medium of communication. In so doing he subtly modified the nature of Young’s work, turning Young into one of the representatives of this new movement that he sought to promote.
Riley’s individual works, regularly seen in conjunction with Young’s in London concert announcements, also appear in Davies’s book. Davies includes his Concert for Two Pianists and Five Tape Recorders, from 1960 (177), and the piece I Can’t Stop, from 1966, which Davies labels “pop” (220). He also lists a “jazz” piece by Riley, Shemooshe (from 1966), as well as Dorian Reeds (from 1965), which he calls a “tape feedback loop” (220). In the Répertoire, Young and Riley stand alongside a good number of New Yorkers, notably Tony Conrad, Dick Higgins, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Cage. Among them we also find the name Steve Reich. Four of Reich’s works from 1966–67 are cited but not described: Come Out, Melodica, Saxophone Phase, Four Pianos. and Buy Art Buy Art (220).
In the months following its publication, Davies’s work—copublished by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales of l’ORTF (the French public radio and television agency) in Paris, the Independent Electronic Music Center in New York, and MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London—won recognition as an authority, eliciting the interest of many champions of electronic music (Emmerson and Smalley 2001). It was reprinted, with no added commentary, in one of the pioneering journals in the field, Electronic Music Review. Meanwhile, Davies took part in another publication that was to become equally indispensable: A Bibliography of Electronic Music, by Lowell M. Cross (1968). It included The Anthology of Chance Operations by Young and Jackson Mac Low (1963), which contained both Young’s and Riley’s works (121). Two years later Davies furthered his campaign, this time working outside the confines of the musicological establishment. He contributed to the electronic music discography in the summer 1970 issue of BMI: The Many Worlds of Music (Frank 1970). In particular, Davies added works by Cage, Ichiyanagi, Maxfield, and Pauline Oliveros, as well as by Riley (Reed Streams [1965], A Rainbow in a Curved Air and Poppy No Good and the Phantom Band [1969]) and Reich (Come Out, It’s Gonna Rain [1965] and Violin Phase [1967]).
ELECTRONIC MUSIC REVIEW AND THE COMPOSER
Among the earliest defenders of the genre that Davies helped to forge in the late 1960s was Robert Moog, who had recently invented the eponymous synthesizer, and Reynold Weidenaar, an electronic music composer (Kostelanetz 2001, 659). Together the two published the Electronic Music Review, which reprinted Davies’s Répertoire in 1968, marking the first appearance of Young, Riley,
