1968, in the journal’s seventh issue, the composer Roger Reynolds continued the work of positioning Young in the electronic genre. At that time Reynolds was known for having founded the group ONCE with Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma (Sollberger 2001) and for conducting the interview in which Cage expressed his admiration for Young. Reynolds, like Davies, was also known as an electronic musician (see, in particular, Clarke 1965). In an article for the Electronic Music Review, “It(’)s Time” (1968), he contributed to the association of The Tortoise with electronic music. Young’s connection to the genre solidified—and so did Reich’s. In the same issue of the journal, Tod Dockstader wrote about a compilation titled New Sounds in Electronic Music (1967), in which Reich’s piece Come Out appeared alongside compositions by Maxfield and Oliveros (Dockstader 1968, 33).
In June 1969, a year after Electronic Music Review published its final issue on the East Coast, The Composer made its debut on the West Coast. The journal was published at the instigation of David Cope, who was one of the editors along with Allen Strange, among others. The journal’s aim was to “establish the elements of dialogue between the factions (radical and moderate) of those individuals concerned with the craft and art of creating with sound” (see The Composer 1, no. 1 [1969]: 3). As the articles and reports that made up the journal’s first issue suggest, this “creat[ion] with sound” essentially meant machine-assisted creations. The journal was published for six years, until 1975. In the course of The Composer’s fifteen issues, Young, Riley, and Reich were among the many who appeared in its pages. There Reich was sometimes associated with “live electronics” or cited among the composers for “solo ensemble” whose pieces “use a combination of live and pre-recorded music” (Turetzky 1970, 67).
MAGNETIC TAPE
Although the connection between electronic music and composers such as Young, Riley, and Reich did not amount to much in 1970—an inventory, a bibliography, and mentions in two journals—a 1972 book by Allen Strange provided a bit more support. At the time Strange had just been named professor and director of the electronic music studios at San Jose State University (Ruppenthal and Patterson 2001). His book Electronic Music was published by William C. Brown Company (1972), the publisher of New Directions in Music by David Cope, a work that associated Riley with “live electronics” groups (1971, 48). Here, instead of offering an aesthetic discussion of electronic music, Strange opted to present different techniques used by a series of composers representing the genre. Unlike his colleague Cope, Strange mentioned neither Riley’s manipulation of electronics in live performances nor Young’s “electronic creations” that Davies had inventoried four years before. He did, however, discuss Reich, whom he described as the composer making the most imaginative use of tape loops (1972, 120).4
The year that Strange’s monograph came out, Herbert Russcol published his own introduction to electronic music, The Liberation of Sound (1972). Russcol relied especially on the works of Lowell Cross (1967) and Davies (1968). Unlike them, however, he saw Young not as an electronic musician but rather as a representative of mixed-media composition, as Salzman (1967) and Kostelanetz (1968) had also seen him. Young, we read, was one of the figures who had recently opened the borders of music (Russcol 1972, 114). The old divisions, particularly between “classical” and “popular” music, were coming down, thanks to the general availability of electronic materials that were now used in both (115). The composer whom Russcol associated most with electronic music was Reich, with Violin Phase and It’s Gonna Rain, in particular (220–21)—works that recalled Riley’s In C, he wrote, and that “allow us to hear things that ordinarily escape us—rather as a microscope enlarges tiny fragments and reveals hidden beauties that we could not otherwise behold” (221).
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
In 1973 Elliott Schwartz helped to further interest in the electronic movement with his book Electronic Music: A Listener’s Guide (1973). Schwartz was a graduate of Columbia University and had studied and worked with Otto Luening, Henry Brant, and Edgard Varèse. In the mid-1960s he began composing works that made use of tapes as well as aleatoric instruments, games, and processes (see Godfrey 2002 and www.schwartzmusic.com). According to Electronic Music, in their lengthy works Reich and Riley invited the audience to participate, or at least to leave behind their passive position of listeners ensconced in their armchairs (165). The same was true with Erik Satie in Vexations, Cage in HPSCHD, and Young and David Rosenboom, the author asserted. The integration of the audience into the work was what these composers had in common, wrote Schwartz, who tended to do likewise in his own compositions (Godfrey 2002).5 The audience’s freedom was also a condition for the success of a long composition such as In C: if the audience was constrained by “artificial concert-hall restrictions,” its only reaction was to flee (Schwartz 1973, 166). Furthermore, audience participation was partly what brought Riley and Cardew closer to popular music (174). Indeed, Schwartz wondered whether Riley was classical or pop. The question was all the more pertinent for works such as A Rainbow in Curved Air, Poppy No Good and the Phantom Band, and Church of Anthrax (with John Cale in 1971); these electronic works, even more experimental or avant-garde than In C, were categorized as “pop-rock” by certain critics. Classical and popular had lost their traditional meaning, Schwartz argued, especially because serious and popular music coincided in the electronic medium. Although Reich did not figure among the standard-bearers for the style, he was included with the avant-gardists who married electronic music with live music—in particular those with an “utterly perfect” grasp of the idea of the echo in Echoi (1960–63) by Lukas Foss.
In the early 1970s, many composers were enlisted in the effort to win recognition for electronic music. Young, whose work had been used to support the foundations of performance art as well as the validity of a new movement in the visual arts, was among these composers. So were Riley and Reich, who had received little mention before then. At the time, however, the general public knew of no connection between the composers. At most a connoisseur might be aware that Young and Riley had collaborated in the Theatre of Eternal Music or that Riley and Reich had worked together in the context of the premiere of In C in 1964. All three may have been electronic musicians, but dozens of other composers made use of the same medium. Soon, however, another author would postulate that the music establishment had overlooked a major detail: all three were part of the same New York Hypnotic School, which had very little to do with electronic music. This author was Tom Johnson.
7. The New York Hypnotic School
FOUNDING A MOVEMENT
By the beginning of the 1970s, Young, Riley, and Reich had been active on the American musical scene for almost ten years.1 Critics and musicologists followed their work closely. Although many of them had celebrated the works of each of these composers, few had established a clear connection between these works. At most, the composers were discussed together in analyses of electronic music (as well as in a few articles in the New York press, such as Henahan [1969a; 1969b; 1969c] and Davis [1970]). Not everyone, however, recognized their inclusion in the electronic movement. As we have seen with Young, very different, sometimes contradictory, readings of a composer’s work coexisted. One New York author had nonetheless recently declared that a single aesthetic united these composers. That author was Tom Johnson, who worked for the popular newsweekly the Village Voice. For him, they formed together the New York Hypnotic School. In 1972, he even asserted that “the term define[s] one of the more important areas of new music. [It] should refer primarily to La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. . . . They all have the same basic concern, which can be described as flat, static, minimal, and hypnotic” (1972, repr. in Johnson 1991, 29).2 Far from being discouraged by the profusion of divergent readings of the composers’ works or by the complete absence of a proven relation among them, the critic outlined his own stylistic genealogy: “There is a direct line of influence from Young, to Riley, to Steve Reich and Phil Glass,” he claimed (1973, repr. in Johnson 1991, 56). This genealogy,
