as he defined it, quite simply broke with the past (1991, 29). What, then, is the history of Johnson’s extravagant proposal?
THE VILLAGE VOICE
After the contributions of Jill Johnston and John Perreault on Young in the mid-1960s (see chapter 3), the Village Voice regularly mentioned the composer. Riley and Reich were not left out, either. Before Johnson, however, few writers in the Village Voice had attempted to unite them in a single “school.” Although Carman Moore evoked Reich’s “reiterative” work several times (1966; 1967; 1969), he never related it to the stasis of Young’s music or that of Young’s disciple Terry Jennings, on whose work he also commented (1968). Also, unlike Johnston and Perreault, Moore did not develop the analogy with the visual arts; he focused solely on the composers and their music. Like Perreault, however, Moore alluded to their aesthetic connections with jazz, raga, and even rock. The critic—a composer who would become known for incorporating elements of jazz and blues in his own music (Wyatt 2001)—noted as well that the composers shared certain traits with popular music, such as the use of repetition and high volumes.
Thus, in Moore’s writing we find no mention of Cage, the aleatory, or indeterminacy among the future “hypnotics.” Ron Rosenbaum, another critic for the Village Voice, confirmed in 1970 that for years already, Young’s music was no longer seen in the context of Cage, Fluxus, or Dada (6). The composer, we read, no longer needed to incorporate any sound or any gesture in his music to expand its frontiers. The battle had been won long ago. Young’s “Dream Music” now unfolded beyond it, focusing essentially on a single, eternal sound.
At the dawn of the 1970s, Johnson had not yet made the connection between those whom he would soon call the “hypnotics.” When he reviewed Reich’s Drumming on December 9, 1971, one of the rare “long complex piece[s] of new music [to receive] a standing ovation,” he described the performers’ “amazing precision,” the “unity” of the piece, and its “unpretentious climax,” but he did not broach any of the traits that would soon define the “school” to which the composer belonged (1971, repr. in Johnson 1991, 20).3 At the time, the characteristics of Reich’s music were, in Johnson’s writing, shared by numerous other musicians: Alvin and Mary Lucier, whose pieces “all work on a static dynamic plane” (1972, repr. in Johnson 1991, 23); Frederic Rzewski and his repetitive music, simple and regular (1991, 25); Phill Niblock and his “sustained sounds” (1991, 26); Rhys Chatham and his drones (1991, 28); and so on. Indeed, an aesthetic appears to have emerged in Johnson’s chronicles of music in the Village Voice: repetition, stasis, and minimalism were among the criteria uniting these “new musics” for which he had become the ambassador. Nonetheless, in the summer of 1972 the critic still saw only one “hypnotic” musician, strictly speaking, in New York: Philip Glass, a composer whose name the music establishment had barely heard before (1991, 24).
“LA MONTE YOUNG, STEVE REICH, TERRY RILEY, PHILIP GLASS”
In the September 7, 1972, issue of the Village Voice, Johnson published “La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass,” the article that marked the birth of the New York Hypnotic School (repr. in Johnson 1991, 29). The designation had received scant attention in music literature up to that time. Its use had been occasional at best, and hardly complimentary (see especially Henahan 1969c). But for Johnson, the school constituted “one of the more important areas of new music” (Johnson 1991, 29). A typically New York school, it excluded Rzewski, Philip Corner, and David Behrman (because their work did not clearly fit the criteria set by Johnson), as well as Gavin Bryars (since he was British). It was defined by four terms: flatness, stasis, minimalism, and hypnotism. Beyond that, it mattered little whether the music featured traditional scales or not, a regular beat or the absence of rhythmic articulation, acoustic or electronic resources. The music was flat, Johnson explained, because there was no attempt to build to a climax or produce tension and relaxation. It was static because it was nondirectional, even though changes arose throughout its development. It was minimal in that it never evolved very far beyond its starting point. Finally and especially, it was hypnotic, Johnson asserted, because it lulled the listener into a trancelike state. According to Johnson, the music of the New York Hypnotic School was, moreover, easier to listen to than any other contemporary music. It focused not on intellectual devices but on sound itself, making it as accessible to the layperson as to the scholar.
In the two years that followed the September 1972 article, Johnson repeatedly evoked these various traits as they developed toward success—distinctive traits that were never boring, Johnson regularly affirmed—in the work of numerous composers of this new music. This music, however, was still only that of Young and his three colleagues.4 These composers, moreover, completely broke from tradition; their music had nothing to do with either contemporary music or jazz (Johnson 1991, 29).5 If their static, nondeveloping forms had roots anywhere, they were to be found in non-Western music (1973, repr. in Johnson 1991, 35–36).
At the end of 1974, a controversy arose within Johnson’s own writings: until then, “minimalism” had been one aspect among others that characterized the four New York composers, while for him the “minimalists,” strictly speaking, were California composers, such as Harold Budd or Michael Byron (1973, repr. in Johnson 1991, 58–59). These latter, heirs to Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Silvestre Revueltas, and Dane Rudhyar, went “far beyond” the New Yorkers in their processes of sound reduction. Nonetheless, on December 30, 1974, Johnson labeled the music of the New York Hypnotics—with David Behrman now in their ranks—as minimal, further declaring that this minimalism was one of the major currents of new music (1974, repr. in Johnson 1991, 94). Shortly thereafter, this view would be reinforced by the British author Michael Nyman, whose book Experimental Music had just come out in the United States (1974). In that monograph, Nyman too grouped Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass under the “minimalist” label.
The story of Johnson and the Hypnotic School is in some ways a variant of that of Cardew and his ties to Young: after having promoted a typically New York movement deserving of a place in the Western art music tradition, the critic put on his composer hat, largely influenced by the movement he had defended. In 1972 Johnson premiered his Four-Note Opera in New York, a piece whose static and minimal nature the New York Times did not fail to note (Ericson 1972). At the same time, he exhorted music teachers to turn toward the creative possibilities of avant-garde music, publishing two of his pieces in that vein, by way of example, in the Music Educators Journal (Johnson 1972). In 1974 the New York Times described his 1971 composition An Hour for Piano as “meditative.”6 It belongs, we read, within a general movement of “austerity,” employing “modular repetition” and “deliberately limited materials,” in the wake of Reich and Glass (Rockwell 1974a). In 1976, Spaces and Septapede (1969) were described as “free from the concept of climax as a structural necessity” (Burge 1976). These compositions by Johnson, a former student of Morton Feldman, seem to have taken a hypnotic or minimal turn. The opportunity was not slight, as he himself had noted: this music would probably “reach a wider audience than most contemporary music has” (Johnson 1991, 29).
8. Untying the Bonds
PROCESS MUSIC
books by composers, including this one, are probably of most interest to those already interested in the composer’s music.
(Reich 1974, vii)
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