Kerman denounced Perspectives of New Music for being concerned only with the “new music” of the journal’s collaborators; he was replying to Charles Rosen’s claim that one should listen only to the composer’s perspective to understand a piece of music (Kerman 1963; Rosen 1962). Indeed, it is usual for each journal to favor one style, one school, one tendency, or sometimes even one music publisher’s catalogue. For example, over the course of the 1950s, the Boosey & Hawkes journal Tempo tended to provide a forum for its own composers’ views rather than those of others. In June 1955, when The Score published its twelfth issue, intended as an overview of American music, it presented a panorama that was mixed, to say the least: from Babbitt’s “twelve tones” to Cage’s experimental music, together with the music of “commerce” described by Wilfrid Mellers, the versions of the “American style” sometimes diverged widely.
The development of “commercial music” addressed by Mellers was also covered in music magazines and newspapers of the day: Melody Maker and New Musical Express in Britain, Down Beat in the United States.4 These publications were even less inclined than their scholarly counterparts to synthesize the general state of the music of their time. At best, the reader can glean information on new trends and noteworthy figures within specific genres or territories. The same goes for the music sections in influential US news publications such as the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York Magazine, Newsweek, and the Atlantic. As conventional wisdom would have it, the press is too local, too close to the present, too focused on its subject, too unstable. It is too “human,” lacking the necessary distance to “tell the truth.”
This excursion through the literature demonstrates how difficult it is to understand American contemporary music around 1960. For some, European influence is major; for others it is trivial. The popular is sometimes absent, sometimes celebrated. American music is described sometimes as essentially twelve-tone, sometimes as experimental or electronic. The definitions of the different genres, styles, schools, currents, or tendencies characteristic of North America overlap and intertwine, when they don’t conflict. A certain current may be seen as having given rise to another (or not); it may be connected to another (or not); and a specific composer may sometimes be viewed as part of one current, sometimes another, and sometimes both. For example, we never quite know whether Cage was largely influenced by Schoenberg, whether he created his own American style, or whether he simply had no place to claim in the contemporary music panorama.
But since we must nonetheless try to assemble, almost statistically, a series of constants, we can surely highlight the disappearance or decline of Impressionism, realism, symphonism, and the “neo” movements (-baroque, -classical, -mystical, -primitive, -romantic). We can also note that the twelve-tone technique and its successive developments, whether in electronic or experimental music—the distinction remains difficult to establish—reigned supreme around the world, and partly in North America, and that its developments were fundamentally opposed to the popular currents largely represented by jazz. This imperfect synthesis formed the foundation on which the future history was to be built.
What is minimal music? We asked earlier what the response to this question might be at the turn of the third millennium. We read that for some this music, emblematic of the United States, existed since 1958; for others since 1953 or even since Erik Satie and his Vexations at the end of the nineteenth century. But when we ask what this “minimal music” meant in 1960, we are hard put to respond: we find absolutely nothing on the subject at the time. Nor do we know anything more about the major minimal composers; history had yet to unveil its ways to those who attempted to interpret it. Indeed, perhaps this delay explains the controversy in the early 1970s surrounding a work composed at the beginning of the previous decade by an American named La Monte Young.
2. Taking Root in Modernity
NEW MUSIC
[X for Henry Flynt’s] repeated sound is of the crudest and most undifferentiated kind and nothing else happens.
(Smalley 1967a, 143)
There is also . . . a fascinating section “On the Role of the Instructions in the Interpretation of Indeterminate Music.” This is principally concerned with La Monte Young’s X for Henry Flynt and should be required reading for those critics who dismiss this music with an air of philistine indifference.
(Smalley 1972, 593)
Five years separate these two quotations. Both are by the British musicologist and composer Roger Smalley in the Musical Times. The first is from a letter sent to the journal in which Smalley virulently attacks an article by his colleague Cornelius Cardew on the American composer La Monte Young (Cardew 1966). Smalley calls Young “Lilliputian” and says that his music “annoys” and “bores” him, in particular the piece X for Henry Flynt, which, he asserts, is in no way even “musical” (Smalley 1967a). The second is from an enthusiastic review of a collection of essays, again by Cardew (1971), titled Treatise Handbook, in which X for Henry Flynt has now become a piece of “music.”1 Moreover, Smalley strongly recommends the work to those who denigrate Young’s aesthetic. It is a radical reversal, even more surprising because between 1967 and 1972 X for Henry Flynt, a piece dating to 1960, remained unchanged by the composer: it still consisted of the repetition, at regular intervals and at high volume, of a cluster produced on piano using the forearms. In the Musical Times, through Smalley’s assessments, it seems nonetheless fundamentally different. What happened over the course of the second half of the 1960s? How did Young’s work, widely disparaged at first, turn into “music”? These are the questions we will address here.
“NOT LIKELY TO BECOME MORE THAN A PART OF THE AVANT-GARDE INFLUENCE”
To understand Smalley’s about-face, we must go back to 1960. In June of that year, the name La Monte Young appeared for the first time in the Musical Times. At that time the journal constituted one of the pillars of the institution of British classical music. It had been published for more than a century, giving voice to established authors and composers and addressing the “general reader” as much as the scholar or practicing musician.2 Young’s name came up in a column titled “The Avant-Garde in New York: Spring 1960,” authored by Peter Dickinson (1960), a British composer, pianist, and musicologist newly converted to the aesthetic of Cage, Cowell, and other “leading American composers” (Norrington 1965, 109). When Dickinson published his column in 1960, Cage was not yet, for many, a “leading American composer.” He was only beginning to regain, in the eyes of the music establishment, the credibility he had lost by turning to the music of chance and indeterminacy.3 A handful of American composers (in large part his own students at the New School for Social Research), publishers (such as Edition Peters), institutions (such as Wesleyan University), and theorists (such as Leonard B. Meyer, see esp. 1963) contributed to his recognition over the course of the 1960s.4 Dickinson, on the other side of the Atlantic, also contributed, particularly in the Musical Times. Indeed, his review of a series of concerts given in New York in spring 1960 sought to remind the reader that “whatever aesthetic objections are raised against [Cage’s] music, it is undeniably more human than electronic music, and each performance is unique” (Dickinson 1960, 377).
The “unique” character of each performance of his works was what, according to Dickinson, linked Cage’s music to that of Cardew, Christian Wolff, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Young, whose compositions were also presented in New York in spring 1960. Although the music of these last four was performed with “sensitivity and restraint,” their music faced the same predicament as electronic music: it was “not likely to become more than a part of the avant-garde influence” (Dickinson 1960, 377). We learn nothing more at this point about the aesthetic of the “haphazard” that guided Young and his colleagues: the performer, we read, plays from a “design” that prescribes neither notes nor rhythm. Although the interest that Young and the other three composers elicited was marked by reservations
