of the great figures of the future of American music. Thus Dickinson, from the pulpit of the Musical Times, accorded Cage the merit of posterity.
“LAMONT” YOUNG
The following year, Young’s name appeared in another pillar of the British musical press: Tempo. Cardew mentioned him in an essay on his own compositional ideas titled “Notation: Interpretation, etc.” (Cardew 1961a). At that time, the journal Tempo belonged to the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, with contributions that notably established certain contemporary composers whose works it published and whose views the journal featured (see esp. Blaikley et al. 2001). These composers were Erwin Stein, Anthony Payne, Smalley, and Alexander Goehr. Cardew, the young British performer and composer newly returned from Cologne, where he had assisted Stockhausen, would now be part of that group. He had attracted the attention of Tempo, which “has always prided itself,” as evidenced here, on “its scrutiny of contemporary music of every school” (“Notes: Tempo and the ‘New’ Music” 1961).
From 1961 on, when Cardew presented his “remarks” on music for Tempo, they effectively became “an important statement of practice and belief” (“Notes” 1961). The interests of the musician and the journal proved mutually beneficial: Tempo laid claim to a prominent composer’s work and enriched its exploration of the avant-garde; Cardew enjoyed the journal’s support and strengthened his position in the landscape of contemporary music. While Cardew relied on this powerful ally to defend his own conceptions, he also relied on an aesthetic that was gaining authority: that of John Cage. Indeed, it was partly in line with the American composer that his British counterpart tended to position his own work. And by mentioning the work of a certain “Lamont [sic] Young” in his twelfth numbered remark (Cardew 1961a, 25–26), he gave Young the leverage of association with Tempo and Cage, as well as his own support, gradually recognized by the music establishment.
In Cardew’s twelfth remark, in contrast to what Dickinson had implied the year before (1960), Young emerged as the leader among those who placed “more emphasis on the human aspects of notations,” preceding Cage, Wolff, Earle Brown, or Feldman (Cardew 1961a, 26). For Cardew, this quality of Cage’s music was not even subject to discussion; it constituted a fact, as well as the unifying thread among the music of American composers such as Young. By associating his own aesthetic with Young’s, Cardew underlined the same quality in the music he composed. This music, we also read, largely consisted of abandoning the predetermination of the traditional system of music notation. “The relation between musical score and performance cannot be determined,” proclaimed Cardew (1961a, 22), who from then on would incessantly defend the idea of creative notation. The “graphic score” marks the culmination of Cardew’s struggle for the performer’s liberation from the constraints of notation: to that end, he composed Treatise from 1963 to 1967.
IN RE
Meanwhile, Cardew continued to promote Young’s aesthetic. In 1962 he wrote an article on the composer in the magazine New Departures, for which he was the music editor. That article, titled “In re La Monte Young,” presented Young’s Compositions 1960 #1, 3, 6, 7, and 10 in the form of several lines of instructions to be given to the performer (see sidebar 1). He thus offered the first illustration of Young’s works.
The article gave a glowing report on a series of works by Young: Poem (1960) was his most interesting piece, “a long and technical instruction manual”;5 while he saw X for Henry Flynt (1960) as an “ill-intentioned but salutory insult.”6 Young’s work was in no way an exhibitionistic act, Cardew wrote; it demanded all the performer’s resources (Cardew 1962, 75). In addition to the music’s emphasis on the human aspects of notation and its Cageian roots, Cardew introduced a new term relevant to the assessment of Young’s music: the performer’s competence. From Tempo to New Departures, Cardew solidified Young’s place in the musical landscape, while also laying the foundations for his own musical discourse.
He soon moved from theory to practice, expanding his campaign to promote Young’s music by actively participating in the organization of concerts that celebrated the music of the American composer as well as his own. Two announcements appeared in the Musical Times in 1963 and 1964: Young’s works were to be performed at the University of London and at the theater of the American embassy.7 For both concerts Cardew was one of the performers, and he presented his own works as well. But at that time it appears that Cardew was not yet satisfied with the fruit of his efforts. In September 1964, he devoted an article to the works of Cage and Merce Cunningham. Here again he brought up Young, reproaching the “more powerful pundits of musical taste” for “unwaveringly” rejecting or ignoring the New Yorker’s work. It was nonetheless enjoyed by audiences, he wrote (1964, 659), thus endowing a future ally with authority.
ONE SOUND
Two years after this remonstrance in 1964, Cardew was named a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music. No longer was he an unknown in the eyes of the British music establishment. Besides his columns in the Musical Times and Tempo, his name—as an author, a translator of musicological works, and especially a composer—had appeared in Music & Letters, the Musical Quarterly, and Notes. In 1966 he published “One Sound: La Monte Young” in the Musical Times, including a biographical sketch of the composer and an analytical overview of his music. In this article Cardew sought to enshrine new facts: Young was indeed a great figure in music, of the same caliber as Stockhausen, as guaranteed by a recognized musicologist and composer addressing the music world through an eminent journal that aimed to cover the most recent developments in music. Since 1960, thanks especially to Cardew, his pronouncements, and his concerts, Young’s music was indeed part of the contemporary musical landscape.
The status that Cardew accorded to Young in 1966 was further bolstered by new arguments. Even the inevitable influence of serial music was summoned: Young had studied with Leonard Stein (Cardew 1966, 959). In addition to being taught by the well-known former assistant to Schoenberg (Morgan 2001), he benefited from Stockhausen’s teachings in Darmstadt in 1959. Moreover, although “it was difficult for the two composers—both ‘giants’ of new music as it has turned out—to find a level of communication,” Cardew asserted, “there must have been some important interchange of a non-verbal kind” (959). Thus, Cardew wrote, “Stockhausen’s Piano Piece IX [is] a weak, aesthetic version of the piece For Henry Flynt—and conversely the complex manipulations of random number tables that constitute the groundwork of La Monte’s early pieces surely owe something to the ‘statistical field’ theory that Stockhausen was elaborating at the time” (959). Vision by Young (1959), Cardew continued, was based on the use of a “random number book” (959), while Poem relied on an evolution of the same methods: the work now included any type of activity, whether it involved sound or not. Indeed, according to Cardew, that was what accounted for the connection between the “complex early compositions” and the “utter simplicity” of subsequent works by Young (959).8
Through Cardew’s analysis, the works became the fruit of mutual exchanges: Stockhausen borrowed repetitions from Young, while Young borrowed the manipulations of number tables from Stockhausen. Although Cardew did not make it explicit, he seemed to justify Young’s passage from the complex to the simple by the fact that Young, partly thanks to Stockhausen and his statistical fields, concentrated on a complex form of numerical randomness; this randomness led him to include any activity, so that “all being and happening” finally came down to “a single performance,” and thus to simplicity (959). And if Young was impressed by Stockhausen, he impressed the German composer as well, Cardew asserted. That declaration, coming from someone who associated with both composers in Darmstadt, is hardly insignificant, which is perhaps why Cardew did not need to explain how this exchange between the “giants” took place. Against the new support from serialists (Stein and Stockhausen), Cardew ultimately pitted Cage,
