major new development in musical history”—evoked above all, in her view, the musical stasis of the East, or even of Morton Feldman’s work (14). Nevertheless, the fact that a New York art critic was attentive to Young’s music was hardly insignificant.
A year later another art critic, Barbara Rose—a regular contributor to Art International, Artforum, and (as Johnston would also become, some years later) Art in America—established a clear connection between Young’s music and the visual arts.5 Rose, at that time married to the painter Frank Stella, whom she helped to become one of the great representatives of pictorial minimalism, wrote “ABC Art,” an essay devoted to a “new sensibility” (1965, 58), in which she traced its lineage.6 For Rose this “new sensibility,” whose “blank, neutral, mechanical impersonality contrasts so violently with the romantic, biographical abstract expressionist style which preceded,” had taken root in the work of Kazimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp, whose procedures “radically altered the course of art history.” For some, we learn, this sensibility went by the name of minimal art. Rose borrowed the term from the philosopher Richard Wollheim, who had written about it a few months earlier (Wollheim 1965). Indeed, she shared a number of his views: if the public resisted this art, it was essentially because of “the spectator’s sense that the artist has not worked hard enough or put enough effort in his art” (Rose 1965, 58). Although these works were perceived as inferior, their art content was “intentionally low.” She quoted John Ashbery: “What matters is the artists’ will to discover, rather than the manual skills” (58). If visual artists such as Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Richard Artschwager, and Andy Warhol owed a debt to Kazimir Malevich or Marcel Duchamp, then dancers and composers—for they also participated in the movement—were all indebted to Cage. Rose considered Young one of these composers, or even the only one. His Dream Music concerts, which lasted several days, could be likened to Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963), as well as to Satie’s music, in particular his Vexations of 1893. This aesthetic of experimentation and inertia, Rose added, “seems applicable to a certain amount of avant-garde activity of the moment” (65).
To which part of the avant-garde? We do not find out. Nor would we find out when John Perreault, art critic for the Village Voice and Arts Magazine, followed in the footsteps of Johnston and Rose three years later. Perreault (1968), too, discusseed Young’s work. He borrowed a number of analytical elements from the two critics:7 the influence of Cage and Duchamp, as well as that of the East, in particular.8 He also took up the link between music and the visual arts—the unchanging sound of Young’s pieces, he wrote, invited the listener to an aesthetic experience resembling that of painting (29)—but he likewise did not extend his argument to encompass other artists. This music, which he called “mono-tonal,” in reference to monochromes, was Young’s alone.9 That same year Lucy Lippard, another critic associated with Art Forum, Art International, and Art in America, and also the wife of another minimal artist, Robert Ryman, made her contribution in the Hudson Review (1968). There she associated Young with the visual art of Larry Poons. But for Lippard it was not a question of “minimalism” or “ABC Art,” but rather “reject art.”
The attempt to translate Young’s aesthetic in terms of visual art and to integrate the composer with pictorial minimalism surely helped to form his cultural cachet in the 1960s New York art scene (just as it helped, by invoking the figure of a prominent composer, to reinforce the foundations of the pictorial movement). But this attempt did not extend beyond his own work, which was regularly portrayed as that of a former neo-Dadaist converted to the musical charms of the East (see esp. Perrault 1968).
4. 1967
GIANTS?
What did contemporary American music mean at the twilight of the 1960s? What ideas were established on the subject at the time? Having considered this question for the beginning of the decade (chapter 1), let us now look at where matters stood some months after Cardew’s article on the “giant” Young appeared in the November 1966 issue of the Musical Times.
The American contemporary musical landscape had changed since the beginning of the 1960s. Seven years had passed; new musicians, new composers and their works had been grafted onto the stock. But more than that, if we look closely, we see that the foundations of the former landscape, which had seemed so stable, had shifted. It seems, for example, that Cage’s position and the place of popular music had perhaps been ill-defined in the former cultural panorama.
MUSIC IN A NEW FOUND LAND
In 1964, Cage’s name—the Cage of chance and indeterminacy—was inscribed in gold letters in Music in a New Found Land, a book by Wilfrid Mellers, a composer, prolific author, and head of the music department at the University of York.1 The recent importance of Cage’s aesthetic in American music was not the only new fact that Mellers presented; his work also emphasized the notion that popular music constituted one of the country’s most significant musical features. The second part of Music in a New Found Land is thus devoted to “the world of commerce” (237), encompassing the jazz of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane, as well as George Gershwin’s musical comedies and Leonard Bernstein’s musical dramas. According to Mellers’s 1964 account, the image of the previous decade’s music as portrayed by others had subtly changed. Indeed, he was not content merely to transmit the more or less established conceptions of authors such as Chase (1955); he slightly modified their nature. Previous authors had omitted Cage’s aleatoric and indeterminate work; Mellers corrected their “error.” He also established the dominant place of that “world of commerce” that many authors had left out.
In 1964, when Mellers published his book, the fine adjustments he had made to the portrait of the musical landscape were as yet valid only for him, along with his publishers, Barrie & Rockliff in London and Alfred A. Knopf in New York. The predominant place he accorded to Cageian chance and indeterminacy, as well as to popular music over the course of the 1950s, needed to be confirmed by others before it could firmly take root. And for other authors to take up Mellers’s views, he needed to incite their interest. That is precisely what happened over the following years: in the Musical Times, for example, Peter Dickinson, the “pro-Cageian” theorist and composer, delighted in seeing his mentor appear in Mellers’s book (1964, 660). While most other authors, Dickinson wrote, had quite simply left Cage’s recent developments in the shadows, Mellers finally treated it “seriously.” Dickinson’s was but one declaration of support among others: little by little, thanks to their validation by other authors, the paradigms presented in Music in a New Found Land would become staples of contemporary musical thought.2
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WITH YOUNG
In 1967, Young’s position in American music was similar to that of Cage a bit earlier: his “greatness” was self-evident only in the eyes of certain people, namely Cardew and a few New York art critics. They were, at least, almost the only ones to have publicly affirmed that view. For that claim to gain wider recognition, Cardew had to incite the interest of other protagonists, who would then adopt and transmit his conceptions. As we have already seen, Cardew did so through his students and collaborators over the last third of the 1960s. But what was the situation beyond his circle of initiates?
Prior to 1967, Young appears to have attracted little interest among other authors. The ninth edition of The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians by the musicologist Oscar Thompson (1964),3 one of the most complete and popular music encyclopedias,4 makes no mention of Young in 1964. The same is true of the fourth edition of Our American Music by John Tasker Howard the following year (1965), even though its aim was to give an almost exhaustive history and to include recent music developments in the United States, particularly in popular music.5 In 1966, when William Austin presented an overview of music since Debussy, published by Norton, he likewise made no place for Young.6 The most interesting developments in American music were, according to Austin, to be found in the compositions of Walter Piston, Henry Cowell, Roger Sessions, and Elliott Carter (442). Austin’s work marked a milestone;