Early Minimalism
and Beyond:
Tony Conrad in
Music, Film, and Video
Beginnings:
A Tracing through Serialism, Cage, pre-Fluxus, and Early Fluxus,
1900-1963.
I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE
TO MAKE MUSIC
WILL CONTINUE AND IN-
CREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS
WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT
CAN BE HEARD. PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS FOR THE SYNTHETIC
PRODUCTION OF MUSIC
WILL BE EXPLORED.
WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.1
The history of music within the Twentieth Century is a project which has been attempted in many other surveys. Given the vaugeness of the definition of “Twentieth Century Music,” which could refer to any number of genres across a multitude of cultures, any complete approach to a survey of music of the Twentieth Century must be futile, if not impossible. Generally, most of these surveys (which usually only cover one genre, such as Twentieth Century high-art music) tend to ignore, or at the least downplay, some of the most important and vital extra-musical aspects of Twentieth Century music: namely that vast musical resources have become available within the last half century, and the implications of the exploitation of these resources has brought about a vast change in the way music is perceived. Indeed, some of these resources, as we shall see later in this chapter, tend to call into question the entire activity implied within in the word “music.” Although the aim of this particular undertaking is not to provide a survey of Twentieth Century music, it is important for us to begin in this chapter with an examination of some of the less lucid entanglements involved in this discussion before proceeding.
For example, with the advent of recording technologies (and subsequent industries), a much, much wider range of musics from around the world, encompassing an expansive magnitude of cultures, has become available not just to a few ethnomusicologists (though they were certainly among the first to take advantage of these aspects of recording technologies), but generally as well to the members of society who can afford such technologies.2 Although, “Let’s face it: Rock and Roll rules the world,”3 another interesting aspect tied to the abundance and proliferation of recording technologies is that the “basic” musical form of Rock and Roll, which Tony Conrad effectively points out is a “reflect[ion of] the European imperial[istic] tradition for one . . . also [as a reflection of] the mainstream of harmonic understanding that was secured in the [West in the] Eighteenth Century,”4 has been grasped by other cultures and re-fashioned, even mutated in a sense, to something quite different from Rock and Roll.5 This kind of cultural fragmentation occurs not only with the so-called “popular” musics, but has occurred in practically all of the forms postulated by theories of cultural hierarchy. What is left is a sort of difficult and complex historical detritus to sort through. However, for the purposes of explicating the moments within which the cultural products of the subject of this project, Tony Conrad, occurred, it is theoretically important to begin with an attempt at a reconstruction of a specific musical culture, that of Western “high-art” music of the Twentieth Century.
Music and the Theory of “Progression”
Realizing a Western conceptualization of what was considered “music” in the early part of the Twentieth Century is essential to understanding the effects which John Cage and the “art movement” known as Fluxus wielded upon this “world” (which was essentially dominated by the European sensibility) in the 1950’s and 1960’s. These two events in particular have an immense resonance for Conrad’s works, although they are by no means definitive in terms of “influence.” Once consolidating this conceptualization, one initially gets the sense that Cage and Fluxus can only be perceived as “radical” forces which broke with the established paradigm, to rush immediately through the gap which they created, and onto a brand new plateau. However, history is of course a bit more complicated than how one initially perceives it.
The beginning decades of the Twentieth Century were a time of musical innovation, despite the intensely culturally conservative environment in which these experiments were carried out. The continent of Europe itself was still a somewhat isolated place, certainly not only one mere aspect of the McLuhan-esque “Global Village” which some feel permeates the current age. Yet technology was laying the groundwork for the present at a tremendous pace. The Industrial Revolution was not limited merely to transportation, manufactured goods, and food processing, for instance, but also developed new ways of communication, which of course spilled (or perhaps trickled) into the production and dispersal of music.
The introduction and reception of modern, Western high-art music, perhaps most famously and graphically illustrated by the riot that occurred at the first performance in Paris of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring6, itself was an indication of a shift (or perhaps the shift itself) in the European sensibility from tonal harmony towards atonality. After centuries in which the forging of an intensive European tradition created within this culture an impression of aesthetic and technological unity, exemplified in the adaptation of the Equal Temperament scale, dodecaphonic music and its most immediate stylistic offspring -- that of Serialism -- probably could not have produced any reaction other than the well-documented shock that it received. Although it is possible that the case for Serialism being as radical a break as, say, Cage could be made, the cultural climate within which Serialism flourished certainly led to the perception that Serialism was the “superior” form to neo-Classicism, able to more properly carry on the European tradition. Indeed, Schoenberg is known to have remarked in July, 1921 after composing in the twelve-tone methodology, “Today I have discovered something which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years,”7 which not only is inherently qualitative in its assessment of European music and its conceptualization of a “legacy” which one “carries,” but also denotes a powerful attachment to the Nineteenth Century conceptualization of nationalism in its assessment of Serialism’s role in the “supremacy” of German music. Ironically enough, it was Adolf Hitler’s extreme distaste for the ultra-modernist tendencies behind Serialism, exemplified in his condemnation and persecution of artists and composers which didn’t fit his German “ideal,” which led Schoenberg to flee Germany for the United States just before World War II.
In a musical culture which gradually discarded aesthetics (and, certainly in the case of tuning systems, the technology which shaped these aesthetics) which did not fit, it is also perhaps surprising that Serialism was so quickly co-opted into the European art-music tradition, becoming the “proper” music to compose by at least the late 1950s or so. However, a musical form which challenged, in a sense, the precepts of Expressionism (and the Serialism which followed) had already taken place in the place of Futurism, embodied by figures like Luigi Russolo (who might not have considered himself, or the other Futurists, composers). Futurism attempted to elevate the noise of the then modern century into music, but was unable to foment a challenge to Serialism and was thus discarded. Indeed, when Futurism’s supposed aesthetic link to Fascism was exposed, it became quite easy to deep-six as a viable movement. Once somehow initiated into the European tradition, the composers who utilized Serialism and atonality also acquired the cultural predisposition of the tradition they now worked freely through. As just a single interesting example of this particular European bias, one of the reasons which certain members of the Fluxus group such as George Maciunas and Henry Flynt, along with Tony Conrad and Jack Smith, picketed Karlheinz Stockhausen’s performance of Originale in New York City on September 8, 19648 was their extreme displeasure at disparaging remarks Stockhausen had made about Jazz, a “low” or “popular” musical form played predominantly by African-Americans, in a 1958 lecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where Flynt and Conrad were enrolled as undergraduates)9 and elsewhere.
Back to the matter at hand: an examination of the musical effects of Serialism may be quite to ambitious for the scope of this chapter, but an explanation of its dominance within music during the earlier part of this century is not. An important presence which helps to explain the position of Serialism is the mythology, in a sense, of progression inherent in the Western (and not strictly European) conceptualization of music. That is, not just strictly in a musical sense (although one sees both the musical and the extra-musical as most definitely related in the terminology of “progression”), but also in an extra-musical sense as well: the understanding that music, as well as the culture that drives it, has a discernible evolution from one form to another; that forms that have been discarded are no longer relevant, necessary, or progressive; and that a certain utopian endpoint can be gleaned from the progressive sensibility. As Conrad declares about the state of this music in the 1950s,
I mean stuff was going on that was incredible, there were all of these myths of how advanced culture was getting in Germany, and in France, . . . and you had this pantheon of composers who were working within the post-dodecaphonic Serialist tradition.
Even James Pritchett, in his The Music of John Cage which fairly obviously concerns itself primarily with musical composition, writes that “in the 1930s, many composers . . . felt that they had to choose between the neo-classicism of Igor Stravinsky and the atonal, predominantly contrapuntal style of Schoenberg.” Quite evident in an examination of Western popular music of the present is this sense of “progression,” of “development.” Even American composers such as Milton Babbitt and Elliot Carter had adopted the stylistic methodology of Serialism, immersing themselves within the European tradition.
However, Michael Nyman specifically constructs an altogether different method of dealing with how in particular John Cage, an American who studied with Schoenberg for a short time at the beginning of his career, regarded Serialism, albeit grounded within quite a negative, possibly misleading viewpoint. He writes in summary that
Cage’s studies with Schoenberg had left him totally unimpressed with the traditional language of music which was organized and articulated by means of pitch and harmony. . . As the power of tonality as an organizing agent gradually weakened more and more, in the early part of the twentieth century other organizing methods were evolved, of which the most important was the serialism of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. But for Cage serialism was not the answer since it ‘provided no structural means, only a method. . . [the] twelve-tone row offers bricks but no plan.’
While all of these things may certainly be true, Nyman offers no explanation as to why Cage would continue to cite Schoenberg as a major influence even in 1980, many years after his own work had effectively dismantled the dominating grip of the Serialists (and some, but not Pritchett, would say of “music” in general). Of course, Cage’s citation might have been in the same spirit as the many other “non-musical” influences (such as Zen Buddhism) on his work, that is, Cage seems to have been more inspired by Schoenberg’s “commitment to music” more than the music itself. However, the radical role which Nyman assigns Cage seems to almost contradict the quotation he cites before the above passage:
I rather think that influence doesn’t go A B C, that is to say from Ives to someone younger than Ives to people still younger, but rather that we live in a field situation in which by our actions, by what we do, we are able to see what other people do in a different light than we do without our having done anything. What I mean to say is that the music we are writing now influences the way in which we hear and appreciate the music of Ives more than that the music of Ives influences us to do what we do.
It seems that Cage’s perceptive comment on influence could be extrapolated as to explain why Nyman decided in his writing to proceed directly to a discussion of Cage’s supposed preoccupation with “silences,” skipping directly over his early, pre-prepared piano percussion work.
The Challenge to “Progression”: Ives, Cage, etc.
The above statement by Cage also totally effectuates the “exception(s) to the rules” inherent in figures such as Ives. The question of Serialism without a doubt raises the issues inherent in any discussion of Cage’s work, but before that point approaches, it is interesting to note that somewhat outside of the cultural (and definitely geographic) location of Europe appeared a precedent for Serialism in the works of the American composer Charles Ives. Nyman does not miss this point, nor do the majority of chroniclers of Twentieth Century music after Cage. The case of Ives has been so well documented that perhaps, again, it is beyond the scope of this particular project. However, it is never not worth noting that Ives does demonstrate that “interesting,” complex music could be written in America. Not only that alone, but also that Ives’ music retained a particular “American” quality through his appropriation of “popular” songs in his works (illustrated to wonderful effect in his Symphony No. 4), which seem to anticipate the later, postmodernist breakdown between the cultural hierarchy of “high”/ “low”/ “popular,” a tendency which has been inherent in almost all American “high” or “serious” music in the latter half of the Twentieth Century.
However, since his name has already surfaced in this chapter almost inadvertently (or maybe not, as well) in its discussion of the dominance of European music in general and Serialism in particular, it is perhaps here where the discussion of John Cage should commence. Cage is most obviously (a quality which this paper sees no need to rise from) the antithesis to the European thesis. The sheer nature of his life, music, and philosophy seems to deny the linear modes of narrative inherent in a historical work. Yet Cage can be perceived in a multitude of ways, and the historical approach while somewhat limiting, seems as good as any to attempt. Tony Conrad very astutely remarks that
The Europeans were so myopic in their connection to the traditions of music that they had this experience in the mid to late Fifties of encountering John Cage, who [it] had turned out had taken a more indirect route, but [had] arrived at a place which was where they were trying to get. And he didn’t even use the principals of dodecaphonic logic, but [had] vaulted right over their position and arrived at a better and more extended analysis of the place of music and of composition without even indulging in the same sort of advanced terminologies and technologies that the Europeans had used.
Although Conrad’s claim that Cage was conceptually where the Europeans desired to be can be eagerly debated (by anyone wishing to debate it), it is true that, after Cage’s music became well-known and his philosophy became (in)famous, that the European paradigm began to shift yet again. Two immediately identifiable results of this shift was the appearance of Musique Concrete in France, and Elektronikmusiche in West Germany, though neither of these developments were definitely quantifiable breaks with Serialism. In the case of Karlheinz Stockhausen, a combination of the methodology of Serialism with the technologies of electronic music were combined to new effect.
However, John Cage’s early career reflects, in retrospect, a few patterns inherent in many others composers of the time. Indeed, Henry Flynt, in his essay “La Monte Young in New York, 1960-1962,” asserts that the radical reputation later attributed to Cage was somewhat his own making:
As one considers Cage’s career, one has to conclude that Cage loved being the renegade of music. Without that charismatic role, he would not have known what to do with himself. He persisted in a professional life which could not be reconciled with his own pronouncements. . . [His music written for a dance company, for instance,] involved upholding a specifically European art-form; it also involved upholding the cooperative distinctness of the European art trades.
Immediately after his initial flirtation with Serialism, Cage became immersed in writing music solely for percussion, which was generally used for dance performances. This immersion isn’t too compelling in and of itself: Henry Cowell had been composing for percussion for years before Cage studied with him, and Edgard (aka Edgar) Varese, a Frenchman who emigrated to New York City in 1915, is regarded as one of the first Twentieth Century composers to write specifically for percussion (most notably in Ameriques, 1922 and Ionisation, 1931) to grasp a higher role than the norm. What distinguishes Cage’s approach to percussion from these two examples is that he employed completely novel methods that directly brought percussion, and thereby sounds, to the fore. His compositions such as the sonically inventive Imaginary Landscapes (the first three were composed from 1939-1942, the remaining two in 1951-1952) and the micro-macrocosmic structural Constructions (1939-1941) were remarkable in that they applied a Serialist-styled methodology to rhythmic structure, combined with an entirely new palette of sounds from “non-musical” instruments. Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939), for instance, utilizes two phonograph turntables playing at variable speeds recordings of test tones as the primary “musical” elements complemented by “cymbal tremelos, the bass strings of a piano played with a soft gong beater, and three piano notes muted with the fingers.” First Construction (in Metal) (1939) combined industrial equipment (such as anvils) with an arsenal of percussion instruments to create a virtual percussion orchestra. The two remaining Imaginary Landscapes utilized a wide range of electronic instruments, and commenced Cage’s first foray into the use of primitive contact miking (through the use of a coil of wire amplified by a phonograph tonearm).
Cage’s greatest achievement in percussion, however, did not come from a particular methodology or from an expansion of the realm of instrumentation. It came in the form of the prepared piano. Preparing the strings of the piano with various devices (screws, bits of rubber, etc.) enabled to Cage to more freely write percussive music for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company by combining the diverse sonic palette of percussion with the compactness and availability of the piano. Although the piano can be thought of as a hybridization of percussion and string instruments, Cage’s preparations (first attempted in Amores, 1943) freed the piano from the rigid tonality of Equal Temperament. Around this time, Cage also began a newfound (but subsequently lifelong) interest in Asian cultures, beginning by delving into a study of Indian philosophy in the mid-Forties, and a later fascination with Zen Buddhism. Again, this was already a tendency in North American composers (such as Colin McPhee, for instance) who wished to distance themselves from the European tradition. Cage’s preoccupation with the East would become one of his major “influences,” and in turn many American composers and musicians from La Monte Young to the Sun City Girls have followed the same path. The resulting sonic break with the European tradition is striking, but not nearly as what would come next.
As early as 1948, Cage had conceived of the idea of a “silent” piece:
I have, for instance, several new desires (two may seem absurd, but I am serious about them): first, to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to the Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 4 [and] 1/2 minutes long -- these being the standard lengths of ‘canned’ music, and its title will be ‘Silent Prayer.’ It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape or fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility.
The essay from which the above was quoted, “A Composer’s Confessions,” also describes his plans for Imaginary Landscape No. 4, in which twelve radios were the only instruments. In 1952, 4’33” premiered in Woodstock, New York. Immediately, the reputation of the piece in which the performer (for any instrument) was instructed to be silent for “fixed lengths: 30”, 2’23”, and 1’40” for a total duration (as given by the title) of 4’33”” spread, inspiring a multitude of disparate activities. The effect of 4’33” on a variety of composers, finally consolidating in the early activities of the Fluxus group, is the focus of the rest of this chapter.
4’33” has been historically described as “the authority of the composer extinguished.” Tony Conrad describes Cage as opening up an entirely new context, a “context of the vacuum that Cage leaves where you have a great sense of aesthetic ambiguity or even abandonment: relativism,” that “John Cage’s work . . . appeared to bring modernism, and the project of an authoritarian musical form based on the sanctity of the score, to a halt.” However, as Henry Flynt points out,
The commentators who enthuse over this piece overlook that modern music is still a going concern and that today’s modern music does not in the least consist in an assortment of little silent pieces. Nor did 4’33” typify Cage’s body of work . . Cage’s ‘slight’ pieces were not the substance of his career; they were postures at the boundaries of his oeuvre.
What 4’33” was, really, was a breach of etiquette relative to the tradition of concert music. It was not infinitely and unsurpassably new and radical; it was not a little bit new and radical; if you had no stake in the tradition, it was something you would not bother to do.
Flynt’s understatement of the radical nature of 4’33” denies that the piece was, in fact, quite a significant breach. His observation is correct in its assessment of Cage’s commitment to such a breach, but denies what is probably the most conspicuous touchstone which set off the activities of those more committed than Cage: namely, the group of artists and composers in and around Fluxus, of which Flynt was associated.
To arrive at that point historically, it might be revealing to catch up with the biographical subject of this project, Tony Conrad. He describes quite vividly his early fascination with music, and how it quickly translated into the quasi-postmodernist breach offered by 4’33”:
And music rendered discoveries. Interesting revelations of an aesthetic nature having to do with the relativism of beauty, for example. Like the way that you can go about liking sounds is so complex and varied. It tells you a lot about other things that are more difficult to analyze socially, like pictures, writing, and so forth. In that sense, music can function more abstractly than writing. You know, it’s hard to just keep writing completely abstract literature because it’s clear that that’s what you’re doing. You can write abstract music and fool everybody. . . I think that the breakdown between so-called high and so-called low cultures, the implementation of an urban cultural model as opposed to a mass cultural model, that this process really changed people’s understanding of where they located themselves. It changed people’s ability to locate themselves culturally within music very early on, which is why I think [that] postmodernity [as typified early by 4’33”] appeared as a concrete factor in music earlier than it did in some of the other cultural forms, really.
4’33” left a multiplicity of entirely new directions in which to travel. 4’33” could be considered one of the early manifestations of musical postmodernism in its emphasis on listening to sound (or silence) as music, about which Conrad writes, came at a turning point where music changed “from a regime of writing . . . to a regime of listening.” Cage himself rarely went in these directions as he was already immersed in his absorption with chance as an aid or method of composition (of which 4’33” was actually part: the lengths of silences were determined by chance operations), particularly those utilizing the I Ching. But there were a variety of people who were using the resources, including the questioning of the role of the composer, that Cage had flirted with. A group of young composers had gathered around Cage: Christian Wolff, Frederic Rzewski, and David Behrman, for example (who were graduate students at Harvard University at the same time that Conrad and Flynt were enrolled as undergraduates). Another group materialized in Berkeley, California: La Monte Young (whom Conrad met during the summer of 1959), Dennis Johnson, and Terry Jennings, for example. Meanwhile, a new generation of Europeans were exploring the new territory as well: “the most advanced young composers were actually going over into this neo-Dada, neo-Futurist territory.” And still, others who would contribute to a widening of this breach were scattered about, soon to be aggregated.
The “New” Radicalism: La Monte Young, pre-Fluxus, etc.
At this point, before recounting how these explorations were consolidated around New York in the 1960s, eventually giving rise to Fluxus (and, subsequently, the end of the explorations), it is important to relate some background as to how these networks were established. La Monte Young, later a major player in this New York consolidation, was an interesting figure even before he had discovered so-called “modern” music. Born in a log cabin in Idaho, Young’s primary musical experiences had come from environmental occurrences (his earliest memories supposedly being “the wind blowing between the chinks in the cabin and the hum of a power line outside” ) and popular music, most notably that of jazz. His first contact with “modern” music had been in high school, after his family moved to Los Angeles, California, and he continued to pursue composition at the college and graduate levels, occasionally enrolling in seminars under a variety of composers.
It was in the summer of 1959, the same time in which he and Tony Conrad met, that Young went to Darmstadt, West Germany to study composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Conrad:
I spent a summer working in Berkeley. And while I was there, I devoted a good deal of my time to frittering away the summer hours. Part of that time was spent meeting some people, and in particular I met some composers who lived around the corner: La Monte Young and Dennis Johnson. They were actually there in Berkeley studying in a summer seminar with Rudolph Kolisch [sic?]. . . Because the summer I met La Monte in Berkeley, he took off and went to Darmstadt to study with Stockhausen, and there was a lot of stuff coming out of Europe. It was like the way that painting seemed to be focused in Paris in the Nineteenth Century.
It is likely that Young’s will to follow his own muse was further strengthened by his encounter at Darmstadt, which by all accounts was not positive. Darmstadt, it seems, reflected his earlier experiences in presenting his works to his Berkeley professors. In particular, his Trio for Strings, a piece which combined a Webern-styled tonal structure with the long durations (the first three notes took four minutes to appear), which would later become a hallmark for Young’s work (and a major component in the definition of Minimalism), was apparently received quite badly by both students and instructors alike. Young describes when he had conceived the piece, and how it was endured:
It’s dated September ‘58 and I was copying the score on onion skin when I got to Berkeley, my first semester. No doubt I’d written the piece over the summer. Maybe I’d started it during the spring semester. . . oh, well, the only people who understood the Trio for Strings at the time of its composition were Terry Jennings, Dennis Johnson, and Terry Riley. I would say that probably nobody else [at Berkeley] understood it at that time, but there were other close friends who participated in it.
The piece premiered at the home of Professor Seymour Shifrin in Berkeley before the assembled composition seminar of which Young was a part. However, the impetus for the work lay in Young’s assessment that Serial music, although brushed with the veneer of “busyness,” employed a certain sense of compositional stasis. Shortly after his first experiments with long durations, Young was also engaged in the sort of post-4’33” activities which invited a similar sense of bewilderment within the general public. Perhaps that is what attracted him to both dissimilar elements.
In 1959 Young composed Vision in which the formal concert setting was deflected in a manner not entirely distant from 4’33”: a group of musicians performed “eleven sounds . . . whose spacing and timing were to be worked out by consulting a random number table or telephone directory” with “the lights . . . turned off for the duration of the composition so the audience would know when the piece began and ended:” its premiere was received in the same sense of shock as the Trio for Strings. This particular piece would be only a hint of what would come in the next year.
1960 marked a year of immense change: one of La Monte Young’s earlier pieces exploiting the possibilities of sound-as-music within a neo-Dada, pre-Fluxus aesthetic which he composed earlier in the year, Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc., in which the performers were to audibly scrape said items across the floor of the performance space, was to be adopted by John Cage and performed frequently by David Tudor throughout that year. Cage, by that point, was probably the most famous name in music, and Cage’s endorsement of Young was quickly making his name the most infamous. In April of that year, Young premiered 2 Sounds in which the primary sound was that of metal can lids scraping on glass. Probably much to the relief of his Berkeley professors, Young was awarded the Alfred Hertz Memorial Traveling Fellowship, and moved to New York City to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield (who, incidentally had taken over instruction of one of Cage’s composition classes) at the New School. It is also in 1960 that Young’s landmark “wordpieces,” collected under the title Compositions 1960, were conceived. These pieces, which were primarily inspired by George Brecht, are amazing in their displacement of the concert event. Composition 1960 #2’s instructions, for instance, are
Build a fire in front of the audience. Preferably, use wood although other combustibles may be used as necessary for starting the fire or controlling the kind of smoke. The fire may be of any size, but it should not be the kind which is associated with another object, such as a candle or a cigarette lighter. The lights may be turned out.
After the fire is burning, the builder(s) may sit by and watch it for the duration of the composition; however, he (they) should not sit between the fire and the audience in order that its members will be able to see and enjoy the fire.
The composition may be of any duration.
In the event that the performance is broadcast, the microphone may be brought up close to the fire.
5.5.60
Composition 1960 #3 has the following instructions:
Announce to the audience when the piece will begin and end, if there is a limit on duration. It may be of any duration.
Then announce that everyone may do whatever he wishes for the duration of the composition.
5.14.60
Composition 1960 #4:
Announce to the audience that the lights will be turned off for the duration of the composition (it may be any length) and tell them when the composition will begin and end.
Turn off all the lights for the announced duration.
When the lights are turned back on, the announcer may tell the audience that their activities have been the composition, although this is not at all necessary.
6.3.60
Composition 1960 #5:
Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.
When the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside.
The composition may be any length but if an unlimited amount of time is available, the doors and windows may be opened before the butterfly is turned loose and the composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away.
6.8.60
Composition 1960 #7 denotes a B and F-sharp on a musical scale with the instruction that this fifth is “to be held for a long time.” Composition 1960 #15 is dedicated to Richard Huelsenbeck, one of the founders of Dada:
This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean.
#15 reveals Young moving even further away from the theatrics of the earlier pieces, into new realms questioning the idea of composerly activity, although there is no relinquishing of the “authorial” function, since La Monte Young certainly considered the entire Composition 1960 series as “his” works. Young’s piano pieces of that fall would continue to combine these elements of non-composerly activities couched within an individual author’s sensibilities. For instance, the text of Piano Piece for David Tudor #1 reads:
Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to.
October 1960
Piano Piece for Terry Riley #1 reads:
Push the piano up to a wall and put the flat side flush against it. Then continue pushing into the wall. Push as hard as you can. If the piano goes through the wall, keep pushing in the same direction regardless of new obstacles and continue to push as hard as you can whether the piano is stopped against an obstacle or moving. The piece is over when you are too exhausted to push any longer.
2:10 A.M.
November 8, 1960
Young’s second piece for Terry Riley, never published, simply states that the composition itself has been “withdrawn” by the composer. Ed Strickland very clearly elucidates the particular qualities of these piano pieces:
The works make statements at the same time, deflating concepts of the artist, and specifically the pianist, inherited from the Nineteenth Century. The virtuosic showman and Romantic martyr reappear as workhorse and farcical Sisyphus. The delicacy of the Romantic artist and the mystery of his art may be the objects of parody in the second Tudor piece, which require the pianist to continue trying to open the keyboard cover inaudibly until he succeeds or gives up.
Even if one ignores the conceptual play which these pieces generate, it seems impossible to ignore that they were but one composer’s work in an ever-expanding field. George Brecht’s Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event); Time-table Music; Spanish Card Piece for Objects; Paragraphs, Quotations, and Lists; and Card Piece for Voice were all composed before or around this time, independent of Young, as an extension of the “Happenings” scene historically attributed to having developed around Allan Kaprow in the New York art community. Walter De Maria who had followed Young east to New York, later known exclusively in the art world, composed Art Yard, Meaningless Work, On the Importance of Natural Disasters, and Piece for Terry Riley (which centered generally on large-scale manipulation of the outdoor environment) around this time as well. Meanwhile, Conrad and Flynt were still at Harvard:
When I had been finishing up in school. . . I had been really impressed by some stuff that I had learned about that La Monte had done like, for example, the piece Any Number [X] for Henry Flynt. Fantastic piece, and there were other pieces, like the piece ‘to be held for a long time,’ and certain elements of his work which clicked with me in part because of what had been happening [with me].
Young, however, was extending his contacts in New York. In 1961 he produced a series of loft concerts (setting the precedent that many others would follow during the 1970s) at Yoko Ono’s loft on 116 Chambers Street. In 1961, he also decided to compose “new” compositions which would in fact be dated after their performances. In this period he was asked to edit an issue of Beatitude East. He also met George Maciunas, a partner in the A/G Gallery uptown. Maciunas became the self-styled leader of a movement he called Fluxus, and Beatitude East became An Anthology of Chance Operations. . ., which Maciunas claimed (because he helped to publish it) as the first Fluxus publication. With the inception of Fluxus, which was conceived initially as a collective, the neo-Dadaistic tendencies of all these activities were supposedly collected within a political agenda which would finally carry out 4’33”’s promise of the death of the composer.
However, as Tony Conrad writes, “A cultural institution as firmly entrenched as music composition -- musical authorship -- can be accosted critically or even sidestepped dismissively, but it simply won’t go away.” But for now the attempt at the narrative, the historical version, must temporarily end. The shortcomings of Fluxus, and the apparent solution to the problem of composer in the Theatre of Eternal Music, must be dissociated from this general outline of sixty-odd years of musical and quasi-musical activity. Those events require a more precise viewpoint, which will commence in the following chapter.