Early Minimalism
and Beyond:
Tony Conrad in
Music, Film, and Video
Tony Conrad, La Monte Young,
and the Theatre of Eternal Music
Our music is, like Indian music, droningly monotonal, not even being built on a scale at all, but out of a single chord or cluster of more or less tonically related partials. This does not only commute dissonance, but introduces a synchronous pulse-beat that is the first coherent usage of rhythm-pitches or microtonal intervals outside of isolated electronic pieces.
The story of “modern” music, as vaguely outlined in the previous chapter, ends here. So does, for now, the formerly linear narrative. Skipping ahead: a major presumption gleaned from the concept of “Eternal Music” is that there can be a musical resistance to progression within a particular paradigm. If a form of music can be constructed as “eternal,” then it has no beginning or end: stasis is its primary attribute. This resistance, exemplified in the name “Eternal Music,” and manifested in the deliberate design of the music itself, was quite possibly a reaction to the Western European high-art culture (and its dominant compositional form of Serialism) which had been adopted by American composers (semi-excluding Cage, who had written twelve-tone pieces in his earlier years). This notion of “Eternal Music” is essentially postmodernist: the end of history and narrative (which, in turn, produces the end of subject) are major components of the postmodern project explicated in writings by Foucault, Lyotard, and others. The past, by postmodernist definition, is irretrievable.
However, the telling of a story -- the retelling of “Eternal Music” in particular -- cannot end before it has begun. Once some of the notions inherent in the preceding chapter (“progression,” “achievement,” etc.) have been dispensed with, the significance of this particular quasi-historical project becomes clear: that, the “truth” or “past” being inaccessible, an attempt shall be made to reconstruct the documented version of said “past” in a new fashion. This newly interpreted unraveling of events, time, characters (which are not merely thus, but rather are/were real, living humans) does not concern itself with a position of indicating “improvement” as a goal of “Eternal Music,” unlike the normally historical (especially in music, where oftentimes “advances” are claimed to be made). Such a refashioning is not an attempt at an empty nostalgia, but rather a documentation which differs from the “official” version (as endorsed by La Monte Young). This motive does not remove this project from either “fault” or “subjectivity.” But perhaps that should be an expectation carried within the project itself: that the time, individuals, and works studied here are incredibly complex beyond the ordinary scope of understanding the historical event. This is nothing special: the postmodernist project conceives that complexity is not an attribute of a specific era, product, or person, but that instead complexity is actually pandemic.
A specific understanding of the general “history” of a period in time (continuing into the present) in which Tony Conrad lives and “produces” works is the broad outline of this entire project. Within this broad objective, this chapter seeks a reconstruction of its own: that of the “Theatre of Eternal Music” in which Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, John Cale, Angus MacLise, and others were active within from the years 1962 to 1965. Such a reconstruction is also the vital aspect of Tony Conrad’s ten-year Early Minimalism project, which will be discussed precisely in a later chapter. However, whereas Conrad’s Early Minimalism seeks to place the musical materials of early minimalism within an historical construct based upon his experience within the group (which can only be supported by an extra-musical understanding of the music itself), this chapter seeks a reconstruction of a specific time-event -- the Theatre of Eternal Music which existed in New York City in the early to mid 1960s -- through re-introduction of a specific historical narrative independent from any significant personal involvement or “stake.” By excluding the materials of music, it is clear that this chapter will deal primarily with the extra-musical, although not exclusively.
Again, the narrative, the historical, sneaks into play. Supposing this “history” was presented in the non-historical, non-linear fashion with which it manifests itself, it would probably not make much sense. Organization of the many disparate documents (some first hand, some not) of that time along a linear narrative, although artificial, provides a certain unity of insight. Since the field of study that this project is being produced in is a field that, although multidisciplinary, is primarily concerned with the historical, the historical is indeed appropriate. The case of the Theatre of Eternal Music is itself problematic, as we shall see, because its very nature (that of collaborative creation of events, and of never-ending events) denies the historical. Therefore, we begin not with the inception of the group, but with a more detailed explication of its members’ origins than the previous chapter could afford.
La Monte Young is today conceived historically as the “leader” of the Theatre of Eternal Music, or “Dream Syndicate.” This conception was postulated as a political and social agenda mainly after the dissolution of the original group (which will be discussed in detail in the later part of the chapter). For convenience’s sake (and not for any sympathy or antipathy for this agenda just yet), the works of Young pre- “Dream Syndicate,” and a recounting of historical events within this period of his life will be skipped over somewhat, as they were broadly outlined in the previous chapter. Tony Conrad is today conceived as the “dissident” to Young’s leader-role (again through politically-framed hindsight), which means that any background data (besides that written about in the Introduction) is completely relevant. Indeed, part of the political agenda ousting the members of the Theatre of Eternal Music besides La Monte Young from any stake in “composing” their music (a topic which will be more easily understood towards the end of the chapter when the dissolution of the “Dream Syndicate,” as it was called, is explained) also denies any importance to the collective as individuals before or after their split.
Which is to say that it is impossible to conceive that Tony Conrad (and the other members of the “Dream Syndicate” as well) were “just sitting on [their] butts” until the opportunity to play together came along. Starting with Conrad, it becomes quite clear that all of the future members were engaged in a number of activities. Not the least of which was, for Conrad by 1962, finishing college (here is where the narrative re-inserts itself).
Backgrounds: Tony Conrad at Harvard University, 1959-1963.
Conrad attended Harvard University, which he describes:
By and large, and particularly in music the contact with the faculty was destructive, the contact with the students was exhilarating. Bracing, and quite fantastic really. It happened that there were graduate students like Christian Wolff, Frederic Rzewski, David Behrman, John Harbison; undergraduates like Henry Flynt [Conrad’s first-year roommate], who was a good buddy of mine, and remained so for decades. And that was very valuable.
Conrad’s interest in music, already quite strong because of his many years of violin lessons, was only one of many. Conrad majored in mathematics, which he depicts in relation (or non-relation) to its supposed connection with music:
As far as math is concerned, it’s just like if there’s something that’s easy to do, without a lot of social obligations, that’s intriguing and a fun way to exercise your mind while you’re having difficulties organizing your body, which a lot of adolescents experience, I think, then little math games are fun. But I never had any way of applying mathematics to music in any real, meaningful way. And for that matter, almost nobody ever has, to be candid.
However, despite how unfulfilling and tedious dealing with faculty and administration can be, college was a remarkable opportunity for Conrad to indulge in his own interests, including contemporary music, which he experienced both in the concert hall and in the library:
I must say, I went to a university that had marvelous resources. Rich, diverse cultural resources within walking distance, and that’s worth a lot, to have a good library, to have visitors come [to the campus]. . . So in a way, for my generation the university functioned like the internet in opening doors to microcommunities. Like I could look up [Henry Cowell’s] New Music magazine that had been published in the [19]40s, and it was many years after I began listening to Conlon Nancarrow’s music, for example, that it flashed back to me: I’ve seen a score by this guy! I remember seeing a score by this guy in the library in this old 1940s New Music score periodical. And you could find this kind of stuff, you know, you have to have these resources, it’s very, very valuable to have diverse resources. That helped to tie me, in a sense, to the Western tradition.
Around this same period of time, Conrad heard a recording of the music of Ali Akbar Khan, an Indian musician. He recalls that hearing it “was electrifying. . . I had never heard the classical music of another culture before.” What impressed Conrad the most was the sound of the drone, the underlying, unwavering tone which was the foundation of the raga. Also, Conrad discovered the scores of the sixteen Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, a German Baroque composer, which were all written with separate tuning instructions for each particular sonata. Conrad writes that Biber’s music is
"[an] adventurous exploration of timbre, tonality, and instrumental technique [which is] the most startling of the 17th century. The sixteen Mystery Sonatas are written scordatura violin [own italics], meaning that the instrument is to be tuned in an idiosyncratic manner for each piece.
Biber’s music transformed me; for the first time, my violin sounded truly wonderful. It rang, and sang, and spoke in a rich soulful voice -- the timbre of the instrument, clad in Biber’s coat of many colorful tunings, catching and refracting every note differently -- reinventing, thereby, the function of the key pitch, the fundamental of the chord. I perceived Biber’s music as having been constructed according to timbre, not melody. The startling originality of his other inventions certainly supported this thought: that Biber had completely reformulated the basis for music composition, around timbre. Biber, after all, had been as inventive with timbre as Gesualdo had been with chromaticism; his many different tunings, unorthodox performance instructions, and even occasional polytonality, are unparalleled until the time of Charles Ives. For me, my interpretation of his work was confirmed by Biber’s use of ostenati [sic], long pedal tones, simple chord progressions, and open fingerings.
Pressing my Baroque discoveries further, I found that 17th century violin technique had been different from the 19th century bravura style that is almost universal among classical string players today; the 17th century style is closer to hillbilly or bluegrass fiddling technique. The bow stays down on the strings more, and vibrato functions more as an embellishment than as an adjunct of every note.
These two discoveries seemed to confirm the steady, patient attention to tuning and intonation that Conrad had been led to by his violin teacher Ronald Knudsen (who realized that Conrad did not have the technique for “normal” virtuosity). Also, Conrad was able to relate these discoveries to music he had grown up with, most notably the popular forms of country and bluegrass which he had heard broadcast on the radio late at night. Finding a relationship between the disparate styles in the “high-art” sonatas of Biber to the “popular-art” wailings of Bill Monroe, for example, fostered his belief in the equivalence of seemingly-opposite cultural enterprises, which would in turn have a great impact on the members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. The remaining major discovery for Conrad occurred after his freshman year. During the summer of 1959, as was stated in the previous chapter, Conrad met La Monte Young, Terry Jennings, and Dennis Johnson while spending the summer in Berkeley, California.
Despite his studies (curricular or otherwise), Conrad found time to occasionally perform music (most notably some composed by Christian Wolff) with Henry Flynt, a violinist who was his first-year roommate. Informed by his distaste for the Nineteenth Century bravura style of violin playing, these performances were structured slightly differently from their scores:
Actual inability, an ineptitude as an element of [performance]. . . had really fascinated me going all the way back to some of the first public performance[s] I ever did. I liked performing, for example, in some pieces that I played in violin duet with Henry Flynt, some pieces by Christian Wolff, and that must have been the late Fifties, and one of the things [that] I liked about that was that I played real bad[ly]. I couldn’t play very well. . . Instead [of the correct sound dictated by the score] I got another kind of sound which was much more suspect, and this brought an element into the work creating a slight distancing effect from the whole pattern of sound, which to me, I felt was an important part of what was going on with the notation in the piece, the conception of the work, the instructions; it seemed to me that this was the way to play that music.
Also, by 1961 Conrad had composed his own work, Three Loops for Performers and Tape Recorders, which premiered at the Harvard-Radcliffe Music Club’s “Concert of New Music” on December 18, 1961. Earlier that year, La Monte Young, Richard Maxfield, and Robert Morris had come up from New York City to participate in one of the club’s concerts. Three Loops for Performers and Tape Recorders, which has no specified instrumentation besides tape recorders and “suggestions,” is remarkably complex for a piece written by an undergraduate (especially for one who was not a music major). Not only does the score and its appendix pay close attention to the effects of manipulating recorded materials, but it also stipulates that the recording material be that of what is played by the performers in real time. The recording of the performance as it occurs also re-amplifies the effect of “incidental” noise reintroduced into the context of performance by Cage’s 4’33”. The score certainly appreciates and anticipates this re-amplification:
It should be observed that the performances are likely not only to record and endlessly repeat any audience reaction, but are thereby likely to amplify any such reaction or perhaps to encourage audience participation. Aside from the fact that such interferences are not likely to be in accordance with the ‘rules’ for the performance, they may become uncontrollably boistrous [sic] or ostentatious. For this reason, it might be suggested that the microphone be kept as far from the audience as possible, especially during the first two sections. Such audience participation is perhaps more in the spirit of the last section, the din, than of the others; moving the microphone nearer [to] the audience after the ‘Aria’ may provide the piece with a dramatic if not formally legitimate finale.
The score makes it quite clear that an exploitation of such an act should only occur during the “din” section.
The first section of Three Loops, subtitled “Chant,” begins the piece with an attentive concern with details, most specifically those of just intervals, attack and decay, and volume:
Two tape recorders are used (see appendix), with speaker-microphone distance and constant intensity settings so arranged that the relative intensities of the playing recorder and the performers are roughly equal for the audience (preferably at forte level) and the recording tape recorder.
Each performer selects a pitched instrument on which to play within a single pitch band 1/3 tone wide centered on one of the following (just) intervals above a given frequency. . . .
The performing order is ruled by changes (on attack times, as in bells), beginning with any order of the performers. Intensities and durations are free, but at least 1/3 change should be performed during each tape loop. The loop length should not be greater than 1/3 minute.
Performers continue as long as they wish; they may drop out individually, so long as they indicate by a prearranged silent signal that they are doing this. The piece continues until all drop out.
A conductor may be used to direct or call out the changes.
Although this section of the piece certainly retains the trappings of traditional music such as a conductor, it is quite clear that it is a hybridization of many different simultaneously-occurring trends in music at the time. The range of notes in this portion of the piece are notated by Conrad as “perfect octave, perfect fifteenth,” etc., as another way of writing that the notes used are the major third, the perfect fifth, the seventh harmonic (and so on) with their octaves. Additionally, the boundaries of “tape” or electronic music -- represented by the French musique concrete of Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry, the German electronikmusiche of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the experiments of Americans such as Morton Subotnick -- had been explored for only a little over ten years, and still proved to be ripe for experimentation. The appearance of “(just) intervals” in the score marks the beginning of Conrad’s “official” work in just intonation. This particular fascination, which stemmed from his high school-era violin lessons, would also eventually become a major factor in the Theatre of Eternal Music. And the stipulation for performers to “indicate. . . a prearranged silent signal” seems to anticipate, to an extent, the gamepieces of John Zorn (and others) conceived in the late 1970s and 1980s. In a separate section of the score entitled “Commentary and Suggestions,” Conrad recommends a way of situating the players so they have visual contact with one another, based upon a pre-determined order of performance, which also is reminiscent of placement strategy for improvising performers.
The second section of Three Loops, subtitled “Aria,” contains six lines of written music, but leaves its performance relatively open-ended:
The accompanying six lines of notes are to be performed in the indicated consecutive order; instrumentation and dynamics are free. The tape loop should correspond in duration to the duration of each of the six lines; since a preliminary estimate must be made in this regard, to depend on the actual tempo of performance, an upper rather than a lower limit should be chosen. The pause at the end of each of the lines should be so construed as to make all of the lines equal in length and equal to the length of the tape loop.
Each of the lines should be played at least once; otherwise, the performer(s) may cease at any point. The recording tape recorder may similarly cease at any time after all six lines have been played.
The thinness of line is designed to encourage use of varied instrumental colors. Rearticulation of a given note within its indicated duration is also to be permitted, so long as this does not interfere with the continuous sounding of the pitch.
High recording and reproduction fidelity is desirable.
The major difference between this section of Three Loops and the others (as well as the rest of Conrad’s work) is its precise notation. The six lines of music are sparsely arranged within their fourteen measure structures, with many rests providing spaces between notes. However, the range of the pitches played is quite large: in the sixth line, for instance, the pitches range from the F an octave below middle C to the G four octaves above middle C. Piano is suggested by Conrad as the instrument of “likely choice,” of which “color may be varied through use of ‘preparation’ and plucked strings.”
The third section, subtitled “(din),” is most aurally connected to Conrad’s later work in the Theatre of Eternal Music by way of its call for volume intensity:
Two tape recorders are used. . . when the intensity levels are set so that a constant tone on the loudspeaker, unaccompanied by performers, does not change in intensity from tape loop to tape loop.
This latter test situation is established as 50 on a scale relating intensity settings to variation in loudness from one tape loop to the next; zero on this scale indicates a setting at which all sound disappears after one tape loop, and 100 indicates the greatest possible amplification from one loop to the next.
This scale corresponds to the vertical axis of the accompanying part for the tape recorders, which is to be ‘played,’ in terms of changing the intensity settings, as long as any performer (not playing tape recorder) remains active. The central line is the 50 mark; either of the two outer lines is the 100 mark, and the other then becomes the zero line. Duration, the horizontal axis, is free, though cusp-like points are to be played quickly.
The performing time of each player is divided into three periods, possibly separated by silences. Each period is further divided into an integral number of measures of equal length; though the measures of a given performer should all be equal, those of different performers will usually be unequal, and most likely incommensurable. Each performer chooses independently his starting time (after the recorders have started), finishing time (indicated by a prearranged signal), measure lengths, number of measures per period, durations between periods, instrument, and the sounds produced within each measure. Sounds produced (and possibly, consequently, the instruments chosen) are however limited by the requirement that within each measure only one continuous (restless) single-pitched sound may be produced, varying in pitch only continuously, and that the continuous sound produced within each measure must vary over at least a major-minor fourteenth.
It also seems related to the early “Eternal Music” in that it is very formally structured in terms of everything except that which is actually played. Another similarity is simply the striking music Conrad’s instructions produced. Listening to Conrad’s recording of the December 18, 1961 concert, one is immediately electrified by the sheer intensity of the piece. Of course, the recording only conveys one specific part: that of the tape recorders’ roles in each section. The actual experience of sitting in Paine Hall at Harvard University that night must have been something quite amazing indeed. Conrad sees the importance of Three Loops in its direct yet invisible influence, albeit arguably more mechanic than musical, on the nascent forms of what would be called Minimalism:
A year or so after the first performance of my early piece Three Loops for Performers and Tape Recorders (1961), which was based on tape recorder loop delay, Terry Riley also began using this device in performance, forming the basis for a rhythmic approach to minimal music. Steve Reich adopted Riley’s approach, and was able to conform it to the formalist idiom of the 1960s art world.
Backgrounds: La Monte Young, Henry Flynt, Fluxus, etc.
Meanwhile, La Monte Young had quickly established himself as a major player in the New York avant-garde scene which overlapped and quickly subsumed both the “distinctive” fields of music and art. He had begun producing a series of concerts at the loft of Yoko Ono at 116 Chambers Street which included performances by Terry Jennings (who had followed Young out East from California), Henry Flynt (who at that point still attended Harvard), Jackson MacLow (a poet and future Fluxus member), Richard Maxfield (Young’s instructor at the New School), and Robert Morris (future acclaimed minimalist sculptor), among others. In the midst of “musical” activity were conceptual pieces akin to Compositions 1960 produced by practically all concerned. Henry Flynt describes Terry Jennings’ performance:
There was a piece in this concert that has gone almost unnoticed: Young’s An invisible poem sent to Terry Jennings for him to perform. Young remembers having sent a letter to Jennings telling him that the piece accompanied the letter in the envelope. After Jenning’s concert, Young asked him, ‘Why didn’t you perform the invisible poem?’ Jennings replied, ‘I did: didn’t you hear it?’ It was a composition whose only tangible record was its mention on the program.
Also in 1961 Young was asked by Chester Anderson to guest-edit an issue of Beatitude East. The manuscripts which Young assembled for the project were finally published in 1963 as An Anthology.... A core of the contributors would, by 1963, be the main collaborators behind Fluxus. Young met George Maciunas, the organizing force behind Fluxus, at the A/G Gallery in New York also in 1961. Maciunas at that time was primarily concerned with modernism, and Young and MacLow worked very hard to convince him that the composer Ussachevsky, for example, was a “square.”
They were successful, and in 1963 Maciunas initiated Fluxus while on a trip to Europe through presenting highly animated theatrical actions masquerading as musical compositions. It is more than likely, given the fantastically provocative nature of the early events he staged, that Maciunas may have been attempting to divert attention away from George Brecht’s Yam Festival which took place in New Jersey while Maciunas was away in May of 1963. However, upon his return Maciunas was able to consolidate some of the major players of the nascent neo-Dada wordpiece quasi-musical action that was occurring, including Brecht, Young and Higgins, into Fluxus. All of these circles of people revolving around avant-garde events in New York are difficult to sort out:
Despite the importance of keeping the different schools separate, it is true that they run together in a period as short as four years, and that a number of figures begin as Cage followers and end as Maciunas colleagues. Moreover, in the formative years, the schools had a theme in common. A screaming claim to be new (along with an attempt to dictate the definition of the terms ‘new’ and ‘avant-garde’) was made by one or more commanding figures in each school. So the process of capturing and redirecting the notion of newness was central to the schools in question.
Fluxus encapsulated a variety of media, ranging from “objects” to “events.” It was conceived by Maciunas as a collective, although it seems obvious with hindsight that Maciunas was truly calling all the shots. However, a number of “Fluxusproducts” were collectively produced. Within a short period of time, Maciunas had radically shifted his aesthetic and personal sensibilities, aligning himself with some sort of Communism (albeit more in word than deed). But the majority of early Fluxus activity existed within the realm of quasi-musical activity:
Fluxus was not an art movement, it was a music composer’s movement, by and large. Or was conceived, or you might say sustained an imaginary that had that character. What that had to do with galleries and forth wasn’t clear other than through the institutional inertia of the different forms. . . Henry Flynt, and his veramusement or brend; he invented neologisms to cover his thinking, and the idea was that basically personal aesthetic experience could be decoupled from institutionalized cultural forms at all levels. And that left institutionalized cultural forms without any real justification or raison d’être other than political, so that the importation of European cultural forms, for example, had to be seen as a kind of neo-imperialistic venture. And should be received within a political framework. The tools for response should not be aesthetic but political. So we went out and picketed. I thought it was a great idea because it made sense. The fact is it’s true. And it was a terrific innovation to express this relationship to these cultural forms through picketing rather than through art-making. And there was a healthy dose of that imprecated into Fluxus.
By the time Fluxus began in earnest in New York, Henry Flynt and Tony Conrad had already moved there. Indeed, Maciunas took much of his political posturing from Flynt.
After Maciunas returned to America, he adopted a “communist” stance heavily informed by Flynt, who was advocating direct action not only against cultural imperialism (in particular that of Western Europe), but also against the practice of making art as commodity. In particular, the act of picketing a museum or concert, while not in the long run terribly effective, certainly seemed more productive than making more art denouncing other forms of art. However, most of the other members of Fluxus, about to make their jump into the commodity-fetishistic art world, did not agree: Flynt writes, “Maciunas anticipated that the whole of Fluxus would conduct anti-art demonstrations; that project was adapted from me.” This was not to be the case. As the history of Fluxus has been rewritten, a number of these picketings have been proposed by the historians as akin to or as street theater, but reading Flynt and Conrad it is clear that they were more committed to eliciting social change than providing social shock (or schlock). Regardless, it is not clear when the first demonstration they held occurred, but they began as early as February 27-28, 1963, when Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, and the filmmaker Jack Smith (who was Conrad’s first roommate at 56 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan) “performed” at 49 Bond Street. Their program was ambitious: Flynt writes, “And I convinced Tony Conrad and Jack Smith to join me in demonstrating for the demolition of museums and symphony halls at MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, and Philharmonic Hall, on February 27, 1963.”
One of these demonstrations in particular led to the first major rift within Fluxus, and with what should be expected with such events, the account differs from participant to participant, from historian to historian. The chronology in Fluxus presents the date as August 30, 1964; Henry Flynt in Ubi Fluxus ibi Motus: 1990-1962 recalls the date as September 8, 1964. The demonstration was against a performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale, the structure of which is actually quite atypical compared to his other pieces. Basically, the piece adapted elements of performance events and was quite “circus-like” in its execution. Obviously, this sort of composition deviates from the formal structures prevalent in the majority of Stockhausen’s work, and was probably directly influenced by Cage’s pieces around the same time (which were, in turn, more than likely influenced by his slight association with Fluxus). The majority of performers in Originale were generally associated one way or another with Fluxus, and some (such as Dick Higgins, Jackson MacLow, and Nam June Paik) were major participants. This was the problem: Maciunas, who considered himself the “leader” of Fluxus (although Fluxus certainly had a dedication to collective events and products which denied leadership and authorship), was whole-heartedly in favor of picketing Stockhausen (who, at that time, was still considered “revolutionary”) to the extent that he threatened to “banish” those who didn’t agree with him. As it turns out, there were two demonstrations that evening: one for Stockhausen, and one against. The demonstrators for Stockhausen (consisting primarily of the concert’s performers) were by far in the majority: only the Fluxus artists Ay-O, Ben Vautier, Maciunas, Saito, Marc Schleiffer (a.k.a. Sulayman Abdullah), Conrad and Flynt demonstrated against Stockhausen (although Allen Ginsberg, the famous “beat” poet, was allowed in both pickets).
The end result of the demonstration was not an effective show of force against Stockhausen, but rather the dissolution of the original Fluxus group. Higgins left, and formed the Something Else Press because of his dissatisfaction with the slowness of Maciunas’ publishing. MacLow left as well. By that time, however, La Monte Young had already dissociated himself from Fluxus. The circle of people which developed around Young, although active in Fluxus-esque word events (such as Tony Conrad’s Concept Art from the Summer of 1961 and John Cale’s infamous piece in which a piano is thrown down a coalmine shaft), would also continue to distance themselves from Fluxus.
Fluxus continued as an art movement of sorts, shifting its emphasis towards objects and events contained within the walls of galleries and museums. However, when George Maciunas died, Fluxus effectively ended. This end was the result of Maciunas’ ability to organize a multitude of disparate elements under his own umbrella, and a result of his ability to alienate a number of early Fluxus participants away from his agenda. As its legacy has become more open to debate since Maciunas’ death, Fluxus products have also become more “collectible,” in stark contradiction to its central aesthetic posture.
The Theatre of Eternal Music.
Where Young’s earlier predilection for the “event” had manifested itself in the performance aspects of pieces like Compositions 1960, his overriding desire for the “new” would turn his attention away from Artaud-esque theater events:
John Cage, [Nam June] Paik’s rampages, and the Events and Happenings which were current in 1960 were already passé for Young. Cage had overthrown Stockhausen’s definition of newness as serialism. Now Young overthrew Cage’s practice of phantasmagoria. Young told me that Happenings were corny; and we agreed in conversation that all opera and dance, for example, were worthless. . . Young declared in favor of a monotony which avoided ‘expression’ and tumult -- and who’s [sic] more important implication was. . . the production of an altered state through narrowed attention and perceptual fatigue or saturation. Tonal music could be rehabilitated as the most radical: if a single fifth was sustained for three hours, for example.
Let me underlie Young’s views on the lurid theatrics of [Yves] Klein and Paik. He regarded it as pandering -- to pull the bozos in off the street -- and he deplored it. The flyers for the [final] loft concerts concluded with the line ‘THE PURPOSE OF THIS SERIES IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT.’
At the same time, Young was still participating in making tonal, slightly-jazz-based music with Terry Jennings and Walter De Maria, and occasionally Simone Forti (a dancer who sang) and Joe Kotzin (flutist). At this time,
He was also listening to a good deal of Indian classical music, particularly Bismallah Khan’s shenai playing, and that of flutist T.R. Mahalingam. His first exposure to John Coltrane provided another revelation. As a result of these new influences, Young picked up the saxophone again, first a tenor, then sopranino. He began having the vocalists he worked with sing drones while he improvised on sax.
By early 1963, Young had established a new series of concerts at the 10-4 Gallery where he:
played saxophone (somewhere between Bismallah Khan and Ornette Coleman), Angus MacLise improvised on bongos, Billy Linich ([a.k.a.] Billy Name) strummed folk guitar, and Marian Zazeela sang drone. All in all, those were hysterical and overwrought concerts; they went on for hours in overdrive. . . The music was formless, expostulatory, meandering; vaguely modal, arrhythmic, and very unusual.
Although Young felt that jazz was “a somewhat limited format,” he still felt a sort of affinity for it based in his Coltrane-inspired use of the sopranino saxophone. The music he played in New York retained an element of improvisation left over from Young’s jazz days in Los Angeles because it was composed in real time. However, Young’s saxophone playing at this time was severely different from the rapidly-moving variations played by Coltrane and by Ornette Coleman. In addition, Young’s accompaniment did stay within certain strict structural guidelines in terms of duration and pitch. This would carry over directly into the establishment of the Theatre of Eternal Music.
Possibly the beginning of the Theatre of Eternal Music as a totally realized performance entity was in May, 1963 when Tony Conrad began rehearsing with MacLise, Young, and Zazeela. That same month, these same performers participated (with four others) in Young’s Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer as part of George Brecht’s Yam festival in New Jersey. Thus, the beginnings of minimalist music (although no one had coined any such terms as this group were the music’s only practitioners) were related to the concurrent “Happenings” scene and the soon-to-be-emerging Fluxus. The relationship between the New York art world and Minimalist music became somewhat interchangeable, as many people participated within both. By the time of the Yam Festival, Billy Name (who later became enmeshed within Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd) had left the group, and the lineup settled for while. Conrad’s interest in playing with the group seems piqued not only by what was going on in New York at the time, but also in relation to musics from around the world:
I began to hear music that La Monte Young was playing at the same time all of this Fluxus stuff was bubbling up, and that seemed to be a kind of resuscitation of his interest in jazz, but very, very powerfully inflected by a drone base. And I thought at that time, I would like to do this [music]. I could play drone in this setting, and I had been doing in line with ideas that had been evolving in this mix with my regular communication with Henry Flynt, and talking to La Monte, and so forth, and hearing music, and spending a lot of time sitting in a room just playing repetitive chords on a guitar for like an hour, things like that. I thought, well, jeez this would be a very interesting thing, maybe there’s a music that can be founded on some of these principles not in a context such as the Indian tradition, or the 17th Century tradition, but in the context of the vacuum that Cage leaves where you have a great sense of aesthetic ambiguity or even abandonment: relativism. . . . There’s a question as to what the composer is going to do in this environment, and it seemed like one outcome would be for the ‘composer’ to radically abandon the function of writing music altogether. And to instead supplant that role by direct involvement in the sound.
Simultaneously in 1963, Young composed/performed Studies in the Bowed Disc on a gong designed for him by Robert Morris, while the group of Conrad, MacLise, Young and Zazeela practiced constantly. This dedication to playing was facilitated by Young and Zazeela’s move to a large loftspace on Church Street, where “there were no upstairs neighbors, they could rehearse all night, every night, and they proceeded to do just that.” Practicing became the first priority of the group, as opportunities to perform for audiences were seldom. However, a large number of these practice sessions, as well as performances, were recorded for posterity.
While continuing with a chronological history of the Theatre of Eternal Music, it is important to note that defining the functions of the group itself becomes dependent entirely upon which version of the history is available. This difficulty leads exactly to the still-current conflict between Young and Conrad so exquisitely exemplified in the latter’s Early Minimalism compositional series begun in the mid 1980s. Conrad’s concept of the group is as a “collective that would exercise itself . . . [as] replacing the composer function.” He writes:
We involved ourselves in what happens when people get together and play collaboratively, and that is you have a lot of discussion and hanging out, and if you have people with strong ideas, which we did. Then you get an interplay that’s very bracing, and change occurs. Things move. So within our group the distinctive dynamics had to do with where powerful sites of musical initiative occurred.
Where for Conrad this collaborative ownership of ideas was directly related to that of a collaborative ownership of the music itself, it is quite clear that Young felt (and still feels) differently. While Young certainly credits Conrad “with his introduction to the mathematical niceties of the relationships of the harmonic series, which directly inspired Young to explore the creation of musical compositions in just intonation,” he has been unable or unwilling to recognize the group’s autonomous composition as a whole, insisting that he is the sole “composer” of their works. However, it is quite obvious that the group seemed at the least to have the vestiges of a collective, especially as their practicing became more and more frequent. Conrad characterizes the group as “exist[ing] inside a cult” and as “antisocial,” descriptions which manifest themselves in many other ways besides the music the group made. Indeed, Conrad writes,
I am not saying that it was not appropriate -- or even perhaps essential -- that Dream Music was founded by people whose displacement from the temporal urgency of bourgeois music listening, and whose radical denial of the social formulation of composition, emerged also in parallel personal singularities such as a hatred of work, elite religious practices, indulgence in intoxicants, or social disappearance.
This aspect is clearly missed in the majority of most “academic” explications of the group’s work. However, it is clear that such factors were primary not only in how the music was created and received at the time, but also in the issues that the music still raises.
Returning to chronology, by June of 1963 John Cale, a viola player, had entered the group. A Welshman who had come to America on a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study music at Tanglewood, he had actively sought out La Monte Young and had already cultivated an interest in “radical gesture.” Strickland notes that the first recording of Cale practicing with the group dates from September 29, 1963. Conrad describes those early times:
I think that during the earliest phases it was quite to be expected that the music that La Monte was doing with the [sopranino] saxophone which was a fantastic hybridization of work that he had done earlier with jazz, and these new influences, that that dominated. Then there was a time when Marian Zazeela’s vocal drone dominated because of the discipline and the extraordinary focus that came to her voice after she had basically been singing one note for like a year and a half, it just went like right over the top. It was incredible. . . . There were moments when Angus MacLise’s drumming seemed by far the most remarkable element in the ensemble because although it. . . . Angus MacLise was a poet, a friendly poet and a drummer. He in fact was classically trained as a young fellow. He had played symphony drums and stuff like that, but you wouldn’t know it because it seemed [that] he banged and bounded on the drums in a completely erratic way. . . I mean he couldn’t even keep the beat. Which you could begin to be alarmed about if you were wondering where this was going, until you noticed that he never played with a beat at all. He had the most disciplined form of rhythm construction that I’ve ever heard in a percussionist. An absolutely unique drummer. A drummer with an astonishing awareness of impulse, but with a free metric sense. Absolutely free metric sense that must have derived from poetry. . . . So, [John] Cale was imprecated into this situation in a way which was bound to, the situation was mature enough when he arrived that it was bound to create an atmosphere of change in his musicianship.
The performances and practices from this period were somewhat loose as occasionally not all the members of the group would show. MacLise, certainly, was the most delinquent member: Conrad describes him as “kind of migrat[ing] around the underground Lower East Side [of Manhattan] in a way that was footloose. So sometimes he was more on the scene and sometimes less.” According to Licht, the music the group played was conceived by Young: he “would define the harmonic structure (which notes could and couldn’t be played) and the group improvised under those rules (although, according to Young, Tony [Conrad] would throw in the occasional ‘illegal’ interval).” Although this may be the case, Conrad’s conceptualization of the group suggests otherwise: that the intervals were generally agreed upon by the members of the group. Conrad’s occasional subversion of Young’s pre-arranged intervals at the very least denotes his interest in a collective-oriented musical conception of the group.
However conceived by the individual members of the group, Young retroactively assigned the music that the group performed as his own compositions with lengthy, obfuscating titles. Concurrent with the time of the departure of Angus MacLise from the country on February 18, 1964 was the group’s newfound singular emphasis on drone. This music was later titled by Young as Pre-Tortoise Dream Music, mainly because by the latter half of 1964 Young was calling their music The Tortoise: His Dreams and Journeys. However, the Pre-Tortoise Dream Music, which occasionally featured Terry Jennings on soprano saxophone, was not singularly droning. Young’s saxophone, also while combined with that of Terry Jennings, played more than one note, and the droning of Cale and Conrad’s string instruments had not yet developed into so cohesive a unit. The first recording of the Pre-Tortoise Dream Music is from April 2, 1964 and is titled 2 IV 64 Day of the Holy Mountain -- 3 IV 64 AM First Day of the World Tree NYC. This was a private performance given for Harry Kraut of the Tanglewood Festival. Listening to the recording, obviously some aural connections with jazz arise as saxophone is the predominant instrument. Structurally, however, the music could not be further afield from jazz. Stasis is its primary element, although there occurs a certain amount of unsteadiness and movement in the drone, most likely generated by the fact that sustaining single notes on any string instruments is very difficult physically, and Cale and Conrad had not yet developed the endurance that would characterize their later performances. If Zazeela was present at the performance (which seems more than likely), it is interesting that her voice is not audible on the recording. Electronic drones were soon added as an additional sound source, and were premiered in the performance retroactively titled Prelude to the Tortoise given at the Philadelphia College of Art on October 9, 1964. The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys would soon make its “premiere” in November of that year.
Sonically, the Theatre of Eternal Music (as the group was named by Young) utilized an interesting range of “instruments” in order to facilitate the drone. Indeed, the inspiration for the Tortoise music came from Young and Zazeela’s tortoise aquarium, whose drone they amplified with the use of contact microphones. Young’s desire for a “Wall of Sound” was realized by Conrad’s ingenious idea to use contact microphones, which he most certainly had learned about through his interest in the music and activities of John Cage (who, in 1960, had recorded Cartridge Music, a piece which exclusively used contact mikes and phonograph cartridges as “found” objects for its instrumentation). Also, Marian Zazeela contributed to the visual aspect of performance by fashioning light-boxes and slide projections which “serve[d] as an uncanny complement. . . predicated upon the extended duration necessary to experience the nuances which are its essence.” Performances of the music were not singular events, but employed “the theatre of mixed means,” a term coined by and used as title for a 1968 book by the critic Richard Kostelanetz. In line with Young’s conception of the music as “Eternal,” oftentimes at concert halls the electronic drones were started well before the audience and performers arrived, and were left on until the last audience member left.
The first performance of the so-called Tortoise music was entitled The Tortoise Droning Selected Pitches for the Holy Numbers for the Two Black Tigers, the Green Tiger and the Hermit by Young, and occurred in six performances on the weekends of October 30-November 1, and November 20-22, 1964 at the Pocket Theater on Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street. The title alludes to the four performers: Young, Zazeela, Conrad, and Cale. Striking in its imagery, the title reflects Young’s rejection of the “minimalist” earlier titles of his works, such as Compositions 1960, although the Tortoise music is considered by many to be his first full-fledged minimalist work. The Theatre of Eternal Music also performed at the same venue on December 12-13 The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers as they were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong and Illuminated by the Sawmill, the Green Sawtooth Ocelot and the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. Other performances through 1964 and 1965 were entitled The Obsidian Ocelot, the Sawmill, and the Blue Sawtooth High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer Refracting the Legend of the Dream of the Tortoise Traversing the 189/98 Lost Ancestral Lake Region Illuminating Quotients from the Black Tiger Tapestries of the Drone of the Holy Numbers, Ballad of the Tortoise or Pierced Earring/Drone Ratios Transmitting the Manifestation of the Tortoise Center Drifting Obsidian Time Mists through the Synaptic Stepdown Barrier, The Day of the Antler etc., and Map of 49’s Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Light-Years Tracery. These titles assuredly reflect the increasingly esoteric nature of the group characterized by Conrad as “in an almost Pythagorean degree.” By February, 1965 Young had finally christened the group the Theatre of Eternal Music, establishing his preoccupation with “timeless” music (although the electronics used to make such music could not have been anything else but modern) which was in some way connected to the “spiritual” or “mystical.” This title change removed the immediacy of “Dream Music,” as it was known, into a particular Youngian agenda. Much to his chagrin, Cale and Conrad playfully dubbed the group the Dream Syndicate.
Throughout 1965, the Theatre of Eternal Music continued their constant practice and occasional performance schedules. Occasionally, they even played outside of New York: they performed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on October 16, 1965, and at the rural Pennsylvanian “Sundance Festival” on August 20, 1966 (which was their last performance). By 1965, the dominance by a particular section of the group had changed again:
When [John Cale] and I came together around an idiom of string playing that was very, very focused, some of the sounds that we made really did dominate the group. And that was the later period of our work together. And it became clear that the most powerful thing we could do would be to focus on these intervals and these constructs of intervals and pitch accuracy and so forth. So that’s what we did.
However, by this time the rock group Velvet Underground had solidified its lineup, of which John Cale was a part. It was clear to him by late 1965 that he could no longer play in both the groups at once, so after the Theatre of Eternal Music’s performance at the Filmmaker’s Cinematique (ran by Jonas Mekas) in December, he quit the Dream Syndicate. The Velvet Underground had grown out of a previous group called the Primitives, of which Cale, Conrad, Lou Reed, and Walter De Maria were members. Conrad relates his version of how the group formed:
Basically it was a goof at the beginning for me and for John [Cale], and then for Walter De Maria, who was our buddy, and who we dragged into this to have a bizarre opportunity to play at being rock and roll musicians just because these sleazy types from Brooklyn wanted to front a band, and they just wanted people who looked like musicians who could go and jump around. . . . So you’d have producers who would get together in a studio and sort of concoct a raucous thing, maybe have a singer and a few people who would whack on guitars and then pretend that it’s like a completely dumbed-down music. . . . But this thing with the Primitives was made up by these guys who were popping pills in the back room of this sleazy studio at Pickwick records, and they decided they’d release it. And they wanted some people with long hair. . . . So John [Cale] and I were both just negligent with our haircuts, we weren’t particularly hirsute, but we did the job, and when we went to sign up, they wanted to protect the record from us. . . . And they signed us up and gave us a seven year contract, and when we looked at this contract, we thought this contract gives them the right to our artistic output for the next seven years! Well, we’re doing all this other stuff. Walter [De Maria], in his way was making some incredible music at that time. And John [Cale] and I also, we were just signing away our music, which these people couldn’t use or market. We didn’t want to do it, so we all went to a showbiz attorney, and reviewed this contract to see if we could loosen it up and get out of it. It turned out that it was no problem, no one cared. But it springboarded us into our rock careers. I let mine fade away. But see then Lou [Reed] was intrigued to have met us, because we were sophisticated people from the city. He had been living out on Long Island and communing with these other garage band youngsters. So when he moved [into the apartment building] at [56] Ludlow Street [where Cale and Conrad lived together], it was quite a shot in the arm for everybody because he brought a real rock and roll brain into the picture.
Angus MacLise had also been a member of the Velvet Underground, but left the group “because they got a job to play at Yale, and they were gonna get paid, and Angus didn’t want to be in a band that got paid.” Cale, however, was replace by Young’s good friend Terry Riley on vocals (himself of the early founders of Minimalism, as his Reed Streams album was the first of the 1960s Minimalism work to be released, on the Mass Art label in 1966 ). The departure of Cale, coupled with Conrad’s growing commitment to his first film The Flicker, lead to the disintegration of the group.
Dissolution and Consequences.
By 1966, the group had disbanded permanently. Partly this was also to due to the fact that Conrad and Young could no longer agree as to what intervals should be played. Fortunately for Young, Conrad became occupied with his film The Flicker, and his subsequent “disappearance” from the world of music has certainly played to Young’s historical advantage.
The majority of literature based on a survey of Twentieth Century music addresses the Theatre of Eternal Music generally as works by La Monte Young, even when acknowledging that this group was a performance entity. As none of the recordings that the group made have ever been released, it is difficult if not impossible to even assess them unless one was present at a performance. The reason why none of these works have ever been commercially available is due to the inability for the surviving members of the group (Cale, Conrad, Young, and Zazeela) to reconcile authorship claims. Therefore, this literature is mostly helpful in describing the sounds that the group made, but not in understanding how the group operated as a unit. This music is described as:
A single chord, tuned and retuned; a single electronic-and-vocal interval extended over vast lengths of time, changing only minutely -- represent an extreme penetration, to a point where an enormous amount of mental energy is focused on an absolute minimum of sensory data.
Also, from a different perspective,
The Theatre of Eternal Music was also the first group to reflect the then-emerging drug culture. Their grasp of tuning, the extended duration of their performances, and their intense exploration and perception of sound would not have been possible without a drug-heightened state of awareness. Director Peter Brook once described the effect of their music as being ‘like taking drugs, insofar as it’s lawful.’ When Ron Rosenbaum wrote, ‘What La Monte’s music does -- for me, anyway -- is blow up the latticework patterns of a sound interaction to room size, allow [sic] me to hear, and feel and visualize the complex rippling tones, overtones, nodes, and beat frequencies produced by a single moment of interaction,’ he’s describing something that approximates a drug experience. As the world has never been the same since the drug revolution, music has never been the same since the Theatre of Eternal Music.
Their music is even described abstractly by John Cage: “In the lobby after La/ Monte Young’s music stopped,/ Geldzahler said: It’s like being in a/ womb; now that I’m out, I want to get/ back in. I felt differently and so did/ Jasper Johns: we were relieved to be/ released.”
The only versions of the history of the Theatre of Eternal Music that have been somewhat sympathetic in acknowledgment of the other members of the group are Strickland’s Minimalism: Origins, Nyman’s Experimental Music, and Licht’s “The History of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music,” although these do not quite cover the entire story. Oddly enough, one of the most interesting and informative documents of the group is an article written by Tony Conrad for Film Culture magazine entitled “Inside the Dream Syndicate” (which appeared in their Summer 1966 issue as an adjunct to articles about Conrad’s The Flicker). This article comes the closest to describing the physical and mathematical elements of their works, especially in relation to other musics around the world. Perhaps its appearance in a journal devoted to film is the reason why many historians of the period’s music never cite it.
Yet it seems pretty clear that Young’s later insistence on sole authorship of the Theatre of Eternal Music’s works, a symptom of what Conrad terms the “monarchic and politically regressive outlook that La Monte [later] adopted,” has systematically denied the historian access to a different perspective of the group. Young’s attitude seems to be naively based on the assumption that everyone in the group was just going along, although he himself cites certain instances where Conrad and others “influenced” his thinking. Eventually, as Young became more and more preoccupied with the classical music traditions of India, he began to take a more active role in undoing the anti-compositional stance of the Dream Syndicate by his inability or outright refusal to release recordings to other members of the group. Young’s turn to the East seems to be but one example of what is by now a tradition among American composers, but unlike Cage and others who found impetus within such Asian traditions as Zen Buddhism for social change, Young adopted an agenda which, to Conrad, “just seemed sad” in its conservativeness. Eventually, Conrad challenged the accepted version of events by re-introducing himself as composer in his Early Minimalism works of the 1980s. Based upon his personal involvement in the group, these pieces solely for string instruments replace an aspect of the Theatre of Eternal Music that was lost (especially as Young, in the 1970s, founded a new group under the name “the Theatre of Eternal Music” which exclusively played brass and woodwind instruments, thereby refocusing entirely the aim of the Dream Syndicate). The aim of this Senior Project is not entirely dissimilar to that of Early Minimalism, except in its desire to capsize the personal, and emphasize an objective, historical viewpoint. Hopefully, through proper understanding not only of the documents of the time, then the histories that have been written, and then Conrad’s recent attempt to unravel each, will a new synthesis be reached.