Tony Conrad -- on Dream Music

(from the Table of the Elements CD Early Minimalism Volume 1)

A cultural institution as firmly entrenched as music composition-musical authorship-can be accosted critically or even sidestepped dismissively, but it won't simply go away. Dream Music's denial of composition as an authorial cultural role was a gesture that was symbolic, but not political; none of us expected that composers everywhere would stop writing music after they heard our music. On the other hand, Dream Music's anti-compositional assertion was not impotent; it was timely and important; it addressed a key issue in the crisis of "high" culture, and it did so in the context of other challenges to "high" cultural institutions: pop art, Fluxus, and the soon-to-emerge mingling of rock with art music.

That early anti-authorial stance of the original Dream Music was neither denied nor compromised when decades later EARLY MINIMALISM reinstated the composer. Though it arrives posing as Dream Music, EARLY MINIMALISM is a work of a different mien entirely. Dream Music may have boasted that it was "eternal," but in its performances (as in performances of "timeless" Western classical music) it nevertheless exhibited closure: It was complete as one heard it, as music by composers was supposed to be-a unified (but anti-authorial) work of musical modernity. EARLY MINIMALISM, though, is different; it can never stand on its own. Its autonomy is compromised exactly as it participates in and retells the story of Dream Music. EARLY MINIMALISM is inhabited by reflections, refractions, and redoublings, and it comes into existence only through these recountings: there is a raconteur, an organizer of the tale, a story teller; the narrator, the librettist, the historian; and this is what has become of the composer.

EARLY MINIMALISM's historian eagerly oversteps the prudent objectivity of modern historians. His tale frequently flows in glowing tones, but not always; it can also lash out in reproach at the lost Dream Music.

EARLY MINIMALISM is made to be heard; Dream Music existed inside a cult, and was esoteric in an almost Pythagorean degree. To be sure, from 1940 to 1970 "advanced" music had often thought of itself as exclusive and monastically esoteric. This was a time when "modern" composition was consolidating its ascendency within the university, and when classical music still competed with pop records in the market. The modern composer Milton Babbitt was even prepared to withdraw completely from "this public world" to a "complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition." By contrast, EARLY MINIMALISM flaunts the "highbrow" notion of minimal music as a scourge for leveling the landscape of history-for bringing the "monumental" within range of a cultural construction based on a social schema of alternative networking rather than urban class differences.

Within Dream Music there were conceits which needed exploding-particularly the notion that our expanded harmonic palette was something new under the sun. Certainly, we had tapped unorthodox frequency ratios as a framework for our system of microtonal intervals, and the ratios using seven, in particular, were wholly outside of common musical practice. But after all, the very first European to discern harmonics back in the early seventeenth century, Marin Mersenne, wrote a suggestion in his magnum opus Harmonie Universelle that could have been a text score for Dream Music:

Why should there not be ears which would appreciate tones in the ratios 7/6 or 7/1 or 9/8? ...I do not doubt for a moment that the dissonant intervals discussed, 7/6 and 8/7, which divide the fourth, sound pleasing if one becomes accustomed to hearing them. Further, I do not doubt that they will be employed in solo parts and concerts to arouse the passions, and to achieve other effects, which are lacking in conventional music.

Then in 1676 Christiaan Huygens pointed out that a seventh harmonic relationship was already being commonly heard, incidental to use of the then-prevalent "mean-tone" tuning system. And during the next century, others commented on the obvious: that the seventh harmonic was ideally suited to be used in the dominant seventh chord of common practice harmony.

Nevertheless, it happened that over the course of recent centuries the uniformity and richness of practices built upon the chromatic 12-note keyboard simply overwhelmed and sidelined other European music which did not "fit in." The militaristic precision of the first modern orchestra, modeled by Jean-Baptiste Lully on the rigid discipline of Louis XIV's army, turned the European composer into a commander of sonic forces unprecedented in their flexibility, mastery-and uniformity. Alternative tunings went the way of unusual timbres and idiosyncratic instruments. Exotic tonal or melodic practices were appropriated only where they could be fashionably accomodated within the overarching narratives of personal genius (Liszt) or imperial orientalism (Borodin).

Throughout the nineteenth century, the quest for fashionable novelty progressively exhausted the stores of tonal materials; by the time of Bartok's death, even the reservoir of acceptable exoticism seemed tapped out. And by this same time, with the rise of "atonality," listeners of contemporary music had been left with nothing but their appetite for novel timbres and textures-which in effect had to replace earlier audiences' accustomed attentiveness to tonal nuances. The arbitrary pitch definition heard in actual performances of the notated pitch sets of "bleep-blop" serial and chance music is proverbial. Often nobody notices, or cares, if different notes (or even non-notes) are substituted into the pieces.

Dream Music engaged these habits of listening by providing the textural novelty to which the audience was by then attuned, but it also reattached these "novel textures" to exactingly defined pitch combinations. Why had this not happened in quarter-tone music, or music written in other idiosyncratic tuning systems? Why were the tone textures of other microtonal music not decisively registered as articulated pitch systems? Simply because these musics, being through-composed with melodic lines and rhythmic interest, did not effectively function as novel textures so much as frameworks within which it was easy for the listener's attention to pitch to be scattered and lost-just as it is in dodecaphonic and chance music.

At the time, the numerical frequency ratios we used for the microtonal intervals in Dream Music appeared so intimate with ancient Pythagorean numerology that it was easy for us to be seduced into fantasizing that our system of pitch relationships was "eternal," as in La Monte Young's preferred designation, the "Theatre of Eternal Music." For my part, I preferred "Dream Music," which was less redolent of a socially regressive agenda-only think of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which I had heard, standing on the Lincoln Memorial steps a year before I recorded FOUR VIOLINS. The framework of intervals relating to seven is of course no more eternal than are rhythms based on seven beats to the measure.

In spite of this, the term "eternal music" suggested that somehow we had staked a mining claim to the "eternal" territory of long-duration intervallic structures built on higher harmonic relationships, and even intimated that the vein had been mined out. In the longer run perhaps our "Eternal Music" inhibited the exploration of an important region with great potential for artistic development. EARLY MINIMALISM attempts to eradicate these phony claims. Though it does confine itself largely to the harmonic territory of Dream Music, EARLY MINIMALISM also animates certain differences within that terrain, and leads eventually out of the cul-de-sac of "Eternal Music."

The nascent idealism of the early 60s made it easy to fall for Pythagorean number mysticism without having a clear perception of the anti-democratic legacy which Pythagoreanism brings with it. The reaction to Sputnik had been an American conviction that Science was Right; abstract expressionism had been installed as the artistic Ideal which just happened to suit corporatist needs; formalisms were being adopted everywhere as official philosophies and styles. In art, minimalism came to be identified not with a quirky sense of humor and a thrill in what ran against the grain, but with the apotheosis of formalism and an utter separation between art and social statement. It was fated in such a context that our music would fall victim to this same capitalist curatorial misappropriation; that the received message of Dream Music would be rigid discipline and a return to traditional materials.

Later, Young, in his heyday of upper crust patronage, when he was pulling in millions in oil money, isolated himself and his Pythagorean coterie notoriously (and palatially) at 6 Harrison Street in New York, the monstrous former Mercantile Building-and stationed a pinkerton guard at the door. Occasionally, as at an eighteenth century European court, there would occur an entertainment, at which outsiders would be admitted. Visitors were to be submissive, as in a mosque; shoes were removed, and a sanctimonious air was maintained.

Does this arch-conservative, autocratic political predisposition somehow inhere in the materials of minimalism? An argument has often been made that abstract expressionism and minimalism, in their very "contentlessness," accomodated the interests of American corporate hegemony during its most rapid imperial expansion. However, music (outside of its words) functions quite differently from other forms, since its "content" resides in the temporal experiences of its listeners and participants-in rhythm (a beat) and melody (anthem).

Music has everything to do with boundaried realities. The anthem, the dance, the ceremony, the concert, or even a recorded piece each "tunes its hearer in" as a part of a group. Sometimes it's a small group-even a couple; other times it's a nation or an age group. Music is about identity in a mysterious way that parallels language, even uses language, but which seems also to redraw language boundaries, to establish its own "language" groups and dialects.

Of course Dream Music did not include words; it also did not include either a beat or an anthem. That effectively de-politicized Dream Music, removed its political voice. However, the early 60s was an exceptional time in the US, and among younger artists much that was later to become political began in wholesale rejection of the straitjacketed right politics, the institutional values, and the lifestyle of the 1950s.

In its collectivist beginnings, Dream Music was antisocial. Compare this to the remarkable scene that George Maciunas circumscribed with Fluxus. Maciunas was a communist; he and Young collaborated in publishing An Anthology, perhaps the key Fluxus document. Like the Communists and the Nazis in Weimar Germany, they shared a profound unrest and impatience with accepted social forms. Fluxus was profoundly disruptive of the installed cultural institutions of the time, while leaving underlying questions as to what might replace them unaddressed. In the end Fluxus was both revolutionary on the one hand (in the eyes of Maciunas or Henry Flynt, an even more outspoken radical, with whom Young broke off) and conservative on the other hand (for artists whom it led to comfortable careers in the gallery system). Now that Fluxus has been thoroughly tamed as a "collectible," the political "excesses" of Flynt and Maciunas seem quaint. They were not. Like Fluxus, minimal music was capable of supporting a radical iconography, but its popularizers made this impossible.

In 1962 when I moved to New York Fluxus was still cooking, big. The prestige and the metaphysical values that now hover over painting at that time drew composers. Music "pieces" were big art. I met Walter De Maria, Robert Whitman, Robert Morris, Emmett Williams; they were all "composers." For my own part, by then my "advanced" musical friends had swayed me away from composition altogether; Henry Flynt called his pieces "concept art."

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. Reich's success in fronting an ultraformalist agenda was enhanced by his neocolonialist appropriation of rhythmic structures from African drumming. In the absence of the 1980s discourse of the subject, it was hard for early minimalists to resist a romantic or neocolonial identification with "ethnic" musical cultures, especially since the proliferation of recorded music had vertiginously precipitated a postmodern cultural crisis among them.

Suddenly, in those years, there had been a vast opening up of the world, and of history, to the ears of the phonograph-literate. For the first time, there was access to a musical "text" which was more full, across cultures, across classes, and across history, than had ever been the case before. This completely radical opening of access to performance, an event without precedent except in the introduction of printed books, blew away the boundary lines that identify "our" culture and replaced it with a feeling of continual rebirth into a wider and wider world of musical opportunities, as more and more material became "listenable." But then, what was the reality which one accessed through these recordings? This was the unspoken question that hurled music onto the horns of the postmodern dilemma two decades avant la lettre.

EARLY MINIMALISM is unusual in addressing and extending a past music which is known and heard only incompletely and indirectly, but it is certainly not unique in hearkening back to music of the past. In particular, there are two other contemporary recording practices which appeal to bygone musical forms. Some of these recordings are bait for nostalgia, as when singers "cover standards;" others appeal to the lost greatness of a past era, as in "historically accurate" classical music recordings. In the first instance, the careful listener is cautious, aware that the "cover" borrows from the cultural capital of an exploited predecessor-a loan that is too often without interest. In the second instance, there is an implied installation of the Western canon into an immutable ahistorical present. In either case, the implicit corruption of values, the suspect motives and standards of the hearer, and the aura of violated historical authenticity that emanates from these forms make them fascinating for the reader of a non-recoverable past.

Most people began to hear minimal music through Reich's work, and through the music of Philip Glass. Each of these saw himself as a "composer." Both fronted performance groups, but their groups were not based in compositional collectivity-they played traditional notated music with a precision that would have made Lully's jaw drop. It was a predictable misfortune that a "contentless" rigid discipline and a return to traditional materials would erupt as the substance of these other "young minimalists." Reich and Glass, far from combatting the autocratic tradition of the Western score, carefully inscribed themselves within careerist authorial postures. These Composers reverted to traditional manipulations of rhythm and melodic form; rather than reaching over the top of these structures and addressing the turbulence of musical listening directly, as we had done, they retreated in the face of these challenges into rhetorical formalism, into "style."

David Franks, in his notable word-piece sound mix for Paul Sharits' film N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968), forged a radically polysemic application of rhythmic formalism, perhaps influenced by Reich's earliest tape "loop" pieces, which had spoken in a stridently social tone of voice. However, as Glass turned to opera, Reich to the art gallery, and Young to the opium den as social models, minimal music appeared to have become a right-wing lapdog.

Rhythmic "minimalism" of course tried to seem non-political, similar to Dream Music. However, (until Rhys Chatham) rhythmic minimalism was polite, where Dream Music had been antisocial. After all, John Cale was the son of a coal miner, and my parents had been too poor to pay any income tax. La Monte Young was born in a log cabin. Angus MacLise hadn't a cent, and even so he quit the early Velvet Underground because he did not want to participate in a band that was going to get paid for playing. We were all ardent members of a lower middle class intelligentsia, whose "idealism" was at its core antipathetic to upper class identity. Underneath it all, our enterprise was to recapture art music to the social level of pop.

What I had learned first about John Cale was that he had written a piece which pushed a piano down a mine shaft. We hungered for music almost seething beyond control-or even something just beyond music, a violent feeling of soaring unstoppably, powered by immense angular machinery across abrupt and torrential seas of pounding blood.

Walt Whitman wrote that "all music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments." So it must be my conscious blood, in my veins, that swells behind my eyes on the unstanchable tide of the music's careening violence; a voicelessly shrieking glee, gushing and unfulfilled; anger coming from somewhere; sweetness of virulence, energy, heated eyes, tension unrelenting, shrill shuddering lust endlessly recalculated in its spasm; focus of power.

Almost nowhere in the literature or lore of music could one then find intensity, focus, and trembling internalized violence expressed directly or indirectly; we could only sense these feelings "coming on," and band together in tempestuous proximity. The conceptualist/minimalist artists I encountered smouldered with aggressiveness, were hysterically arrogant-or were effusively funny. There was little that was academic, or "pleasant," or idyllically contemplative in the various works of Walter De Maria, Henry Flynt, Carolee Schneeman, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Robert Ashley, Paul Sharits, or The Velvet Underground. This was transgressive, violent, possessed, extreme, far-out, and/or funny work, by purpose and in effect. When art historians, critics, dealers, and collectors signed the bottom line on the minimalist/conceptualist movements of the 1960's they recast the the gaiety or rage of these movements in their own forms, in the shapes of their own weak emotional fixes.

Though John Cale was brilliant enough to weld Dream Music into pop music directly and become enormously productive, Young and others were trapped in the "eternal" tar and remained in frozen development. Young actually moved backwards, toward the appropriation of exotic tonal and melodic practices from Indian music. Orientalism, unfortunately, as it demeans the Other also effaces the subject. In all fairness, though, Young and Zazeela have shown commendable restraint, in submitting to the mastery of their guru Pandit Pran Nath rather than dominating him as a "native informant."

Before leaving Dream Music behind, there is room for a final confession-it was indeed amateurish; our recordings, should anyone ever be able to hear them, are of poor quality, with outrageously poor balance in the mix; La Monte always turned himself up loudest; the group was frequently too stoned to play long enough with adequate focus; our heterogeneity as performers often overcame our ability to muster group discipline. 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.

Time, time, time. Life should be abundant enough for each person to feel what it is to have their greatest pleasure in wasting time. For my own part, I know that now, when music playback systems can put out hours and hours of sound at one flick of the button, it's nothing unusual to think about playing a set for an hour. There was a time, though, when it really meant something to like playing your 78rpm records on the 16rpm setting--so they would run a half hour, and sound so...so...so...slow.

 

Essay by Tony Conrad (c) 1997

Early Minimalism Volume One *Table of the Elements (c) 1997