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Tony Conrad -- on Early Minimalism

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

The works EARLY MINIMALISM are before all else comments on the status of history and a non-recoverable past in the archive of musical culture. Beyond this, and not coincidentally, they are insistently dualistic; first in the manner that any cultural appropriation induces an interpretive duality in its reception (the instance of the present performance itself, versus the re-presented historical object); and then in secondary dualisms of receptivity that lie in wait within the initial approaches by the listener.

What they announce most straightforwardly is their appropriation of my own early performance work. Appropriation is a slippery strategy as it applies to performance. Stephen Prina has mounted performances of Schoenberg as his own work--but it could be easy to misinterpret this as what pop music calls a "cover." And if you "appropriate" performance-based work whole (a play, for instance), you risk being said to be simply "doing a performance" of it--unless the original work is totally inaccessible, as it is in my own case.

Appropriation is a general structural principle of postmodern culture, a relational principle that seemed for a time to give theory a toe-hold in the bulwark of the dissolving arts hierarchy. Appropriation functions to re-label an artifact which is already oriented within the cultural plane. In my case, though, the appropriated artifact is absent: the recordings of early minimalism by the Dream Music group have been suppressed. However, the traces of these recordings are abundantly evident within the plane of culture in their impact and influences, which have cut a deep channel through the center of American music.

As a present performance, EARLY MINIMALISM stands before you on its own; but paradoxically, it somehow also trails a shadow--a question (unexpounded and therefore unanswered, but forever posed) of what "might have been." What if the Dream Music had never stopped, and instead had moved in the direction that EARLY MINIMALISM signifies? What if EARLY MINIMALISM is an overdue return on a forgotten promise? In calling upon a lost time, EARLY MINIMALISM is a sign of that time's passing, and a measure of that absence. So the music brings us to what is, and what was long ago, and more than that, to an even more remote imaginary music that might have been played and heard sometime within that measure, in some third time which can only be hypothesized, as a projection from the time of unrecoverable absence.

As a "re-presentation," EARLY MINIMALISM challenges the listener to hunt through time along some path back toward a virtual "original"-but EARLY MINIMALISM implies the traces of two such paths, two histories. One is autobiographical and consequently intimate, esoteric, like a family myth; the other, which is very open, is continuously being melted and reforged, both by writers and by musicians. In the long ago where these two sound currents cross, a strange imaginary harmony is woven; this is music reaching out over a grand scale of duration, occupying a peculiarly extended temporality, a metric span of half a lifetime. In this sense, EARLY MINIMALISM was composed to bring the spectrum of musical structures into a closer conjunction with history: not the writing of history, but with the articulation of history by other means.

Yet what of the possibility that there was no point of departure (epoch) which could be identified as a musical schism, when the public expression of minimalist influence was separated from another (biographical) expression, which is said to have maintained its coherent parallel flow apart from the mainstream? Looking back without this fork in the road to arrive at, is a "real" past music even thinkable, of which EARLY MINIMALISM is the residue or image? In short, what if EARLY MINIMALISM were a complete fabrication, a Piltdown man? And while we're on the subject, what if there never was any Dream Music back in 1963?

The "accurate reconstruction" of the past does not access a real (non-recoverable) past, but it does represent this recoverability. Our image of the past is the "real" past; and this past is always a "reconstructed" one, albeit not a unique one. Nevertheless, to the extent that "accurate" original residues exist-to the extent that there is consensus reliance on the authenticity of recordings-there is that much less ambiguity in the recoverability of past sounds; the past sounds are grounded, and become unmovable elements within an architecture of history-music.

In this regard, it is paradoxically the unmovable refusal of La Monte Young to expose his archive of the original Dream Music recordings to public view that itself makes possible a mobile narrative of minimalism, that enlivens the opportunity which EARLY MINIMALISM has adopted: to make music out of history, and history out of music.

Reaching back through time, then, along the threads of implied sonic construction which EARLY MINIMALISM weaves, we may imagine an arrival at a conjunction between this present sound and a past non-recoverable sound (which is heard simultaneously, resonating as a virtual sound shadow throughout the music which it has influenced). This is the exquisite joy that is always there in history: the conjunction and interpenetration of overlapping present and imaginary, which is arrived at "by surprise," along an unanticipated route, and which reconstructs our understanding of the lineage to which the partners in this conjunction once before had belonged.

In this sense, then, EARLY MINIMALISM is not all that surprising, since it delivers a music of history just where we should expect history to die in its own making. However, EARLY MINIMALISM does more than simply deliver, it opens out this music of history at stage center; it asks that its story be consciously attended to as musical (hi)story-telling, as a construct whose two social sites are the foundation of its legibility-both its "biographical" site and its glaringly influential cultural site, which lies at ground zero of the collapses of modernism, high culture, and the cult of authorship.

Stories are not told because they are surprising; stories have always been told because they renegotiate the mutual expectations of the teller and the listener. At first you might expect that the bartering is one-sided in favor of the teller, but that is a completely naive simplification; you might as well say a sadist is in control of a masochist. The teller's moves must be precise, skimming her iridescent tale close along the shiny impenetrable surface of the listener, so near that they each reflect into one other. It's "how you tell a joke" that makes all the difference.

When she slings in still other kaleidoscopic doublings and refractions to eddy across the story's meanings and contexts, it all makes the tale a little more joyful. It's rare to get that same sensual fun continuously from writing or reading; but there are spots where writing can spin inward on itself and skip across time; here, for example: Here it is, still there in my 1963 notebook, a "Note to writers, by me, to be by them: If you put this comment in your book, I'll put it in mine first. -You won't? Then this isn't a comment, but you're too late anyhow. Or someone, or it, was too early. -I've got that one, too."

Freud thought that "the comic" arises when we "apply to one and the same act of ideation two different ideational methods, between which the 'comparison' is then made and the comic difference emerges." He adds that in the case of hearing a joke, "[o]ne of these two views, following the hints contained in the joke, passes along the path of thought through the unconscious; the other stays on the surface and views the joke like any other wording that has emerged from the preconscious and become conscious." EARLY MINIMALISM's doubling of a history which is public with a history which is suppressed is an analogue of Freud's doubling of conscious and unconscious processes.

Of course, neither the "literature" of music nor its place in the social order is meaningfully either conscious or unconscious; however, Fredric Jameson's framing of the "political unconscious" affords an opportunity to extend the allegory. Jameson's view of literary narrative is deftly epitomized as "the specific mechanism through which the collective consciousness represses historical contradictions" (William C. Dowling). In his discussion of postmodernism Jameson also positions music at the door of history; "music also includes history... since, as background and mood stimulus, it mediates our historical past along with our private or existential one...." Could music, which has stood aside the highway of language, only thumbing short rides from time to time, be considered for a partnership with narrative in an interrogation of the political unconscious? EARLY MINIMALISM would then be interpreted as deconstructing a particular social condition, and we could ask-since the work displays and is built upon the suppression of a historical contradiction (a much smaller one than Jameson is inclined to envision, to be sure, but nonetheless a contradiction which is accessible as a working object): Does EARLY MINIMALISM conceal the structure and conditions through which this contradiction is repressed?

For Jameson postmodernism is a condition of radically-extended literacy, in which the text enters and occupies every crevice of inquiry or action, and commodity culture has swollen to fill our entire space. He associates space with the new cultural dominant of the postmodern; "you make space musical around the consumer." Jameson's conception of the spatialization of music through narrativization is figured largely from MTV and cartoons. It does not account for a parallel development whereby Dream Music and much of the performance-based music that followed in the 60s and 70s (the work of Alvin Lucier offers an example) foregrounded issues of space. Inside Dream Music's space the musicians "listened around" the innermost architecture of their frozen sound.

EARLY MINIMALISM maintains the dense sonic spatiality that Dream Music founded, but approaches Jameson more nearly by narrativizing the musical context-not by using projections and video. The agitated space developed by music with cartoons is claustrophobic; the languorous time frame of EARLY MINIMALISM pushes the context outward, affording a greater distance between music and narrative.

If it still seems hard to discern the outlines of musical postmodernism, that is simply because music has inhabited a peculiarly postmodern corner of "culture" ever since the late 50s, when the critical paradoxes of Cage opened the ear of "serious" music onto the world, when the machinery of international capitalism coalesced with the machinery of popular music, when both ethnomusicology and music history became participatory enterprises for the active listener. It was only in the 50s that it became possible to listen to records of weird jazz, avant-garde music, and music from other times and cultures.

This was the turning point from a regime of writing music to a regime of listening. Many things at the time pushed this change, even though there has been very little comment on, or understanding of, the core paradigm shift that this represented for music. For instance, rock n roll elbowed itself to the front of pop music because of its sound-a much simplified, listenable music. In another universe, rock n roll might have been called "minimal pop."

The sound of EARLY MINIMALISM is sometimes limpid, but more often intrusively dissonant-though, enigmatically, not discordant. Ripples of beats, in various ranges of the frequency spectrum, emphasize the various aspects of the performance-its attention to spatiality and timbre, its demands for technical accuracy, its engagement with rhythm as an aspect of pitch, and its scrambling of instrumental ranges.

To speak in physical terms, the air vibrations that make a particular pitch are always evenly spaced out through time and space. If you could see them, they would be from an inch to a yard in length, traveling across the room. When different frequencies are simultaneously present, they interact much as a moire pattern appears when two meshes are superimposed. These are "beats," tones whose frequency equals the difference between the frequencies of the two generating pitches. When a group of pitches has frequencies that are all multiples (which is exactly to say they are "harmonics") of a single low number (or "fundamental" pitch), any and all of their beat tones will also be multiples of this fundamental pitch-just as, if all your accounts are in even dollar amounts, you can add or subtract any of them and will never need change.

In EARLY MINIMALISM certain unexpected harmonic relationships are exploited, incorporating stark new moirÈ textures in which the beat tones are richly prominent and the tonal patterns unusually angular. For these combinations to sing out clearly, the intervals must be articulated precisely and sustained long enough for the unaccustomed listener to self-locate within the fabric of the sound.

When consonance is based on higher harmonics the beat tones (or difference frequencies) between those tones which are microtonally close together can be very small compared to the difference frequencies that arise from the common musical intervals. Since these small frequencies correspond to very deep tones, this music produces effects far down in the low bass, even at frequencies below the range of pitch hearing, where they are perceived as very rapid rhythms or (even deeper) as beats. In EARLY MINIMALISM the usual fundamental frequency is around nine cycles per second-which places the musical center of the sound outside the normal range of pitched tones.

This makes for a tonality so singular that EARLY MINIMALISM handshakes easily with the conventional modernist listener, whose ear seeks textural novelty in music; its sound clearly indexes the issue of (aural) specificity that remains a major preoccupation of modernist music, and which constitutes the dual of modern music's formal structure. In decisive contrast to the elaborate internal structuring which characterized the work of most "rhythmic minimalism," the stark reduction of structural complexity in Dream Music loosened its relation to the modernist idiom, and already began a courtship with history in its substitution of long durations for metric structures.

Speaking generally, the modernist perspective-which regards music as poised between (1) the phenomenological aspects of the sounds themselves in relation to the individual auditor, and (2) the work's structural formalisms-is generally analogous to a postmodernist view of music as balanced between (1) its engagement with the social attentions of the listener and (2) its cultural appropriations and references. Why should this critical lineage, from modern to postmodern, be of any concern to EARLY MINIMALISM? Largely because postmodernism marks a sea change in cultural literacy during recent decades.

Long before EARLY MINIMALISM I had explored life-scale durations in film and had wished for an active intervention of the historical into music-but not until the popularization of poststructuralist writings have such elements been legible as components of musical culture.

Besides all that, EARLY MINIMALISM has unbridled Dream Music, checked where I had left it; more than that, EARLY MINIMALISM has shaken off Dream Music's arch-conservative handicap, to race ahead with a new exhuberance. What an exquisite joy to mount a Pegasus so long in the gate-and hobbled, as it happened, just from the moment when John Cale and I, on violin and viola, had spurred it to a dizzying azimuth. EARLY MINIMALISM flies from that apex.