Do people of a certain age try to explain to themselves and others how some critcal incidents had more profound consequences than looked likely at the time ? In the last 24 hours I have found some pretty good material on the web. Here�s Tony Conrad on Lamont Young�s penchant for on jazz and some his associates. Some people think that Conrad is annoyed that Young hi-jacked the early history of Minimalism especially via his links with Bill Strickland who wrote the major history of the movement:

�By early 1963, Young had established a new series of concerts at the 10-4 Gallery where 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�

When John Cale arrived in North East America at this point he concluded that Young was the main man on the progressive music scene. Cale played viola rather than guitar - the instrument used by Billy Name. Somewhere I have the collection of photographs of the Factory which Name used to make his comeback. There�s a photograph of him on page 17 Matthew Collings� book about the New York art scene IT Hurts. Collings writes:

�Billy Name � the famous speed freak, now with a flowing grey beard, gesturing with long ringed fingers and wearing other a lot of other jewellery too� When he wasn�t photographing he was doing boring routine management with a good will, for little pay.�

Tony is also to the point on the link between tuning effects and distorted perception � in fact the tuning ideas were mainly hos contribution.

�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 one time I heard the Theatre of Eternal music that�s exactly what it was like � the latticework patterns of sounds � this captures the experience of being there well � also the strange phenemonon whereby only a few notes are used for a period of two hours or more but you are sad when it comes to an end - I wondered when I would experience such wonders again? In fact the whole drone/fifths stream of activity is motivated by a desire to reproduced some of those effects � on the assumption that Young gets them by mixing harmonically complex tones in non-standard frequency ratios.

Several participants � Cale, MacLise - emphasise that the music the played with Young was completely novel � that nothing like it had ever been heard before.

I have just this minute listened to a piece performed by Lamont Young and Terry Riley in San Francisco in 1960 � Two Pianos and Five Tape Recorders. I think this must come after the Trio for Strings (which provoked Riley to write a String 4tet). Both Young and Riley were supporting Ann Halparin�s dance company in San Francisco at this point � her dancers became the core of the Judson Group in NYC in the early 60s which helped extend the concept of �dancing� at this time.

The piece doesn�t really speak for itself � it needs some kind of framework � one is the way that the two of them were working with Cage�s ideas mediated through Stockhausen at this point. The CD also has an early Riley piece that sounds like it could have been made last week I- Music for the Gift � a play by Ken Dewey who Lamont introduced to TR. The incidental music is a cut-up of a jazz performance by a Chet Baker group � the work was done in a French radio studio in 1963 while Riley was on a two year tour of Europe . It parallels the Lamont ensemble which Conrad described above. The looping effects on Music for the Gift leads Riley on to make �In C� which is the first Minimalist piece which to get widespread recognition. Fred Frith refers to this piece in an interesting interview which is currently up on the Radio 3 website.

Roger Smalley who had studied with Stockhausen and Goehr was made King�s College first artist in residence in 1968. Fred cites as early influences Renbourn, Jansch and his relationship with Smalley. Smalley organized the first UK performance of �In C� in his college rooms. I am pretty sure that Steve Pheasant played in this � in fact I can remember people making remarks about Steve� s jazzy approach to this � unaware of just how jazzy the background to the work is. In fact I have a contemporary recording of the piece by a Scandanavian big band which really swings.

Fred also refers to the influence of a King�s music student � Andy Powell:

�The biggest influence during this early period, post 1968, was Andy Powell, who was a hotshot music student at Kings College. I was studying English, but through him I was exposed to many things for the first time, from Captain Beefheart , Frank Zappa and the Band to John Cage, Stockhausen and Cornelius Cardew. He had a copy of Cardew�s Treatise, which I found intriguing, and also through him I read Cage�s book Silence, which opened up completely new ways of thinking about music.�

I first heard of Andy Powell through Paul Bell � Cathy�s dad � and Jon Cole (wrote wrote the Sandy Denny piece I mentioned recently.) They all went to the same school in Wimbledon and I think AP was in the same year as one or both of them. AP went on to produce the first Kate Bush album, The Kick Inside.

If I ask myself where I got closest to this radical experimental stream I have to start with HORN � the band that Steve and I started in 1968 � and I suppose the jamming I did with Fred while I was working my way up to my Philosophy dissertation on The Aesthetics of Improvisation ( influenced by Richard Wollheim�s Art and Its Objects).

In my Aesthetics finals paper there was a question about a �revolutionary� work of art and so I wrote about �A Love Supreme� which I could play in my head from memory in the exam room. At the time I thought I was going right out on a limb � but from this distance it looks like a valid response to a deliberately ambiguous question.

I started at these threads shortly after Steve�s death in 1996. My neighbour, Peter Buckle � an ergonomist - organized a memorial event at Senate House London University. Charlie Alexander (Jazzwise) was the master of ceremonies and the White Hart band reconvened after at least 10 years. Paul Bell and I shared a slot talking about Steve�s Cambridge years and I had to try and find some framework to put my observations into.

You might see the White Hart band as some kind of preservationist undertaking � like Woodie Allen� s New Orleans band. Allen thinks that New Orleans jazz is a wonderful form and he sympathetically tries to keep the music going by playing once a week in a bar in NYC. When Fred Frith says he thinks that UK musicians get stuck he might have this (amongst a number of other things in mind). From time to time he would drop in on a Friday night at the White Hart and say it was good to hear all friends playing jazz with gusto � he denies that he plays jazz.

I am not sure the White Hart Band quite captured what Steve was about at university. He had come there with experience in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (which is a serious apprenticeship) but also from the North London Arts Laboratory which was something else. I wrote and delivered some stuff which tried to get grips with the radical aesthetic that Steve had at that point. At exactly that moment I picked up in a remaindered bookshop � The New Bohemia� about East Village in the 60s � written by a journalist who thought that something was happening and he doesn�t know what it was. Reading through this with those questions in my mind I began to play with the idea that there might be parallel agendas � in fact this hypothesis starts to surface in some of the articles I started to write for Mikael�s ND pages in the next year or so.

(I got an e-mail from Mikael today who edits these pages saying he has just started a five year Psychology degree)

From the perspective of �now� then people like Smalley and Andy Powell seem to be the connectors that fed some of the major ideas through. Tony Conrad has a crack at defining the aesthetic assumptions:

There were three pathways that made sense to the performers of �Dream Music,� or the �Theatre of Eternal Music,� or �The Dream Syndicate,� as I sometimes called it. Happily, what each of these solutions shared was a solid opposition to the North Atlantic [i.e. Western European and American] cultural tradition of composition.

The first was the dismantling of the whole edifice of �high� culture. Also around this time, I picketed the New York museums and high-culture performance spaces with Henry Flynt, in opposition to the imperialist influences of European high culture. More than that, I had strong sympathies with the aims of Flynt�s program, which amounted to the dismantling and dispersion of any and all organized cultural forms. At the time I was also a part of the �Underground Movie� scene, which (as I saw it) reconstructed the movies as a documentary form -- a merging of life-aims with movie production. Other counter-cultural components of the Dream Music picture were our anti-bourgeois lifestyles, our use of drugs, and the joy which John Cale and I took in common pop music. Down this pathway there were other fellow travelers, like Andy Warhol and Lou Reed; it led straight to the Velvet Underground, and the melting of art music into rock and roll.

The second solution was to dispense with the score, and thereby with the authoritarian trappings of composition, but to retain cultural production in music as an activity. The music was not to be a �conceptual� activity . . . it would instead be structured around pragmatic activity, around direct gratification in the realization of the moment, and around discipline. . . .

In keeping with the technology of the early 1960s, the score was replaced by the tape recorder. This, then, was a total displacement of the composer�s role, from progenitor of the sound to groundskeeper at its gravesite. The recordings were our collective property, resident in their unique physical form at [La Monte] Young and [Marian] Zazeela�s loft, where we rehearsed, until such time as they might be copied for us.

The third route out of the modernist crisis was to move away from composing to listening, again working �on� the sound from �inside� the sound. Here I was to contribute powerful tools, including a nomenclature for rational frequency ratios, which ignited our subsequent development.3�

I would certainly say that Steve signed up to the first two � that was the ethos that undepinned his Stoney Ground ventures and his decision to form Wild Oats. The technological and scientific side doesn�t fit so neatly, although Steve actually achieved recognition and fame in ergonomics � writing several very influential books, some of which were illustrated by Keith, the drummer from the White Hart Band. He was confident enough about mathematics to invent his own kind of statistics for this work. He once told me that he ate statisticians for breakfast. (I have a project in the back of my head to get out the synopsis of the book that he and I kicked around in the mid 1980s. He was worried about the disconnection of value from any functional benefit and the rise of what he called semiotic value � empty conventionalism and social conformism. ) There are times when I see Steve�s prose as belonging to a liberal prose tradition where clarity and logic plus some common sense are key. (The other thing about Steve that I think of these days is that his employers got fed up with him and forced him out.)

I sent Gilsbert Isbin a CD today with twelve tracks plus some scores � some of it is about what I have done with his tunes or playing and the rest is things he might want to collaborate on. I am glad I got round to getting this away.