I only met Tony Conrad twice—once after a performance at Issue Project Room in September 2014, and again, almost exactly a year later, at his apartment in Buffalo in August 2015. The second time I had come to interview him as part of my dissertation research on authorship in early minimalism. He was—as those who knew him much better have consistently portrayed him—funny, painfully intelligent, generous with his time (we spent about eight hours together), respectful of those with whom he has worked over the years, and impatient with praise or questions that read too far into his own career and ideas.
In his book Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage, art historian Branden Joseph argued for Conrad as someone too complex, heterogeneous, and self-critical in his work to allow for the formation of a heroic “major” narrative. Joseph’s brilliant book presents an artist who aimed always to work at the margins, and in response to whom a straightforward “life and works” biography would do a great disservice. Nevertheless, the major narrative has appeared: particularly in obituaries, it leaps across a number of media, always carefully noting his problematization of authorship. But still, we can now trace a line that connects The Theatre of Eternal Music to early films like the Flicker and Straight and Narrow, before diverting to Germany to discuss his album with Faust, the Yellow Movies, his 1980s work in public access television, and his 1990s return to recording. That this narrative leaves out important works is inevitable—this is the case in any posthumous overview of an artistic career.
As a musicologist, I’ve been consistently impressed by Tony’s work as a theorist and historian of music—the way he has created critical foundations for his own work, within the long history of Western art music, all the while undercutting and mocking those very conditions of possibility.
Still, across all of this outpouring of attention, a few roles have taken center stage: filmmaker, violinist, and teacher/collaborator. As someone who met him relatively recently, and spoke to him as a researcher, I would like to uphold some level of the “minor” status Joseph attributes to Conrad by leaving aside his films and music. As a musicologist, I’ve been consistently impressed by Tony’s work as a theorist and historian of music—the way he has created critical foundations for his own work, within the long history of Western art music, all the while undercutting and mocking those very conditions of possibility. The avant-garde lineage within which he articulated his work is one of both depth and contingency. It is revered and mocked simultaneously, with Conrad enjoying the spoils of the tradition while outlining its unspoken power structures (and offering guidance in how to topple them).
How did he do this? The answer is strewn across an entire career’s writings and interviews. Anyone reading along the last few weeks is surely now aware of the extensive liner notes from his 1997 Early Minimalism, including his infamous assertion that “history is like music—completely in the present.” In those essays, Conrad framed a polemical narrative of his work with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale in the original Theatre of Eternal Music as a deliberative and democratic collective rather than as a group formed, as historians like K. Robert Schwarz have written elsewhere, for the sole purpose of performing drones under Young. Perhaps most powerfully, Conrad ties his travels in the avant-garde to the Western canon in an entirely novel way, drawing on the influence of the 17th-century violinist-composer Heinrich Biber, whose music Tony claims he heard as organized according to timbre and tuning rather than harmony or melody.
Tony Conrad. (Photo by Bettina Herzner, courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery.)
Similarly, as Jeremy Grimshaw has argued, with the earlier CD Slapping Pythagoras, Conrad criticized Young in the guise of Pythagoras for substituting “a Theology of Numbers for the pragmatics of counting.” He considers this a profoundly anti-democratic confiscation of political potential from regular people, and shows how this initial theft becomes the organizing principle of specialized Western music against the heterophonic principles of community music-making. The articulation of this argument is, as with everything Tony did, paradoxical, messy, even silly, as it shifts between first-person attack and a more “objective” historical voice. He seems to have developed some of these ideas in the less publicly available works to which scattered reference can be found online, such as “Inducting Lully” and “Roughing Up Rameau.” This series of projects—as much scholarly as artistic—articulated a relationship between Western art music, tuning, and power that is perhaps Tony’s central theoretical contribution. Most importantly, it has inspired generations of musicians and artists, not only introducing to them the mathematics of just intonation and tuning, but doing so in such a way that is attached to the critique of power in art music.
This mode of anti-authority historiography continued outside of writing: it existed equally in his archival releases of his own music and that of others. His small imprint Audio ArtKive provided a number of releases that were avant-garde and probably unsellable even by the exceptional standards of their parent label, Table of the Elements. Several of the pieces on the three-CD set New York in the 1960s—archival recordings made with John Cale and others from the circle around 56 Ludlow St. (Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings, among others)—show their effort to formulate a new music making that was neither sole-authored nor purely “improvisation” in the wake of what Conrad saw as the post-Cagean challenge. The recordings show, more than anything else available, the problem of marking a strong dividing line between, for example, The Theatre of Eternal Music and the Velvet Underground, or treating Young as an inherent influence on the latter, or placing those two groups as obvious examples of an “avant-garde” and a “popular” impulse towards similar ideas. Similarly, the three Jack Smith CDs are incredible documents of the interaction between those same musicians and the experimental film scene occurring in that same apartment. To shift the locus of historical writing—which has yet to happen, at least in musicological thought on the period—from Young’s apartment at 275 Church St. to Conrad, Cale, and Smith’s at 56 Ludlow reveals an entirely different relationship to performance, labor, time, and intermedial influence.
We can further expand Tony’s mode of historiography into his “writing” in public space. One of my favorite examples of his historical practice—which is also a political practice, and an artistic one—comes up in an interview he conducted by email in 1996 with Brian Duguid of EST Magazine. Asked about the times he picketed performances by Young in Buffalo in 1990, Conrad explained himself in this way:
But picketing—picketing for or against something, and handing out literature—these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication. Yes, I am “in communication” with La Monte Young, of course, when I picket and he is there to perform his public action—but by clearly shaping my own action as “picketing,” even though there is only me there, I am making my action interpretable only as a public or political action, not as a private communication. What I’m trying to say is that both the message conveyed through my picketing, and the picketing itself, were not communications primarily intended for La Monte Young personally. They were communications which took place on the public level, which is the level of culture, of symbolic statement. These were symbolic or formal statements, which are as much a part of “Music” as this interview is—even though this interview is actually silent, and we aren’t even speaking out loud.
Conrad chose picketing to be in communication with the public sphere, rather than only with Young. He stood by his proclamations and found the appropriate means of circulating them during a period when, we can assume, several letters by lawyers may have changed hands. Around this time, Young attempted to get Conrad and Cale to sign contracts admitting that they were merely performers in what Young claimed were his (and only his) compositions for the Theatre of Eternal Music. By standing in the street, Conrad publicly articulated these protests as part of the history of this music. His mode of engaging and reinserting himself into the history of “early minimalism” (a phrase which he frequently noted was intended to be ridiculous) was by asserting a continuity between his formal actions, the sounds on Young’s tapes (still inaudible to most listeners, since Young refuses to release them), and the public memory and context for any of the sounds that might eventually become available—which happened ten years later with the Table of the Elements release of Day of Niagara. In this public articulation of his argument—a means of taking to the streets as a solitary, weird protester to make history—Tony was building off his work from around the same time in his public access project “Studio of the Streets.” This is yet another project which is likely to receive little attention in the near future, as it breaks with not only economies of art, but also modes of historicizing art. (For some interviews, photos, and writing around the project, see Doing the City, a program published by the 80WSE Gallery in New York.)
Listening to the crowd from his window, placing it in opposition to its filtered presentation for mass mediation, draws to attention the dissonance between history as it actually occurs and history as it is mediated for us through the memorialization of experts and specialists.
Perhaps my favorite historical record, though, in Tony Conrad’s long career, is from another Table of the Elements CD, The Bryant Park Moratorium (1969), that went entirely unnoticed among all of the roundups of his “best moments” in the news these last weeks. In 1969, Tony Conrad lived just off Bryant Park in New York City during the famous “Bryant Park Moratorium” aimed at demanding an end to the Vietnam War. While the protest is remembered today for the involvement of and speeches from prominent celebrities and politicians—Woody Allen, Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul and Mary), forgotten Broadway stars (“please sit down so people can see them” the producer introducing them yells), Dick Cavett, and so on—Conrad provides an entirely different mode of listening to the event. In place of the representatives, delegates, and stars that so frequently stand in both for regular people and for the importance of an event, Conrad takes a unique approach to presenting the tension at hand in media coverage of such democratic mobilizations. Conrad sat in his apartment with one microphone and tape machine pointed out his window at the crowds below, and another mic’ing his television set’s news coverage. In the Table of the Elements release from 2005, the two tracks are panned left and right, showing the stark tension between the noise of the crowd and the clear, singular speech of the television set, focused on representative individuals deemed able to speak for the crowd. What’s remarkable on the CD is how rarely the sound of the speakers at the podium are audible above the roar of the crowd. Amid the celebrities constantly interpellated from the crowd by the reporters, and the politicians speaking to the crowd through loudspeakers, one might expect to frequently hear the same sounds booming across the park and up to Conrad’s window. Instead, we hear rhythmic applause, percussion, shouting, street noise, always in stark contrast to the bland platitudes of politicians and actors. Only rarely does any event in the media coverage rise to the level of street-level attention.
While Conrad was only 28 at the time, the method of recording the moratorium clearly set a standard for his approach to many issues of history and representation throughout his career. Listening to the crowd from his window, placing it in opposition to its filtered presentation for mass mediation, draws to attention the dissonance between history as it actually occurs and history as it is mediated for us through the memorialization of experts and specialists. His entire approach as a historian, artist, and all-around trickster, seems to be: How do I supplement the count of people assumed responsible for this public action? For the sound of minimalism in the early 1960s? How do I remind popular memory that an event was messy, collaborative, collective, and noisy? Is there something that occurs comparable to a difference tone that can result from listening to a heterogeneous collision in the realms of history and politics?
Tony Conrad’s writing is an incredible model of thought for any composer or musicologist. Studying his work as a historian means not only dealing with facts and details about the life and works of an important musician; it means engaging in a dialog with a thoughtful writer and thinker himself, someone whose thought and writing provokes reflexivity in my own writing studies. As several people noted in a fascinating piece on NPR that drew on the comments of several important collaborators, Tony could not help but be a teacher—including of generous and critical music-historical practice.
