"Experimentalists and independents are favored": John Edmunds in conversation with Peter Yates and John Cage, 1959-61

Notes, June, 2008 by Amy C. Beal

Though his own opinions seemed so vehement, Yates later wrote to Edmunds: "I fear your new savage mood towards musical conservatives" and advised his friend to "retain a discreet impartiality to strengthen your decision." (40)

Despite Yates's protesting, in compiling this first list Edmunds's taste might have had a lasting, yet heretofore unacknowledged influence on American definitions of experimental music. Through the correspondence, the notion of "fighting names" remained central, and Yates's introduction to volume 1 indeed announced in its opening sentence: "Here are fifteen fighting names of American composers." His essay continued in a sassy, polemically revisionist, and deliberately provocative tone, with name-calling right from the outset.

If I accept this group as central to the growth in American music of a continental individuality, I do not by that imply the unimportance of the American academists, descendants of Horatio Parker. No composer has labored for American music and musicianship more unstintingly than Howard Hanson. Here indeed, I am not concerned with arguing and pointing, in the usual manner, from the routine to the exceptional. Here, for one of the rare occasions in American musical scholarship, we begin in the midst of the exceptional, putting to one side the decorous, however admirable, routine. ... Student and critic alike may be inclined to put the whole business to one side, to believe that music in America should represent an historical continuity from the music of Europe, and that whatever American composer does not accept or more vigorously denies such continuity may be dismissed as experimental and at best incomplete. Incomplete becomes inadequate; inadequate deteriorates to faulty; what is faulty can be at best no more than primitive. Thus we find the word "primitive" attached to the compositions by Charles Ives. (41)

In his introduction, Yates announced that "these fifteen composers share one characteristic: they are all American experimentalists" (42)--which might seem odd now, given the inclusion of Carter, Copland, Harris, and Sessions. (Furthermore, Yates offered no apology for Varese's foreign-born status.) Yates emphasized "continental individuality" and praised the "exceptional" rather than the " routine." (43) The main difference he noted between composers such as Cage, Partch, and Harrison--the "more native extreme of American experimentalism"--and the others was that those three "lay outside the direction of European music." (44) (In his preface, however, Edmunds underscored the glaring lack of information when it came to idiosyncratic composers like Partch and Nancarrow, the second of whom, by 1959, had been discussed in only "a single article by Nicolas Slonimsky in the Christian Science. Monitor of November 10, 1951 .) Yates's essay otherwise displays a strongly critical voice toward many of the first volume's subjects, especially Sessions ("disclaims interest in the concept of an American music"), Copland ("less gifted with such powerful crude talent as Roy Harris"), Harris ("his powerful native talent was blunted and diverted by a formalistic education in Paris"), Hovhaness ("an with flair rather than fundamentally an experimentalist"), and Brant (whose "fanciful" titles alone were discussed by Yates, who despised his music). Yates closed his essay by admitting that "there is not one composer on the list whom I do not admire, only four with whom I have not enjoyed personal acquaintance, and only one whom I believe inadequate to this honorable place." (46)