"The message here was not about indeterminacy, nor about immediacy, but about the control of sounds right there in your environment, and the process of composition as long-term growth of interests within that sound complex"
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Tony Conrad pushes back against two dominant mid-century currents: Cagean chance and the cult of the instant. Rather than surrendering sound to randomness or celebrating spur-of-the-moment gestures, he argues for a deliberate, situated authorship that begins with the physical and social environment. The room, the instruments, the amplifiers, the bodies listening, and the resonant air all become the site and substance of composition. Control here is not rigid command but a cultivated relationship with the materials at hand.
That stance reflects the drone practices Conrad helped pioneer with La Monte Young and the Theatre of Eternal Music. Sustained tones tuned in just intonation create dense fields of overtones, beating patterns, and psychoacoustic effects that only reveal themselves over time. The composer’s task is to stabilize and adjust that field, coaxing it into a coherent sound complex and living with it long enough for interests to grow within it. Attention becomes the compositional engine. As the ear returns to the same tones and the same space, new micro-events appear, new tensions and affinities emerge, and what seemed static begins to bloom.
By naming composition as long-term growth, Conrad reframes originality as patience and care rather than novelty or spontaneity. The work is less a finished object than a practice that accumulates insight. Rehearsal is composition; maintenance is composition; subtle retuning and micromovements are composition. This view also recasts minimalism: not reduction for purity’s sake, but concentration that lets the environment answer back. The site is an instrument. Duration is a tool for discovery.
There is a social edge, too. Control of sounds in your environment implies reclaiming everyday sonic life from the commodity spectacle and from abstract systems. One can organize sound without vast resources, by tuning relationships, by listening harder, by committing to an evolving sonic ecology. Composition becomes a civic act of attention, grounded where you stand and thickened by time.
That stance reflects the drone practices Conrad helped pioneer with La Monte Young and the Theatre of Eternal Music. Sustained tones tuned in just intonation create dense fields of overtones, beating patterns, and psychoacoustic effects that only reveal themselves over time. The composer’s task is to stabilize and adjust that field, coaxing it into a coherent sound complex and living with it long enough for interests to grow within it. Attention becomes the compositional engine. As the ear returns to the same tones and the same space, new micro-events appear, new tensions and affinities emerge, and what seemed static begins to bloom.
By naming composition as long-term growth, Conrad reframes originality as patience and care rather than novelty or spontaneity. The work is less a finished object than a practice that accumulates insight. Rehearsal is composition; maintenance is composition; subtle retuning and micromovements are composition. This view also recasts minimalism: not reduction for purity’s sake, but concentration that lets the environment answer back. The site is an instrument. Duration is a tool for discovery.
There is a social edge, too. Control of sounds in your environment implies reclaiming everyday sonic life from the commodity spectacle and from abstract systems. One can organize sound without vast resources, by tuning relationships, by listening harder, by committing to an evolving sonic ecology. Composition becomes a civic act of attention, grounded where you stand and thickened by time.
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| Topic | Music |
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