When La Monte Young wrote Composition 1960 #10 on a 3x5 filing card, he wrote what might be the most readily citational musical score in the history of Western music:

In the midst of the Fluxus movement, a movement characterized by a melding of musical notation and event theatre, Composition 1960 #10 established the foundational pattern for all of Young’s subsequent compositions, in which exhortatory instructions, which make no distinctions between performer and listener, replace standard musical notation and prompt a singular activity to be sustained for long durations. Indeed, Composition 1960 #10 was a marked turning point for Young. Once you’ve considered “draw a line and follow it,” you are as prepared as you’ll ever be to grapple with the entirety of Young’s 1961 output. In 1961, Young, in his own words, became more and more interested in the idea of this sort of singular event, and “I decided to polish off my entire output for 1961 in a singular manner” ( Kostelanetz, 1968, p. 204). And so, Composition #ers 1-29, 1961 all read, “Draw a straight line and follow it.” And although he used a yearly average of the number of pieces “completed,” and spaced that number equally throughout 1961 to date these compositions, Young proudly reports how he “performed all 29 compositions in March, long before many of them had ever been written according to their dates of composition” (Kostelanetz, p. 204). Already, Composition 1960 #7 (two notes “to be held for a long time”) played with extended duration, but the 1961 “Draw a Line” series introduces a remarkably unorthodox concern with and expanded approach to time and space in the medium of sound.

figure from "A Cartography of Ecstatic and Meditative States"

SCIENCE Vol 174 Num 4012 26 November 1971

In the aesthetic register, we say "minimalism" when we want to engage Young's refined focus on duration and repetition. But the amplified attention to perception it solicits encourages the production of a practice: the repetitio axiomatic to differentiation, and any rhythmic practice. Taking the human nervous system coordinate system for rhythm, Roland Fischer (1971) creates a spectrum of conscious states, from ergotrophic (ecstatic) and tropotrophic (meditative), that accompany embodied rhythmic practices rooted in repetition ("A Carography of Ecstatic and Meditative States). Elsewhere, in an article for J.T. Fraser's Voices of Time edited collection, Fischer defines biological time by considering the basic conditions by which a "now" can be articulated, and these articulations depend on the coordinate system, which, as in quantum mechanics, must include "the observer." "When a living organism is the coordinate system," Roland Fischer argues, "the concept of biological time has to be introduced. Biological time, then, may be defined as a creature's awareness of its own duration and location within a restricted frequency range, in contradistinction to traditional concepts of time which attempt to be independent of life" (358). Young's 1960 performance pieces function as a code or script, designed to program this same coordinate system. This musical (music as filter/philter) program aims to impose boundary conditions on the listening body, the "city of 9 gates" in Prabavananda and Isherwood's translation of the Gita.

As repetitio practice, Young's minimalism presents itself as a pedagogical and potentially interactive medium of dynamic composition. Like Young, Fischer (1971) draws lines to show the similar effects of ergotrophic and tropotrophic repetitions. When measured by EEG technology, these effects score a consistency no different from La Monte Young's compositional gambit, "draw a straight line and follow it." Fisher shows that an increase in ergotrophic activity corresponds to a "decrease in variability of the EEG amplitude with increasing ergotropic arousal," or, in other words, long, sustained, repeating durations” (Fischer, 1971, p. 897). At the same time, on what Fisher calls the "perception-meditation continuum" another repetitio unfolds: alpha, beta, and theta EEG waves, measured in hz, draw a line, and the performer who develops this filament actively composes the tropotrophic conditions of meditation (Fischer, p. 897). Whereas repetitive dance moves and musical gestures dissolve ego boundaries and rhythmically entrain bodies into fluid and ecstatic communities of movement, introspective and yogic practices directly rhythmize the Mind, where consciousness, spirit, body, and all the subtle categories and coodrinate systems humans and machines, together, map onto vibratory space. Under this paradigm of "vibration," the space and meaning of music becomes increasingly configureable as they fall under common principles of movement for the performing listener, who becomes, in a sense, the composer. In what follows, Young's "Romantic Symmetries," a paradoxically baroque elaboration of musical minimalism, offers itself as model for rhythmic composition in classroom contexts, because it draws a line on the very idea of a "composer," and, if we follow it, we find new connections between composer, performer, and listener. At the same time, however, the ghost of an authorial ethos haunts these Dream House installations, and provides opportunity to reflect on the ways technology often functions to tighten the knot of creativity and control. Understood allegorically, Young's mystical rationalism and musical minimalism teach us that it is only by getting lost that one can find a rhythm. Impractical as it may sound, practical rhetorics, then, must include practices of disaggregation and “pattern­ breaking” that allow rhetors to re­tune to the contingencies of any given audience or ecology. Because the interruption of old compositional habits may prove most crucial to a rhetorical pedagogy designed for dynamic contexts, Young's recipes for (musical) composition, in the semiotic analysis that follows, are sampled and recast towards rhetorical scholarship, which too often forgets the (even evolutionary) traces of music, rhythm, and song in speech and written discourse.

Code and Coda