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fallen under the influence of John Cage and was involved with what would become known as the Fluxus movement. With New York composers and visual artists such as Al Hansen and Yoko Ono, Fluxus set out to playfully blur the lines between different art forms (music, theater, visual art), as well as between art and life.
    Young’s work in this period was often more conceptual than musical. The score to his Composition 1960 #10 , for instance, called for the performer to “draw a straight line and follow it.” When it was musical, it retained an essential simplicity that came to define his work (his Composition 1960 #7 consists of a single piano interval, “to be held a long time”), and Young is often recognized as the first major minimalist composer (a group that would include Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass as well).
    Young’s 1958 Trio for Strings served as a blueprint that he would use for his major life’s work. Consisting of long, sustained viola notes, with other instruments joining for various durations to complete a chord, the droning strings created fascinating harmonic effects and psycho-acoustical phenomena. By 1962, Young had largely moved away from Fluxus and formed a group of like-minded musicians (including Terry Riley early on) to exclusively pursue these sounds, which he called “dream music.”
    One of his collaborators was Tony Conrad, a composer-violinist Young met in California who shared his fascination for Indian and experimental music and had been trained in harmonic theory. In addition to Conrad on violin and Young on saxophone (and later singing), the group dubbed the Dream Syndicate included poet (and original Velvet Underground drummer) Angus MacLise on percussion, future Warhol scenester Billy Name on guitar, and Young’s wife Marian Zazeela singing and designing a light show. Rounding out the group on viola was John Cale, a young Welsh music student who had come to the United States on a Leonard Bernstein scholarship.
    Expanding on the basic premise of slow, sustained tones and a limited number of pitches, the group produced The Four Dreams of China , an extended trancelike improvisation. The work’s most developed section, called The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer , explored the harmonic relationships between notes and used techniques such as amplification, throat singing, and a minimalist bowing style to emphasize certain harmonics.
    By 1964, the group was renamed the Theater of Eternal Music to reflect the transcendental quality of the ever-lengthening performances. Conrad introduced new pitches based on notes in the harmonic series rather than the traditional Western system of equal temperament. The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys , which used the pitch of Young’s turtle aquarium motor as the root frequency, was their first piece based on this harmonic tuning system, known as just intonation. That same year, Young’s solo piano piece The Well-Tuned Piano , employed just intonation as well.
    As the group’s explorations grew, so did an inherent power struggle. On one side there was Young, who considered himself the Theater of Eternal Music’s composer. On the other side was Conrad (along with his roommate Cale), who considered the group collaboration and was openly disdainful of even the idea that this music could have a composer in the traditional Western sense. Though they would remain active for at least another year, Conrad and Cale were soon exploring other career options.
    In the fall of 1964, Conrad and Cale became the bassist and lead guitarist for a rock band, the Primitives, where they backed up singer Lou Reed on an inane teenybopper dance song he’d written called “The Ostrich.” The band was short-lived, but Cale and Reed soon began a musical partnership that would evolve into the Velvet Underground. Combining Cale’s background in experimental music – particularly his droning viola work in the Dream Syndicate – with