Tony Conrad

A pioneering force behind the evolution of minimalism, violinist and composer Tony Conrad introduced the idea of "Eternal Music," a droning, mesmerizing performance idiom which employed long durations, amplification and precise pitch to explore new worlds of sound; through both his solo work and through collaborations with artists including LaMonte Young, John Cale and Faust, he forged new creative directions which proved enormously influential on successive generations of artists ranging in background from pop to the avant-garde. Born in Baltimore in 1940, Conrad studied music at Harvard, where he was first exposed to the work of John Cage and David Tudor; among his fellow students were David Behrman, Christian Wolff and Frederic Rzewski, all of whom later pursued careers in experimental music as well. After graduating in 1962, Conrad relocated to New York, where he became immersed in the city's burgeoning underground music scene; there he first joined forces with composer and saxophonist LaMonte Young, who at the time was leading an improvisational group including his wife Marian Zazeela on voice-drone, Billy Name (later a staple of Andy Warhol's Factory scene) on guitar, and Angus MacLise on percussion. Conrad approached Young about performing with the group, and by 1963 a new line-up also consisting of Zazeela and the young Welsh musician John Cale began playing about town in an ensemble variously dubbed the Dream Syndicate and the Theater of Eternal Music. Sustaining notes for hours at a time, their improvised dissections of specific harmonic intervals rejected the compositional process, instead elaborating shared performance concepts. The Dream Syndicate disbanded in 1965, with Conrad, Young and Cale all later staking claim to authoring of the "Eternal Music"...