Terry Jennings, the Lost Minimalist

On December 18, 1960, at an artist’s loft in lower Manhattan, the music of an unknown young composer named Terry Jennings inaugurated a series of concerts spotlighting emerging voices of the post-Cagean avant-garde.¹ The artist hosting the event was Yoko Ono; the force behind the selection of the evening’s program was La Monte Young, a recent arrival from the West Coast. Nine of Jennings’s own compositions were heard that night, as were three works composed by his friends but linked to his skill as a performer: a piece for saxophone and tape titled Wind by the electronic music innovator Richard Maxfield, a work in graphic notation by Terry Riley called Envelope, and a conceptual piece by Young bearing the enigmatic title An Invisible Poem Sent to Terry Jennings for Him to Perform.² In the audience for the performance were Jennings’s middle-class, suburban parents—his first music teachers—who traveled across the country to witness their son’s New York debut (fig. 1). One can only wonder what they made of the strange characters, the bohemian miseen-scène of Ono’s loft, and especially the invisible poetry.³

In the half century since Jennings’s New York debut, his name has made fleeting appearances in documentary accounts of the 1960s avant-garde. One of his works was reproduced in John Cage’s 1969 manuscript collection Notations, another in Michael Nyman’s influential 1974 volume Experimental Music.⁴ Surveys of minimalist music have included brief summaries of his association with Young, but offered little detail about his own music, much of which remains unpublished or difficult to obtain in print.⁵ Having died in 1981 after a long struggle with substance abuse, he has nearly vanished from the historical record, the published commentary on his work amounting to little more than a page in all.

Figure 1.

Jennings and his parents at 112 Chambers St., New York City, December 1960.

Source: Photograph from Jackson Mac Low Papers, MSS 180, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UC San Diego. Used with permission of Anne Tardos, Executor of the Estate of Jackson Mac Low.

To be sure, such neglect is not unique; many participants in the minimalist movement were relegated to the margins of history as academic accounts were written in the 1980s and 1990s charting its emergence. Only in recent years have scholars and performers embraced a wider view, acknowledging the contributions of the many “marginal” artists who helped build one of the most influential, diffuse, and resilient aesthetic paradigms in music since World War II. To reframe the story of minimalism from their perspective is to revisit familiar territory with new eyes, reminding us of the limitations implicit in any single historical narrative—and especially one whose authority rests upon its frequent repetition.⁶

Retiring in life, overlooked in death, Jennings was nevertheless a vital participant in the development of minimalism, and he served as an influential figure to its second generation of composers.⁷ Yet his significance cannot be attributed to the introduction of a particular technique or method of composition, the sort of achievement that helped elevate his better-known peers to positions of historical prominence. By reducing the history of modernist music to a checklist of such “firsts,” we inevitably diminish the importance of artists such as Jennings, who play crucial if quiet roles in the dissemination of musical styles, aesthetics, and ideologies.⁸ As both a performing musician and a composer from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, he worked alongside many colleagues to fuse elements of New York School experimentalism, modal jazz, underground rock, serialism, and non-Western music into improvisational and compositional practices now associated with minimalism and postminimalism. By surveying his output chronologically, we can track the emergence of several of those practices as they spread within communities of musicians: the exploration of sustained tones and modular repetition as the basis of musical style, the pursuit of an aesthetic of radical reduction, the embrace of modal pitch collections, and the merging of improvisation and composition...