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La Monte Young

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La Monte Young (born October 14 1935) is an American composer.

Young's eccentric and often hard-to-find works have been included among the most important post World War II avant-garde, experimental, or drone music. Both his proto-Fluxus and "minimal" compositions question the nature and definition of music and often stress elements of performance. He is normally listed as one of the "big four" minimalists along with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, despite having little in common with Glass and Reich.

Contents

Biography

Young was born to a Mormon family in Bern, Idaho. His family moved several times in his childhood while his father searched for work before settling in Los Angeles, California.

He studied at Los Angeles City College, and was such a good saxophonist that he came out ahead of Eric Dolphy in an audition for the school's jazz band. Besides Dolphy, he played alongside notable musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Billy Higgins.

He undertook further studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), then at the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied electronic music with Richard Maxfield and attended the summer courses at Darmstadt under Karlheinz Stockhausen. Over this period he virtually gave up playing the saxophone to concentrate on compositions influenced by Anton Webern, Gregorian chant, and various music of other cultures — including Indian classical music and Indonesian gamelan music. Beginning in 1970 these interests and a wish to be able to find the intervals he used by ear led to studies with Pandit Pran Nath. Fellow students included calligrapher and light artist Marian Zazeela; composers Terry Riley and Yoshi Wada; philosophers Henry Flynt and C.C. Hennix, and many more.

A number of Young's early works use the twelve tone technique, which he studied under Leonard Stein at UCLA. (Stein had served as an assistant to Arnold Schoenberg when Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone method, had taught at UCLA.) When Young visited Darmstadt he encountered the music and writings of John Cage. There he also met Cage's collaborator, pianist David Tudor. At Tudor's suggestion, Young engaged in a correspondence with Cage. Within a few months Young was presenting some of Cage's music on the West Coast; in turn Cage and Tudor included some of Young's works in performances throughout the U.S. and Europe. By this time Young had taken a turn toward the conceptual, using principles of indeterminacy in his compositions and incorporating non-traditional sounds, noises, and actions.

When Young moved to New York in 1960, he had already established a reputation as an enfant terrible of the avant garde. He initially developed an artistic relationship with Fluxus founder George Maciunas (with whom he published a text titled An Anthology) and other members of the nascent movement. Yoko Ono, for example, hosted a series of concerts curated by Young) and quickly eschewed his often parodistic and politically charged aesthetic. Young's works, though conceptual and extreme, were not meant to be merely provocative but rather dream-like.

His Compositions 1960 includes a number of unusual actions; some of them are unperformable, but each deliberatively examines a certain presupposition about the nature of music and art and carries ideas to an extreme. One instructs: "draw a straight line and follow it" (a directive which he has said has guided his life and work since). Another instructs the performer to build a fire. Another states that "this piece is a little whirlpool out in the middle of the ocean." Another says the performer should release a butterfly into the room. Yet another challenges the performer to push a piano through a wall. Composition 1960 #7 proved especially pertinent to his future endeavors: it consisted of a B, an F#, and the instruction: "To be held for a long time."

In 1962 Young wrote The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. One of The Four Dreams of China, the piece is based on four pitches with the frequency ratios: 36-35-32-24 (G, C, +C#, D), and limits as to which may be combined with any other. Most of his pieces after this point are based on select pitches, played continuously, and a group of long held pitches to be improvised upon. For The Four Dreams of China Young began to plan the "Dream House", a light and sound installation where musicians would live and create music twenty-four hours a day. He formed The Theater of Eternal Music to realize "Dream House" and other pieces. The group initially included Marian Zazeela (who has provided the light show The Ornamental Lightyears Tracery for all performances since 1965), Angus MacLise, and Billy Name. In 1964 the ensemble contained Young and Zazeela, voices — Tony Conrad (a former Mathematics major at Havard who introduced Young to the idea of just intonation which informed all of his subsequent works, including revisions of many of his previous works) — John Cale strings — and sometimes Terry Riley, voice. Since 1966 Young has realized the "Theater of Eternal Music" intermittantly, due to a lack of funding for such an exceptional, extensive, and expensive project.

Most realizations of the piece have long titles, such as The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers as they were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong, Illuminated by the Sawmill, the Green Sawtooth Ocelot and the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. His works, too are often of extreme length, conceived by Young as having no beginning and no end, existing before and after a particular performance. Young and Zazeela are also on an extended sleeping-waking schedule – with "days" longer than twenty-four hours.

Young considers The Well Tuned Piano — a permutating composition of themes and improvisations for just-intuned solo piano — to be his masterpiece. Performances have exceeded six hours in length, and so far have been documented twice: first on a five-CD set issued by Grammavision, then on a DVD by Young's own Just Dreams label (a later performance). One of the defining works of American musical minimalism, it is strongly influenced by mathematical composition as well as Hindustani classical music practice.

Together Young and Zazeela have realized a long series of semi-permanent "Dream Houses" — combining Young's just-intuned sine waves in elaborate, symmetical configurations and Zazeela's quasi-calligraphic light sculptures — in long-term installations. The effect is highly modernistic and deeply sensual, utilizing aspects of the viewer/auditor's perception to create an extraordinarily refined sensory overload, within a physical space which is barely defined. Like his work of the 60s and 70s, when he was at his most playful, his installations with Zazeela remain alarmingly psychedelic.

Influence

La Monte Young's use of long tones and exceptionally high volume has been extremely influential — notably on John Cale's contribution to The Velvet Underground's sound — and with Young's associates: Tony Conrad, Jon Hassell, Rhys Chatham, Michael Harrison, Henry Flynt, Charles Curtis (musician), Michael J. Schumacher, and Catherine Christer Hennix. Young's students also include Arnold Dreyblatt and Daniel James Wolf.

The album Dreamweapon: An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music by the band Spacemen 3 is influenced by La Monte Young's concept of "Dream Music."

Lou Reed mentions (and misspells) La Monte Young's name on the back cover of his album Metal Machine Music: "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont Young's Dream Music"

Discography

Compilations

See also

External links

 

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