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La Monte Young (1935-)

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La Monte Young (1935-) La Monte Young (1935-) Raised in a log cabin in a small Idaho town, Young cites his earliest musical influences as the sound of the wind blowing through a chink in the cabin and the buzzing of a power line outside. After training as a jazz saxophonist, Young became a twelve tone composer, and visited the seminar at Darmstadt in the mid 1950s. After this, he began to write pieces for strings that involved notes that were to be held for several minutes at a time. In 1960 he went to New York, where he joined the Fluxus movement. Three of his pieces from 1960 are often called the first minimalist works: Composition 1960 #9: the score was a card with a straight horizontal line on it; arabic numeral [any integer] for Henry Flynt: a sound is to be repeated some number of times, the number corresponding to the title chosen for the performance; Composition 1960 #7: two pitches, B and F# are notated, with the instruction "to be held for a long time." Young founded the performance group The Theater of Eternal Music. Many of this group eventually went on to form the rock group The Velvet Underground. Young began to examine the mathematical nature of tuning, working with tones that were integer multiples of a fundamental frequency. With tones that extended over a period of minutes, listeners could be brought to a state of analytic listening, in which they were conscious of the interplay of individual overtones. In 1964, Young introduced a piece that over the next 20 years grew into The Well-Tuned Piano, a series of improvisations on a piano tuned to maintain a series of perfect fifths (3:2 frequency ratios), and a set of over fifty themes that were the subject of a series of improvisations. Performances of the piece last up to six hours, intended to permeate a listener's life for that period of time, rather than be passing songs. A continuing project of Young's is Dream House, in New York, which consists of sine tones played in ratios calculated to affect the nervous system, accompanied by lighting designed by his wife, visual artist Marian Zazeela. Initially conceived as a seven year project, it has been extended repeatedly. The musical component has the imposing, but perfectly descriptive title: The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered Above and Below the Lowest Term Primes in the Range of 288 to 224 with the Addition of 279 and 261 in Which the Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped Above and Including 288 Consists of the Powers of 2 Multiplied by the Primes Within the Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64, and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in the Half of the Symmetric Division Mapped Below and Including 224 within the Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56, and 31.5 to 28 with the Addition of 119. Kyle Gann wrote the following description of the piece: Walk into The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry and you'll hear a whirlwind of pitches swirl around you. Stand still, and the tones suddenly freeze in place. Within the room, every pitch finds its own little niche where it resonates, and with all those close-but-no-cigar intervals competing in one space (not to mention their elegantly calculated sum- and difference-tones), you can alter the harmony you perceive simply by pulling on your earlobe. Moving your head makes those tones leap from high to low and back, while that cluster in the seventh octave, with its wild prime ratios like 269:271, fizzes in and out... Inspired by teacher Pandit Pran Nath, who taught him about intonation and also stated that people can have out-of-body experiences when singing perfectly in tune, Young has stated that "if one doesn't feel swept away to Heaven [by his music], it has failed." .
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