La Monte Young”
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M. Musick April 2008 “La Monte Young” La Monte Young’s musical output between 1960 and 1991 has been important in the avant-garde community. However, his unwillingness to compromise any control over the musical product and the extreme nature of his musical ideas have kept his music from reaching larger crowds then the New York underground avant-garde community. Although the distribution of his music has been hurt, La Monte Young’s music has explored new areas and created a product that will influence more composers as access continues to become available. La Monte Young’s music is unique because of his desire to “get inside a sound.”1 Rather then listening to melody and rhythm like the rest of the western music world, Young wants to listen to the sound and learn to understand it. Young was influenced by long sustained sounds when he was a kid, listening to the wind through his log cabin when he was very young, then step-down power transformers a few years later, the train yards across the Los Angeles river in high school, and the hum of turtle motors in the 60’s when “he kept turtles.”2 Young would spend time just listening to these sounds trying to hear everything about them. Young wants to listen to sounds that have the power of making him feel like he is leaving “this world” and “stepping into the world of the sound,” “viewing the current world from the sound.”3 This desire to “get inside the sound” has allowed Young to write music that explores harmonies and sounds over very long periods of time. Young feels that in order to really hear the sound, especially the 1 La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, eds., Selected Writings (ubo.com: ubuclassics, 1969), 74, http://www.ubu.com/historical/young/index.html. 2 William Duckworth, Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers (New York, NY: Schirmer Books, 1995), 210. 3 Young and Zazeela, Selected Writings, 78 Writing Sample 2 “La Monte Young” M. Musick 2 tuning, overtones, and false frequencies created from his just-tuning system that the music must be played for a long time. Young compares this to astronomer’s measurement of orbits. The “degree of precision of measurement is proportional to the duration for which the measurement is made.”4 Young knows that in order to accurately hear and measure the fine-tuning aspects of his music the listener and musician must listen for a long time. In addition to the length of Young’s compositions and the true minimalist nature of them, Young has a tendency to compose very loud music. He claims, that in order to accurately hear the high partials and the beats created, the music must be loud and allowed to interact in the room.5 It is like looking at the music under a microscope and therefore he tends to play the music on the “threshold of pain.”6 The minimalism and loud volume of La Monte Young’s music are two of the first examples where his unwillingness to compromise in ways that would make his music more consumer friendly have created compositions that are pushing the musical boundaries. In addition to his music being sparse and loud, the length is also a factor. With one of his live performance pieces running more the six and a half hours, it is not surprising that concert presenters have a hard time putting his music on programs. Because of this problem, La Monte charges other people who perform his piece inversely to its length.7 He charges more for a shorter work then a lengthy work because he does not enjoy composing short pieces. That is not his music, nor the scale of size and depth he likes to work on. Young also refuses to change the volume of a 4 Young and Zazeela, Selected Writings, 7 5 ibid., 40 6 Duckworth, Talking Music : Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers, 243-244 7 Young and Zazeela, Selected Writings, 19 Writing Sample 2 “La Monte Young” M. Musick 3 work once he has determined it. At a movie screening of four Andy Warhol films that La Monte composed for, the theatre director “demanded” the music be turned down to “reasonable” levels. La Monte would not allow it and rather then compromise his music by changing the volume, he withdrew the music from the movies.8 The Dream House is one of La Monte Young’s major projects. This project is a space in New York where Young plays his composition: The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 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 (1991 - Present NYC). Marian Zazeela also displays her light exhibits, in that space, which are intended to complement the composition. Young’s long title helps explains the harmony that is created on a custom “Rayna” sin oscillator which is played over two “large white speaker[s] that look like giant refrigerator[s]” in a white room that houses the magenta light exhibit.9 The tones are produced loud enough to allow the listener to “get inside the sound” or get lost in the other world Young was always trying to step into. The harmony is a set of “35 tones tuned according to [Young’s] own system of just intonation.10 The idea for the Dream House and original composition for it come from a larger composition known as The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys. This music is 8 Mark Alburger, "La Monte Young: Compositions 1961-," 21st Century Music 10, no. 4 (April 2003, 2003), 4. 9 Mela Foundation, "Dream House: Seven+Eight Years of Sound and Light," http://www.melafoundation.org/Howard_03.htm (accessed April, 2008). 10 Mela Foundation, "Dream House: Seven+Eight Years of Sound and Light," http://www.melafoundation.org/farneth.htm (accessed April, 2008). Writing Sample 2 “La Monte Young” M. Musick 4 true “minimalist” music, Young has stripped it down to its bare ingredients and unlike Philip Glass or Steve Reich he does not introduce rhythm or changing pitch to the composition. The only variance that happens is from the movement of a listener around the room. The listener is able to “play” the room by finding different regions of “high and low pressure” which drastically change the pitch, volume and beats in the sound.11 The current Dream House in New York City has been going since 1991. Young hopes that the project will be around long enough that it will become a “living organism with a life and tradition of its own.”12 Young’s original intention for this project was to have a place where music was always happening, this included plans for live musicians. It was to be a place where musicians could live, practice, study and whenever they were inspired join the performance. Young wanted to take the artificial time out of performing by providing a situation where, whenever the creative muse was in a musician, it could be expressed.13 He also planned on playing the music from the main room in all other parts of the house so residents and guests could always hear the performance. He eventually realized the cost of this environment was impossible and that is when Young decided to explore creating the music with electronics. Since Young’s original intentions for the Dream House, there have been Dream House exhibits around the world but they would never last more then a few months at most. Young’s dream was for a permanent set-up and that dream has come true in the most current exhibit in New York. The problem with this work is its ability to be distributed to the consumer. It is impossible to distribute through traditional means that exist today 11 Mela Foundation, "Dream House: Seven+Eight Years of Sound and Light," http://www.melafoundation.org/farneth.htm (accessed April, 2008). 12 Young and Zazeela, Selected Writings, 10 13 ibid., 14 Writing Sample 2 “La Monte Young” M. Musick 5 because the full impact of the work could not be experienced, therefore in order for an individual to experience this piece they must travel to the only existing Dream House in New York City. La Monte Young’s desire to create extended music from minimal ideas can be seen starting in his college years with the Trio for Strings or his Composition 1960: #7, which simply showed the interval of a perfect fifth with the instruction underneath “to be held for a long time.”14 In New York, after Young left California and the rules of school, he assembled a group with which he could start to explore his long tones and the chords he conceived for the large work Four Dreams of China. The “Theatre of Eternal Music” was an improvisational group that became this avenue. The Theatre of Eternal Music played one song: The Map of 49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery which was from the larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys which was based on the same harmonies as the Four Dreams of China.