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WD_414/ 2008
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 5 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.9 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 455 | | Catalog #: | WD_0414 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Dream House : The Evolution of The Well-Tuned Piano
FRANK J. OTERI: To take it specifically to what brings us together here, The Well-Tuned Piano... It's almost 40 years old at this point. And now, with the release of The Well-Tuned Piano on a single DVD, it is a great moment in this 40-year history of The Well-Tuned Piano, and also, the two of you being together this year will be just overactually 41 years, since 1962.
LA MONTE YOUNG: Yes, it's true.
FRANK J. OTERI: This remarkable moment in time has not stayed fixed; it has evolved. The Well-Tuned Piano has not stayed the same as it was when you first created it; it is so much more. And you can't really say that for compositions in the Western classical sense. It's interesting that The Well-Tuned Piano happened after you were dealing with the concept of long sustained tones, after you were dealing with and starting to think about just intonation and the relationships of intervals with one another and the purity of sound. In so many ways, the piano as a construct is antithetical to all of these things. On a piano, you can't really sustain a tone. Yes, you can press a pedal but the decay cannot be prolonged. It's not like bowing a string or blowing into a brass or woodwind or singing until your breath runs out. It's a chopped, percussive sound. And pianos are traditionally tuned in 12-tone equal temperament, where you don't have any of these pure relationships between the intervals. And it's also a manufactured instrument that comes out of a factory, which is the opposite of a guru and a teacher. And you took this instrument and you turned it into something completely different. You remade it into your own instrument in spite of all of the piano's qualities. Why the piano? What brought you to the piano?
LA MONTE YOUNG: This is a great question! It all goes back to the lyre of Orpheus and the harp of David. From the beginnings of time, it seems that stretched strings became an instrument of measurement for men and women to study music. It seemed that with our voices we could go directly to God, but when we became interested in the measurement of the whole thing, we began to stretch these strings and make them different lengths and different tensions. Some people say that this approach to the relationship between music and mode goes back to the lyre of Orpheus. Actually, it goes back further. It goes back to the Vedas. And we can find these ideas in the Vedas, going through Greek thought, through Orpheus, through Plato, on up to the present time. And the piano is this glorification of Orpheus's lyre and David's harp. It's just a big lyre that's been set up in such a way that you can press the keys and strike the strings and you can manipulate the pedals and do various kinds of sustenances. When I began to study music I was two years old. In the beginning my dad was teaching me cowboy songs and my aunt Norma who used to sing at the rodeo was teaching me cowboy songs and playing the guitar. We know she was teaching me in Bern when I was about two years old and by the time I was five they had me singing and tap dancing at the Rich Theatre in Monpelier. But my mother's parents, Grandma and Grandpa Grandy, owned a piano, and before I left for California, between when I was one and five years old, we would sometimes go over to Grandpa's house and I would sit at the piano. Of course, somebody taught me "Chopsticks" [laughs]. I found it so profound to sit and play the interval of a second; I didn't know what I was doing but I would just listen to the sound of the piano. And later, I had saxophone lessons from the time I was seven years old. My dad bought me an alto saxophone and he taught me saxophone. My dad's uncle Thornton had taught him saxophone. Uncle Thornton had had a swing band in L.A. in the late '20s. This was a dance band. When I was ten, we moved to Utah where my father managed my Uncle Thornton's celery farm for four years before we moved back to L.A. and I went to John Marshall High School. I was living on Uncle Thornton's celery farm working out in the fields all day. But Uncle Thornton also gave me some coaching in saxophone and he introduced me to sheet music of Jimmy Dorsey. So it was through Uncle Thornton that I began to get some sense that jazz existed, although our radio hardly worked. We were like hillbillies, you know, farmers, cattle people, sheep people, and we were extremely poor. My family never really recovered from the Depression. They never ever earned a whole lot of money but somehow I was always learning music. And so Uncle Thornton gave me the sheet music from his dance band. But I didn't have any piano lessons until around 1955 after I was already at L.A. City College. But every jazz musician starts to play chords because sometimes the piano player doesn't show up so somebody has to lay down some changes so that some of the other guys can play. So I started to play piano. And especially after I met Terry Jennings because I liked to listen to him play and I would play piano for him. When I graduated from John Marshall High School, Terry Jennings entered. And this valve trombone player named Hal Hooker brought me a recording of Terry Jennings. I was astonished. He sounded just like Lee Konitz when he was only in the tenth grade. It was remarkable...
MARIAN ZAZEELA: ...You played in an orchestra when you were in Utah. So you were aware of pianos and many other instruments. Maybe you didn't play it, but...
LA MONTE YOUNG: I've played music my whole life. The piano exists. The piano exists. You can't avoid the piano!
MARIAN ZAZEELA: There was probably always a piano in church...
LA MONTE YOUNG: At the world premiere of The Well-Tuned Piano, the live world premiere in Rome in 1974, Pandit Pran Nath was there. And he said, "You literally transformed the traditional instrument of Europe before their eyes." Somehow, by tuning the piano in just intonation, it takes it back to the lyre of Orpheus and the harp of David which had to be tuned in a much simpler way, and it brings out some of those characteristics. The piano just depends on what you do with it. It's like everything else. Remember when electronic instruments came out and the Musician's Union said, "This is going to be a problem. Musicians are going to be out of work" and so forth. They weren't really. It just became another instrument. And what you do with electronics is what's important.
Published: October 1, 2003.
-www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=54fp04
La Monte Young -
La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer and musician.
Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer (Strickland 2001), and one of the four most celebrated leaders of the minimalist school, along with Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, despite having little in common formally with Glass or Reich. Young is also probably the least heard and least well-known of the major minimalist composers.
His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, or drone music. Both his proto-Fluxus and "minimal" compositions question the nature and definition of music
Life:
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 came out ahead of Eric Dolphy in a saxophone audition for the school's jazz band. In LA's jazz milieu, 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), where he received a BA in 1958, then at the University of California, Berkeley, from 195860. In 1959 he attended the summer courses at Darmstadt under Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in 1960 relocated to New York in order to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield. His compositions during this period were influenced by Anton Webern, Gregorian chant, Indian classical music, and Indonesian gamelan music.
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 in 1959, he encountered the music and writings of John Cage. There he also met Cage's collaborator, pianist David Tudor, who subsequently gave premiθres of some of Young's works. 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.[1]
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 at her loft, and absorbed, it seems, his often parodistic and politically charged aesthetic. Young's works of the time, scored as short haiku-like texts, 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#, a perfect fifth, 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, which he later gave as 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.[2] 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 work 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 Harvard) John Cale strings and sometimes Terry Riley, voice. Since 1966 the group has seen many permutations and has included, at various times, Garrett List, Jon Hassell, Alex Dea, and many others, including members of the 60s groups. Young has realized the "Theater of Eternal Music" only intermittently, due to a lack of funding for such an expensive project, requiring extensive and exceptional demands of time in rehearsal and mounting.
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 any particular performance. In practical terms, too, Young and Zazeela are also on an extended sleeping-waking schedule with "days" longer than twenty-four hours.
Beginning in 1970 interests in Asian classical music 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 others.
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 Gramavision, then a later performance on a DVD on Young's own Just Dreams label. 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, symmetrical configurations and Zazeela's quasi-calligraphic light sculptures in long-term installations. The effect is rigorous yet sensual, utilizing aspects of the viewer/auditor's perception to create sensory overload within a barely defined physical space.
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), 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," evidenced by their inclusion of his notes on the jacket.
Lou Reed mentions (and misspells) La Monte Young's name on the cover of his album Metal Machine Music: "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont Young's Dream Music"
Drone rock pioneer Dylan Carlson has stated Young's work as being a major influence to him.
Since 1962 La Monte Young has worked very closely with Marian Zazeela. Most of his mature works are performed with light designs created by Zazeela.
Quotes about Young:
* "If you were going across the prairie in a Conestoga wagon, La Monte was the father and he always had a wife and everything was like his scene. Everybody was there playing with him, but he was the hierarchical chief." Billy Name[3]
Discography:
* Inside the Dream Syndicate, Volume One: Day of Niagara with John Cale, Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela, and Angus Maclise [Recorded 1965] (Table of the Elements, 2000. Bootleg recording of dubious title, credits, and quality Not authorized by La Monte Young)[1]
* 31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM Munich from Map of 49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery; 23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM the volga delta from Studies in The Bowed Disc [a.k.a. The Black Record] (Edition X, West Germany, 1969)
* La Monte Young Marian Zazeela The Theatre of Eternal Music - Dream House 78' 17" (Shandar, 1974)
* The Well Tuned Piano 81 X 25 (6:17.50 - 11:18:59 PM NYC) (Gramavision, 1988)
* 90 XII C. 9:35-10:52 PM NYC, The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From the Four Dreams of China (Gramavision, 1991)
* Just Stompin': Live at The Kitchen (Gramavision, 1993)
Compilations:
* Small Pieces (5) for String Quartet ("On Remembering a Naiad") (1956) [included on Arditti String Quartet Edition, No. 15: U.S.A. (Disques Montaigne, 1993)]
* Sarabande for any instruments (1959) [included on Just West Coast (Bridge, 1993)]
* "89 VI 8 c. 1:45-1:52 AM Paris Encore" from Poem for Tables, Chairs and Benches, etc. (1960) [included on Flux: Tellus cassette magazine #24]
* Excerpt "31 | 69 c. 12:17:33-12:24:33 PM NYC" from Drift Study; "31 | 69 c. 12:17:33-12:49:58 PM NYC" from Map of 49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals (1969) [included on Ohm and Ohm+ (Ellipsis Arts, 2000 & 2005)]
* 566 for Henry Flynt [included on Music in Germany 19502000: Experimental Music Theatre (Eurodisc 173675, 7-CD set, 2004)]
References:
* Duckworth, William. 1995. Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers. New York: Schirmer Books; London: Prentice-Hall International. ISBN 0028708237 Reprinted 1999, New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80893-5
* Grimshaw, Jeremy. 2005. "Music of a 'More Exalted Sphere': Compositional Practice, Biography, and Cosmology in the Music of La Monte Young." Doctoral dissertation, Eastman School of Music. Ann Arbor: UMI/ProQuest.
* Howard, Ed. 2003. "The Dream House". Stylus (online magazine, 17 November).
* Potter, Keith. 2000. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Music in the Twentieth Century series. Cambridge, UK; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press.
* Strickland, Edward. 2001. "Young, La Monte". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
* Watson, Steven. 2003. Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 0679423729
Footnotes:
1. ^ Duckworth 1995, 233.
2. ^ Howard 2003.
3. ^ Watson 2003,[citation needed]
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Monte_Young
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