La Monte Young - In Search of Eternal Music

It would be – rather simplistically but certainly effectively – possible to divide La Monte Young's career into three phases tied to three cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. It would also be possible – though we certainly won't do so – to claim and prove that Young was the first true minimalist in music, but doing so would fail to do justice to the evolution of a style in constant progress and development.

I have my own definition of minimalism, which is ‘that which is created with a minimum of means.

(La Monte Young)

Avoiding digressions that are as fascinating as they are pointless, it must be said that musical minimalism is nothing more than the consequence of a progressive reduction of means and sonic form, introduced in the second half of the last century by four American composers: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Broadly speaking, minimalism confronts us with a self-imposed limitation of material at the compositional stage, an apparent reduction of arranging techniques and transformative solutions, a precise balance between rhythm and timbre, and a proud rejection of the thinking and conventions that postwar popular culture had seemingly made indispensable.

And it is precisely popular music that provides the most effective key to understanding the minimalist sensibility. While the roots of the pictorial minimalist movements of the Fifties and Sixties were inevitably European (the American artists Frank Stella, Don Judd and Dan Flavin all held a deep admiration for the formal austerity of Malevich's Russian Suprematism from the turn of the century, Vladimir Tatlin's Constructivism, and the Dadaism of the Old Continent), in the musical field development had not followed such a clear and straightforward path.

In music, instead, a process of subtraction takes place, a de-composition of the structural system that is not "deprivation" but a kind of "negative addition," leading pop music back to almost elementary forms of tonality and modality, reducing the number of harmonic movements to a strictly essential minimum, and paring rhythmic solutions down to the bone, replaced by near-obsessive repetitions and short diatonic harmonic units.

A first process of evolution and reworking of musical minimalism can be said to have concluded once European composers such as Michael Nyman, Peter Michael Hamel, Dominique Lawalree, Louis Andriessen or Richard Pinhas began making use of the repetitions and forms typical of the American musical language; that is, they began bringing minimalism back into pop music, if not in form then at least in substance, thanks to the early experiments of Xtc, Pil (Public Image Limited) and German space-rock (Kraftwerk, obviously, above all).

It was really exciting growing up in L.A. because there was so much going on in music, and so many young talents. At one point I was playing at sessions with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry.

(La Monte Young)

The temptation to divide La Monte Young's life into three phases tied to as many cities, as we said, is strong. But in doing so we risk making the mistake of underestimating the importance of his beginnings in Bern, Idaho, where he was born in 1935, and in whose tiny town he first experienced the fascination for sounds – whether natural or artificial – that he could hear near the small wooden cabin where he lived with his family.

The wind between the boards of the house, the river, the transformer at the nearby power station and the irregular whistle of passing trains are just some of the sounds that Young would later cite as his first true musical influences. One need only think of the number of his compositions based on the “Dream Chord” (“an amazing sequence made up of G-C-C sharp-D”), which is nothing other than the sound of the wind through the telephone poles of Bern.

Following frequent moves, the family eventually settled in Los Angeles, where Young learned the rudiments of saxophone and piano without ever truly excelling at either. As a teenager he graduated from the hardly renowned John Marshall High School, where he nonetheless had the good fortune to study music with Clyde Sorenson, a former student of Schoenberg's at the University of California. Jazz was his first love, though he would only get to play it in the years before earning his degree in composition, ethnomusicology and music theory in 1958.

During this period, La Monte, by then a young man, tried his hand at composition for the first time, recalling how “only Terry Riley and Dennis Johnson (a fellow student, ed.) were able to appreciate music that was as spontaneous as it was new”.

His flirtation with jazz continued in various combos featuring young and then-unknown musicians such as Billy Higgins, Dennis Budimir, Hal Hollingshead and trumpeter Don Cherry.

From the few surviving recordings, it is possible to hear how the young American composer was already starting to experiment with the free jazz that, only a few years later, Ornette Coleman (whose original band would include Cherry and Higgins) would bring to prominence.

The genre, however, proved to be a limited vehicle, an expression ill-suited to his ever-present desire to explore repetition and sustained sound.

By the late Fifties, the jazz experience had become too confining for Young, who was developing new sonic forms that found an outlet in 1957's “Young's Blues”, where the continuous alternation of chords – still rooted in blues standards – hints at different ideas, undeniably geared toward the pursuit of a new aesthetic. That aesthetic appeared before him one day, suddenly and entirely by chance, when he happened to hear “Sind Bhairavi” and “Piloo” on the radio; two examples of Indian music whose skeleton consisted of drones (the Italian equivalent “bordone” fails to fully capture the idea, being too tied to symphonic classicism, ed.), sustained sounds and harmonies. His passion for Indian music would culminate in 1971 with his directorship of the Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music.

The mystical yet simultaneously areligious component of Young's music would, over time, help make him a composer of a minimalism oriented toward the eternal, the infinite. Not that this was an entirely new intent (as early as the 14th century we find works with a similar aim, such as Guillaume de Machaut's “Ma Fin et mon commencement”), but in the case of the man from Bern, we find ourselves before an intellect free of doctrinal reflexes or canons, of sacred emphasis, of scriptural feeling, of a fearful conscience or a sense of the “correct”.

The simplicity of the sound evokes nothing other than the man himself, his carnal vibration and the curious drive of a mind that is at once reason and soul, blood and spirit.

While it's true that his earliest compositions echoed the style of Béla Bartók, following an interest sparked by hearing his “Concerto for Orchestra”, it was nonetheless Arnold Schoenberg who had the greatest influence on Young during his Los Angeles years.

During his time at Ucla, in fact, it was the lessons of Leonard Stein and Anton Webern that led him toward Schoenberg's serialism and twelve-tone technique, as both had been students of his during their time at the Second Viennese School. Of the great Viennese composer, however, Young preferred the freer, more atonal elaborations, in turn developing a language infused with a healthy contrast between the aesthetic of a dynamism rooted in classical forms and a leaning toward a more static structure – a true forma mentis of that early idea of minimalism that continued to haunt the young La Monte.

I had a calling to become what I became – I was created to do this.

(La Monte Young)

His final period in Los Angeles was marked by an almost obsessive study of sustained notes, by the possibility of elevating individual sounds – drawn out over time – to the very form and substance of his compositions. His “Trio For Strings” (1958) is the very culmination of that period. The discovery of serialism, and his subsequent drift away from it – even as he made use of it in creating his earliest works – encapsulate the intellectual restlessness of a composer who had not yet entirely abandoned more classical means (his study of counterpoint and the writing of several canons are shining examples of this) but who was already looking toward other shores still unknown even to himself. Here, at last, we have a first hint of minimalism, a formal experiment drawing on geometries outside the corpus of the Western tradition (we have already mentioned his love of Indian music, but we might also cite Japanese gagaku or Indonesian gamelan) in order to arrive at conclusions of a pure and revolutionary dynamism, one that uses the past to lay bare its linearity and break it with entirely new force and vigor.

September 1958 saw La Monte Young move to Berkeley (San Francisco), where he studied under Seymour Shifrin amid a thousand difficulties, despite his tutor's enthusiasm. The studies on sound and the new compositional form he had developed in Los Angeles, in fact, were not taken seriously in the Bay Area, and it was against this backdrop of general indifference that the première of “Trio For Strings” took place – an event not attended, among others, by the man who would soon become Young's one true friend: Terry Riley. Ironically, Riley would later recall first noticing the disoriented composer from Idaho more for his look than for his music (“We were in the Fifties and everyone had a very formal style of dress, but La Monte seemed to have been dropped into the middle of campus straight out of the following decade”, an amused Riley would later admit).

Berkeley's reality is nonetheless different from UCLA's. Shifrin all but forces Young to write music following the rules of a traditionalism he had by then come to despise, but the result is nevertheless noteworthy. It's during this period that the "Studies I, II & III" come into being, containing in nuce hints of sustained sounds and even "fast music".

Draw a straight line and follow it.

(La Monte Young)

The campus environment, however, starts to feel too confining for La Monte, who sets off on a study trip to Europe, where he gets the chance to attend some of Stockhausen's lectures at the Darmstadt School in Germany in 1959. The young American composer takes his teacher's lessons very seriously, waiting until the very last day to show the German master his scores for the "Trio". During his summer stay, Young composes the third of his studies, which betrays the full extent of Stockhausen's influence, even though his music fails to be taken seriously even in a fertile, forward-looking environment like that of the German town.

Summing up his European sojourn, though, the surprising thing is that Young's real discovery turns out to be John Cage. Curiously, Stockhausen had in fact devoted considerable space to the music of the inventor of "chance music", who had himself taught at Darmstadt the year before, stirring up quite a bit of interest.

In 1966 Young would argue that Cage's influence at the time was twofold. On one hand, he admired Cage's boldness in embracing chance in music; on the other, he was fascinated by his use of extra-musical resources in performance.

"Poem For Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc..." indeed dates from those very years (1960), but even before that came the celebrated "Vision" (1959) - though only on paper - written for twelve instrumentalists, a tape recorder and four basses, all positioned around the perimeter of the auditorium, in a space plunged into total darkness. Every sound is specified on the score, but the duration and pauses (within a thirteen-minute span) have to be calculated using a number picked at random from the phone book.

Needless to say, the premiere of such works caused shock and horror among Berkeley's intellectuals, but by then the die was cast, and turning back would simply have been self-defeating.

For the sake of brevity, we can say with absolute confidence that Cage gave Young the key to decode his own inspiration - the expressive tools through which to vent the logic he had accumulated during his years in Los Angeles.

La Monte Young's music now loses almost all contact with reality: the rules dissolve their own meaning, and time - until then the true master and overlord of sound - becomes the leading actor, and for that very reason ceases to be the director of sonic organization.

The moving furniture in "Poem" marks the threshold beyond which nothing would ever be the same again. Dadaism and Surrealism find their own voice amid friction, noise, and the screech of concrete, wood and plastic.

Later works such as "2 Sounds" begin opening up to architecture and sculpture, with performances carried out in real time, in collaboration with Terry Riley - with whom Young forms a partnership that, in 1960, would lead the pair to teach composition, staging lessons bordering on the paradoxical. By this point in his career, as the composer himself recalls, "it doesn't matter whether the art is good, but that it proposes something new". The Bay Area scene can no longer keep up with the volcanic ideas of an artist who knows he's found a path just waiting to be walked. Young therefore decides to move on again, this time even further north, to a city experiencing a creative ferment perhaps without precedent. It's the autumn of 1960. It's time for the avant-garde. New York City.

If listeners aren't carried away to Heaven, I'm failing.

(La Monte Young)

The pretext is the award (the "Alfred Hertz Memorial Traveling Scholarship") that Young, he swears, was given at Berkeley simply to get rid of an awkward, intrusive student - but which, whatever the real reasons, allows him to come into contact with figures of the caliber of George Brecht, Toshi Ichiyanagi and his wife Yoko Ono, Jackson MacLow and others.

Just a few months after his arrival, Young becomes one of the leading figures of the New York avant-garde, and of Fluxus in particular. He composes several works, not without making seemingly absurd demands of the performers - such as asking them to "release a certain number of butterflies into the auditorium" ("Composition 1960 No. 5"), or another piece in which the performers must pretend to be the audience.

If we stick to his more traditional compositions, the most important event is his meeting with Richard Maxfield, who had temporarily replaced John Cage at the New School for Social Research, and who partly shared Young's interest in stasis and in a slow but progressive musical development.

This is when his interest in electronics takes root, culminating in the writing of The Second Dream Of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer - a clear reference to his childhood years in Bern, Idaho.

The '60s thus saw him at the helm of New York's avant-garde scene, but the urgency to compose was soon followed by the desire to bring to life his first elaborations, which until then had only existed on paper. Forming an ensemble was the next step, and in 1967 he founded the "Theatre of Eternal Music," which aimed to promote the arts (not just music) in so-called "Dream Houses": veritable loci of an ante-litteram psychedelia where some of his most celebrated compositions found their first outlet, such as "Poem For Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc..." (1960) or "The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys" (1964). The tortoise, an animal that would often recur in Young's compositions, was chosen as a symbol of "longevity and slowness," and it was precisely the piece dedicated to it that marked the debut of a truly remarkable line-up made up of La Monte Young (soprano sax), Angus McLise (percussion), John Cale and Tony Conrad (string instruments) and Marian Zazeela (voice).

The ensemble's existence was, however, relatively brief. John Cale left in 1965 to focus on forming a band that would later become known as Velvet Underground, while Terry Riley chose to concentrate on his own (successful) solo career.

The musical differences between Young and Conrad thus began to make themselves felt, culminating in a falling-out that was not without controversy, leading Conrad to picket some of his former friend's performances.

The Theatre's performances continued with only Zazeela accompanying Young until 1975, even though Young himself had officially disbanded the group back in 1966.

For nine years after its official end, the ensemble continued to live on through performances in the Dream Houses, both in Europe and the US (a memorable instance being the performance at the Contemporanea Festival in Rome in 1973).

One of the aspects of form that I have been very interested in is stasis – the concept of form which is not so directional in time, not so much climactic form, but rather form which allows time, to stand still.

(La Monte Young)

The Young work most frequently performed by the ensemble over the years is undoubtedly The Well-Tuned Piano, in which the relationship between periodicity and repetition is pushed to its extremes through a mathematical logic, an acoustic theory whose complex principles (certainly not summarizable here) were based on the concept that the longer a sound is sustained, the easier it becomes for the listener to grasp the resulting harmonic.

Young thus began to grasp the musical implications of harmony and turned to mathematics to better explore its content and its possible developments.

Hence the intervals of a second and a fourth are based on the prime numbers 2, 3 and 7 (to which he would later add 31), opening up new horizons and contributing to musical exploration through mathematics as well.

Staging The Well-Tuned Piano live is, moreover, an extremely complicated affair. The piano's tuning is achieved by Young himself over weeks of work, during which the instrument must obviously remain untouched, effectively putting the venue where the concert is scheduled out of use. The deeply improvisatory nature of the performance means that every detail — from the sounds down to the lighting — must be arranged so as to allow the audience to fully enjoy the nearly six hours of performance.

I think the fact that I created something and had an enormous influence is indisputable.

(La Monte Young)

La Monte Young's influence on contemporary music has long been debated, but never denied. Some critics even argue for his influence on the John Cage of the '60s, and go so far as to assert a certain similarity with Stockhausen's own works in the second half of that same decade.

What is certain is that names like Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Donald Miller carried on the musical exploration right where Young himself had left it off. The circle closes once again with a return to popular music. Brian Eno, and even earlier the Velvet Underground (with John Cale) and Lou Reed's Lou Reed Primitives (with MacLise and Cale himself), let a seed sprout so that it too could live on in a theatre of eternal, new music.

Ride the wave of great music

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