Musicians - La Monte Young

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	Musicians - La Monte Young

La Monte Young (born October 14 1935) is an American composer whose 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 Fluxus influenced and "minimal" compositions question the nature of music and often stress elements of performance not normally indicated. 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.

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. As well as Dolphy, he also played alongside Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Billy Higgins.

He later entered the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to study music, and later still 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 composition, being influenced by Anton Webern, Gregorian chant and various music of other cultures, including Indian classical music and Indonesian gamelan music. These interests, and a wish to be able to find the intervals he used by ear, later led to him studying with Pandit Pran Nath from 1970 (fellow students included his wife Marian Zazeela and the composer Terry Riley).

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, and also met Cage's collaborator, the pianist David Tudor. At Tudor's suggestion, Young engaged in a correspondence with Cage, and within a few months Young was presenting some of Cage's music on the West Coast while Cage and Tudor performed some of Young's works during their 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.

By the time Young moved to New York in 1960 he had already established a reputation as the enfant terrible of the avant garde. He initially developed an artistic relationship with members of the Fluxus movement, but gradually eschewed their often parodistic and politically charged aesthetic; his works, though conceptual and extreme, were not meant to be merely provocative. One of his best known collections, Compositions 1960, includes a number of unusual actions, some of them unperformable, but each deliberatively examines a certain concept of presupposition about the nature of music and art and carries ideas to their extremes. One instructs "draw a straight line and follow it", another instructs the performer to build a fire, and another says the performer should release a butterfly into the room, and 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 his first drone-based piece in just intonation, The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, also his first piece to use electronics. The piece, one of The Four Dreams of China, 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 a drone of select pitches, played continuously, and a group of long held pitches to be improvised on. 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, and formed The Theater of Eternal Music to realize this and other pieces. The group initially included his wife, Marian Zazeela who has provided the light show, The Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, for all performance since 1965, Angus MacLise, and Billy Name. In 1964 the ensemble contained Young and Zazeela, voices; Tony Conrad and John Cale, strings; and sometimes Terry Riley, voice. Since 1966 Young has realized the "Dream Theater" despite interruptions due to a lack of funding for such an exceptional, extensive, and expensive project.

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Musicians - La Monte Young

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