Young, La Monte (Thornton)

(b Bern, ID, 14 Oct 1935). American composer and performer. As a child he learned the guitar and cowboy songs from his aunt Norma before taking up the saxophone at the age of seven. He studied first with his father Dennis, a sheep-herder, then with his great-uncle Thornton, a bandleader, and from 1951 to 1954 at the Los Angeles Conservatory with William Green, who also taught him the clarinet. Young played extensively in blues and jazz bands in Los Angeles throughout the mid-1950s, as well as in the orchestra, dance band and jazz combo at Los Angeles City College (1953–6), while studying counterpoint privately with Leonard Stein (1955–6). He took undergraduate courses at Los Angeles State College (1956–7) and at UCLA (BA 1958), where he studied with Robert Stevenson, and did postgraduate work at the University of California in Berkeley (1958–60). Early in his first term he showed the Trio for Strings (1958) to his composition teacher Seymour Shifrin, who organized its first performance at his home in an unsuccessful attempt to show Young the error of his ways. The Trio – composed entirely of long tones and rests, some lasting a minute or more – is now generally recognized as a defining work in the minimalist movement, and Young as its founder.

The spaciousness of the piece, which remains a model for Young's output as a whole, is on one level a reflection of the spaciousness of his upbringing until his teens and, on another, of his fascination with variegated environmental drones – from the wind blowing through the logs of the cabin where he was born, to the transformer he would listen to beside his grandfather's gas station, to the motors he would sing along with in the machine-shop where he worked after school. Young himself cites gagaku and the static elements of Webern – which he ‘telescoped’ by extending them exponentially – as the principal musical influences on the Trio. He encountered another major influence at Stockhausen's (1959) Darmstadt summer course seminar, which featured the music of Cage, much of it performed live by David Tudor. Back in Berkeley, Young's performances of Cage-inspired scores drew ridicule on campus but found a sympathetic ear in the choreographer Ann Halprin, who invited Young and his fellow student Terry Riley to accompany her troupe with outré friction sounds, such as tin cans scraped across glass for the duration of a performance.

In 1960 Young went to New York on a Hertz travelling fellowship to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield at the New School for Social Research. He organized the first loft-concert series in the city at Yoko Ono's studio shortly after his arrival and edited the proto-Fluxus An Anthology of avant-garde art (published after numerous delays in 1963), including his own Compositions 1960. Termed ‘concept art’ by the writer Henry Flynt, these pieces ranged from the purely abstract (e.g. no.15 ‘This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean’) to those with a minimal aural component (e.g. no.2 ‘Build a fire in front of the audience’). In 1963 Young founded the Theatre of Eternal Music, playing virtuoso sopranino saxophone with the viol player John Cale, the violinist Tony Conrad, the percussionist Angus MacLise, and the vocal drone of the calligrapher and light artist Marian Zazeela, whom he married that year.

It was Riley's In C (1964) which inaugurated the style of modular repetition adapted by other minimalists. Nonetheless, although Riley's innovation grew out of his own early tape-loop compositions, Young had himself experimented with radical repetition as early as arabic numeral (any integer) in 1960, the integer in question being the number of times a note, chord or sound (in ‘923’ a gong struck with a mallet, in ‘1698’ a forearm piano cluster) was repeated in a given realization. However, his more profound influence on minimalism, new age music and rock was in his gradual extension of durations, beginning with the radical sustenance of the Trio, moving on to the even longer tones of Four Dreams of China and reaching the fully fledged drones of The Tortoise, his Dreams and Journeys in 1964. With the departure of MacLise for India, the rhythmic element was removed and the Theatre, singing and playing over the drone of, first, the aquarium motor of the eponymous tortoise, and later of sine wave oscillators which could theoretically extend tones ad infinitum, more closely approximated the ‘eternal music’ of its title. In the same vein Young and Zazeela began creating Dream Houses – long term installations comprised of the otherworldly beauty of Zazeela's light art uncannily complementing that of Young's drones. (A six-storey Dia Art Foundation environment in Tribeca operated from 1979 to 1985; the most recent Dream House, projected to last seven years, opened nearby in 1993.) By 1964 those drones were tuned in just intonation, and Young's revival of this tuning rivals in importance that of his extended durations.

His research bore fruit in The Well-Tuned Piano, a riposte to The Well-Tempered Clavier in its rejection of equal temperament and its compromises. Beginning as a 45-minute tape piece in 1964, the work has now extended to 384 minutes in performance, developing from an intriguing experiment to an epic masterpiece. The work explores often exotically named chordal areas, alternating slow single-note sections with ‘clouds’, in which the keys are struck in such rapid succession as to create the illusion of a sustained chord with their haze of harmonics. The slower sections evoke the alap of classical Indian music, which Young studied with master Kirana vocalist Pandit Pran Nath from 1970 until his death in 1996. Those studies have also borne fruit in Young's return to his blues roots in the 1990s with the Forever Bad Blues Band. While his early improvisational performances with the band were, by Young's standards, short (under an hour) explorations of a standard 12-bar blues progression in just intonation, more recent performances, prefaced with a slow mode-establishing section again reminiscent of alap, have extended to nearly three hours. As with The Well-Tuned Piano, the elaboration has been qualitative as well as quantitative, a visionary exfoliation of the spirituality of the visceral blues form in a manner hitherto unimagined.

After several rescorings of the Trio, Young returned to long-tone string writing in Chronos Kristalla, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. A constant in all these varied efforts has been his desire, as he has put it, to ‘get inside a sound’ – whether a set of computerized harmonics held for the duration of an installation or the I, IV or V chords of the blues explored over a pedal for 15 minutes. The same desire to confront the listener on a neurological level led him earlier in his career to extreme dynamic levels, causing him, in 1964, to withdraw his soundtracks for Andy Warhol films when the management of the Lincoln Center insisted on lowering the volume. More recently, Young has achieved his aim more subtly with electronic equipment capable of generating bass frequencies that are felt as much as heard.

His uncompromising perfectionism has unfortunately restricted recordings and thus, despite international touring, Young is perhaps more widely heard of than heard. He withdrew from a Columbia Records contract in 1968 rather than accept an overdub, and remained relatively obscure while later exponents of minimalism gained notoriety. However, his work has appeared on Edition X, Shandar, Disques Montaigne, Bridge and most notably Gramavison, which released a five-disc The Well-Tuned Piano (18-8701-2, 1987), The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (R279467, 1991), and a two-disc recording of the Forever Bad Blues Band entitled Just Stompin' (R279487, 1993).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

EDWARD STRICKLAND

Young, La Monte

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