Composition 1960 #7 (July 1960)

'As Young became rooted in Manhattan's nascent Downtown scene from 1960 on, he was one of a small circle of composers writing music of extremely long durations and slow tempos. The others, notably Terry Jennings and Dennis Johnson, have fallen into obscurity, and their music would be worth resuscitating. Long durations, however, were not Young's only interest. Once in New York he temporarily found himself a pioneer in the conceptualist movement associated with what would come to be called the Fluxus group. In California he had already made pieces that consisted of simple actions, verbal instructions, or even just graphic enigmas, and by the early sixties he found himself associated with a group of similarly conceptualist Downtown Manhattan artists, including George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, Nam June Paik, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, and Yoko Ono. One such composition, of many written in 1960, could be considered his first sound installation, the first work that contained no forward motion and was intentionally outside-time: Composition 1960 #7, which consists of a B and F# with the direction 'to be held for a long time.' This simple dyad sustains two pitches whose frequencies are related by a ratio of 3:2. Although many such conceptual pieces surrounding the Fluxus movement seem dashed off quickly and unintended to be taken seriously, they often reveal an unexpected power when performed in good faith.'

--Kyle Gann, The Outer Edge of Consciousness in Sound and Light: La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela

'Other pieces from Compositions 1960 offer direct connections to Young's more purely musical activities, both before and since. Probably the best example is Composition 1960 # 7 (July), which consists of the perfect fifth B F#, notated on a staff, plus the words 'to be held for a long time.' The link with the composer's concern with sustained sounds is obvious, right down to the choice of a 'pure' interval which allows the listener to focus on aspects otherwise unnoticed. More clearly, because even more reductively, than any of Young's earlier works, #7 opens up the world of psycho-acoustic events behind a simple acoustic phenomenon: combination tones, for instance, and the possibility of hearing the balance of partials within each note of the interval quite differently in different parts of the room. As [Dave] Smith has said, the piece 'emphasizes the harmonic series through the purity and reduction of material and points to Young's later work with precisely-tuned sinewave drones and voices.' Just as the world had become conceptualized as a 'single gigantic performance of Poem,' so Composition 1960 # 7 can be considered to encompass Young's entire output.'

-- Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists

NOTES

La Monte Young

Historical and Theoretical Background

The very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of the wind blowing through the chinks and all around the log cabin in Idaho where I was born. I have always considered this among my most important early experiences. It was very awesome and beautiful and mysterious. Since I could not see it and did not know what it was, I questioned my mother about it for long hours.

During my childhood there were certain sound experiences of constant frequency that have influenced my musical ideas and development: the sounds of insects; the sounds of telephone poles and motors; sounds produced by steam escaping, such as my mother's tea-kettle and the sounds of whistles and signals from trains; and resonations set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic areas such as canyons, valleys, lakes, and plains. Actually, the first sustained single tone at a constant pitch, without a beginning or end, that I heard as a child was the sound of telephone poles, the hum of the wires. This was a very important auditory influence upon the sparse sustained style of work of the genre of the Trio for Strings (1958), Composition 1960 #7 (B and F# "To be held for a long time") and The Four Dreams of China (1962).

I was perhaps predisposed to twelve-tone technique because my high school harmony teacher, Clyde Sorenson, had studied at UCLA with Arnold Schönberg. I entered LA City College in 1953 and there I took classes under Leonard Stein, the noted pianist and former assistant to Schönberg. I was very impressed with Stein's musical stature and began to study composition and counterpoint with him privately. Stein introduced me to a broader spectrum of modern music and I gradually became totally absorbed in the work of Anton Webern. Beginning in 1956, I enjoyed writing with serial technique in such works as Five Small Pieces for String Quartet and Variations for Alto Flute, Harp, Bassoon and String Trio (1957), but by 1957-58, I was considering reasons for moving outside the twelve-tone system. I felt that the system had enormous potential but that there was perhaps an infinity of forms that structure could take. In my Octet for Brass (1957), I began to introduce, within the serial style, very long tones. In the middle section, there were tones sustained for comparatively long durations. Nothing else would happen except other occasional long tones overlapping in time. There were also silences, and then another long tone would enter. This technique became more refined and perfected in the Trio for Strings, which, while constructed as a serial piece, has pitches of longer duration and greater emphasis on harmony to the exclusion of almost any semblance of what had been generally known as melody. The permutations of serial technique primarily imply possibilities of ordinal organization. Ordinal organization applies to sequence, which in music is line or melody. However, the increasing emphasis on concurrent frequencies or harmony in my work implied the possibility of the organization of the cardinal values both in regard to how many frequencies are concurrent and the relationship of the frequencies to each other.

The use of sustenance became one of the basic principles of my work. When there are long sustained tones, it is possible to better isolate and listen to the harmonics. The harmonics can assume a greater relevance to the fundamental musical material, allowing greater opportunity to work with them and to produce other tones that are related to them. The harmonic series is a clearly audible model for understanding the structure of "just intonation." Just intonation is that system of tuning in which every frequency is related to every other frequency as the numerator or denominator of some whole number fraction. Just intonation is based on the natural principles of overtones and resonances as our ears hear them and our voices produce them, that is, as they are found in nature. The tunings for The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964-present) and The Well-Tuned Piano (1964-present) were set in the system of just intonation. Additionally, sustained tones help make it possible to achieve finer degrees of precision in tuning. In my book, Selected Writings (Munich, 1969), I point out that tuning is a function of time. If scientists want to make a comparative measurement of two or more periodic events in time, the longer the period of measurement, the more information they can extract about the relationships between the events in time. This is exactly what happens in tuning; whether the frequency is measured with a frequency counter, an oscilloscope, or by ear, the degree of precision possible will always be proportional to the duration of the analysis, i.e., to the duration of the tuning. For instance, the drone is like a frequency constant, and if a drone is sustained throughout the composition, there can be very fine tuning relationships because there is a constant, a point of reference to which one can always return, as with the drone in Indian classical music. The Indian system of scales is the most all-inclusive set of scales in the world today. The parent scales of perhaps all the scales and modes that have been used in Western and Eastern music can be found in Indian music. It is probable that such a large number of scales, and the many frequency relationships they contain, evolved through the context of working with the drone.

Similarly, my subsequent work with continuous frequency environments led to my concept of the drone-state-of-mind. These frequency environments set up a drone state of periodic composite waveforms in the nervous system, establishing periodic patterns. These patterns are the internal representations of the external air molecule patterns, which vibrate the eardrums and send pulses throughout the nervous system. Once this so-called drone-state-of-mind is established, the mind should be able to embark on very special explorations and in new directions, because it will always have a fixed point of reference to come back to, to relate to; it could perhaps go further into more complex types of refined relationships than it can in the ordinary state. If, however, the tones are always little tiny short points, it is almost impossible to compare them.

In fact, why did pointillism develop at the time that it did in equal temperament, when the democracy of twelve tones was established? Composers such as Webern, Boulez, and Stockhausen wrote little points distributed in time. The tonal aspects of the system were being underplayed and the democratic aspects of the system were being brought out and emphasized, probably because of the fact that within the system of equal temperament it was so inharmonious to sustain the tones for a long time. In contrast, sustenance provided the foundation for the development of my musical expression and, ultimately, became the light that illuminated the path that led to my later work in tuning and just intonation, inspiring a new vision of composition evolving from the universal truths of harmonic structure.

The Trio for Strings is the first work that I composed which is comprised almost entirely of long sustained tones. It is probably my most important early musical statement. This work has been credited by critics, musicologists and art historians with the initiation of a new direction in music and art, since no one had ever before made a work that was composed completely of sustained tones. '[T]he Trio for Strings is a landmark in the history of twentieth-century music and the virtual fountainhead of American musical minimalism.' (K. Robert Schwartz, Minimalists, Phaidon Press, London, 1996). 'The Trio for Strings is undoubtedly Young's most important composition of this period, and the work which firmly establishes his place as the first composer to discover a truly minimalist language and to develop it in a totally individual way.' (Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, Cambridge University Press, London, 2000). 'Young is now widely recognized as the originator of the most influential classical musical style of the final third of the twentieth century.' (Edward Strickland, Minimalism:Origins, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1993).

There was sustenance in Eastern and Western music but it was always a drone, a pedal point, or a sustained tone of a cantus firmus over which melodies were sung or played. It is very difficult to find any other examples of sustenance besides these types of drones in music before they were introduced in the long sustained tones of for Brass and for Guitar (1958) and finally crystallized into the Trio for Strings. In the Trio for Strings, there was no melody since each tone was separated by silence from its preceding and succeeding tones in the same voice. The texture is contrapuntal in that the entries and exits of the long sustained tones overlap in time. Melody exists only in the sense that one remembers and identifies events that have taken place over long periods of time. The concept of the expanded time structure comprised of long sustained tones and the unique tonal palette of the work came to me not by theoretical deduction but by totally inspired intuition, and subsequently developed into the creation of continuous sound and light environments presented in collaboration with Marian Zazeela in our Dream Houses, major installations extending over durations of weeks and years. Thus, the origins of the long sustained tones that came to characterize my style can be traced to for Brass, for Guitar and the Trio for Strings.

Even though the Trio for Strings introduced an approach to composing and hearing that had not previously appeared in music, I consider it to be a very classical work. Along with the environmental influences: the sound of the wind, the hum of stepdown transformers on telephone poles, and perhaps most directly, the sounds of whistles and signals from the train yard across the river from where I lived in Los Angeles at the time I composed for Brass, for Guitar and the Trio for Strings, the Trio was also influenced by other classical musics: Webern and Japanese Gagaku, to mention the foremost. The Trio for Strings is a serial composition constructed with classical 12-tone technique. The macrostructure follows classical form in that there is an exposition section, development, recapitulation and coda.

Compositions 1960

I consider my 1960 compositions one of the beginnings of concept art. Henry Flynt has referred to my Compositions 1960 as having special significance for him when he coined the term "concept art"; Henry then went on to create a genre of original work that can best be characterized according to his own particular definition. Although my 1960 compositions are unique events, and in that sense related to Events and Happenings, they are most effective when performed in a conventional concert setting. In fact, they were a social statement, in part inspired as a response to the particular academic concert atmosphere then present at the University of California at Berkeley.

Compositions 1960 #7 (July 1960), #9 (October 1960) #10 (October 1960)

I wrote Composition 1960 #7 in July 1960 when I was living in San Francisco, after I had completed two years of graduate studies in composition at Berkeley. This was still the inspirational stage of my seminal works in concept art. These works, such as Composition 1960 #2, the fire piece, and Composition 1960 #5, the butterfly piece, were mainly composed of words, and became a primary influence on the Fluxus movement generated after George Maciunas met me in New York in 1960-61.

Composition 1960 #7 is comprised of the sustained interval of a perfect fifth, B and F#, with the instruction "to be held for a long time." This work evolved from the long sustained tones that I had introduced in for Brass and the Trio for Strings. Composition 1960 #7 is the only one of the 1960 concept works that is written in conventional music notation (albeit brief).

In Composition 1960 #7, I distilled the approach of for Brass, for Guitar, and the Trio for Strings to the radical minimal conclusion of even less than a haiku: no season, no place, and, in musical terms, no theme, no development, no variations, no contrast, just a concern for time (long) and pitch relationships (the interval of a perfect fifth, which had played an important role in my earlier works as an element of the "dream chord"), just B and F# to be sustained for a long time. This work can be heard as the direct ancestor of the electronically generated continuous periodic composite sound waveform environments of the Dream House.

Composition 1960 #9 was a straight line drawn on a file card which was intended as a score to be interpreted by performers and was conceived as an answer to the graphic notations of John Cage. I have sometimes performed this work at one sustained pitch. On February 2, 1962 I presented a realization of Composition 1960 # 9 utilizing the acoustically audible hum of Richard Maxfield's tape recorder during a concert on a New Waves in Electronic Music program at The Great Hall at Cooper Union, New York City. Not only was this one of my earliest references to hum in my musical compositions, it treated the hum as the entire subject matter of the musical composition and harked directly back to the original acoustically audible hum of the stepdown transformers on the telephone poles of my childhood. Later, Andy Warhol commissioned me to create the soundtracks for the four movies Eat, Sleep, Haircut and Kiss, to be exhibited continuously throughout the Second Annual New York Film Festival on 8mm rear-screen projectors from September 14 through 26, 1964, at Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City. For this commission I recorded a realization of Composition 1960 #9, performed by Marian Zazeela and myself bowing a brass mortar. As a further exposition of my interest in static sound (stasis as opposed to Fluxus), I used the same sound for the tracks for all four films. At the world premiere performance of the films with my soundtracks at the Festival, I withdrew the soundtracks permanently because the Festival would not let me play the sounds at the loudness level I wanted to, and I foresaw that future presentations would present similar problems. I believe the films ran without sound for the duration of the Festival and throughout Andy's lifetime.

Composition 1960 #10 consists of the instruction, "Draw a straight line and follow it." Over the years, I had been interested in the study of the singular event in terms of both pitch and other kinds of sensory situations. I felt that a line was one of the more sparse singular expressions of oneness. The line was interesting because it was continuous: it existed in time. A line is a potential of existing time. In graphs and scores one designates time as one dimension. A well-executed realization of the B and F# perfect fifth of Composition 1960 #7 sustained for a long time in performance creates a clearly audible straight line in sound.

Quintessentially minimal, Composition 1960 #7 virtually introduced the drone, as the entire subject matter of the work, alone, without melodic counterpart or structural context, into Western contemporary music.

Copyright © La Monte Young 2001

Performance History

Although I wrote Composition 1960 #7 in July 1960, the first performance was a full year later, in July 1961 at George Maciunas' AG Gallery in New York City. It was performed for three hours continuously on a group of bowed viols that George had assembled. Following performances in Florence by Bussotti, and in Wiesbaden at a Fluxus Festspiele concert in 1962, an important early realization was under my direction at Judson Hall along with the New York premiere of the Trio for Strings on October 12, 1962 by La Mar Alsop, violin, William Schoen, viola and Charlotte Moorman, cello. Composition 1960 #7 was performed for the same duration as the Trio, about one hour, as the symmetrical second half of the program. Many of the New York avant-garde attended the concert, including John Cage. Jonas Mekas believes that this was probably the concert he attended with Andy Warhol that inspired Andy to create his static films Eat, Sleep, Haircut, Kiss and Empire.

In May 1963, I performed the work on bowed strings for five hours continuously with musicians including Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, and others, as part of the 24-hour YAMDAY event during George Brecht's and Robert Watts' YAM Festival at the Hardware Poets Theatre, New York City. The composition as I notated it in 1960 inspired many imaginative realizations. Over the years, I more and more realized that with 1960 #7, just as with many of my other works, I was interested primarily in versions that were highly refined and prepared under my own direction with musicians I have worked with over many years.

Charles Curtis has demonstrated a remarkable interest in and dedication to the performance of my music. He is without doubt the foremost interpreter of my music for bowed strings in the world today. In 1989, I formed the Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble, with Charles Curtis as director, to focus on realizations of my works and related works for string instruments. Since that time, Charles has worked with me on numerous premieres and performances of my work and has trained a younger generation of string players in extended bowing techniques for sustained tones.

Jon Catler and Brad Catler have worked with me over many years and have participated in many presentations of my music. Jon and Brad are the guitar and bass players in The Forever Bad Blues Band. Jon performed the World and American premieres of the just intonation version of for guitar and led the guitar and bass sections of the 23-piece Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band in performances of The Lower Map of The Eleven's Division in The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119, in which Brad also performed. In Germany in 1992, Jon and Brad premiered the just intonation version of the Sarabande (1959). Brad Catler accompanies Marian and I on tabla in our performances of Indian classical vocal music.

Partial List of Performances of Composition 1960 # 7

July 02, 1961, AG Gallery, 925 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. "2 VII 61 8:00 PM NYC," Joseph Byrd, George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yoko Ono and others, strings. Three hour uninterrupted performance.

March 16, 1962, Sala del Conservatorio di Musica, Piazza delle Belle Arti, 2, Firenze, Italia. "16 III 62 9:15 PM Firenze," Sylvano Bussotti, pianoforte. Vita Musicale Contemporanea.

September 08, 1962, Hörsaal des Städtischen Museums, Wiesbaden, West Germany. "8 IX 62 8:00 PM Wiesbaden," Fluxus Festspiele Neuester Musik, Konzert Nr. 5.

October 12, 1962 Judson Hall, 165 West 57 Street, New York, NY. "12 X 62 8:30 PM NYC," La Mar Alsop, violin; William Schoen, viola; Charlotte Moorman, cello.

December 04, 1962, American Students and Artists Center, 261 Boulevard Raspail, Paris 14e, France. "4 XII 62 8:30 PM Paris," Festum Fluxorum.

April 12, 1963, Eliot House Junior Common Room, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. "12 IV 63 8:30 PM Cambridge," presented by Eliot House Music Society.

May 11, 1963, Hardware Poets Playhouse, 115 West 54 Street, New York, NY. "11 V 63 12 Noon - 12 V 63 12 Noon NYC," La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, and others, strings. YAM Festival Yamday, presented by George Brecht and Robert Watts. Five-hour continuous performance.

October 30, 1964, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. "20 X 64 8:30 PM Waltham," Chorus conducted by Alvin Lucier.

February 1966, Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds, England. "II 66 Leeds," Instruments: bowed banjo, 5 guitars, cello, violin, piano, performed as a part ("meeting again") of George Brecht's Gap Event. Performance directed by Cornelius Cardew.

April 01, 1966, American Artists Centre, Boulevard Raspail, Paris, France. "1 IV 66 Paris," instruments: cello, accordion, harmonium. Performance directed by Cornelius Cardew.

June 18, 1966, Royal Albert Hall, London, England. "18 VI 66 London," Instruments: bowed amplified sitar, amplified cello, contrabass, violin, harmonium, cello, great organ. Performance directed by Cornelius Cardew, later broadcast over BBC.

October 01, 1970, Sala Riunioni della Bibliotheca Comunale, Como, Italy. "1 X 70 9:00 PM Como," Antionio Ballista, piano. Quarto Autumno Musicale a Como, Concerto di Antonio Ballista: 45 pagine rare per Pianoforte.

February 20, 1976, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. "20 II 76 8:30 PM Buffalo," SEM Ensemble: Julius Eastman, voice; William Lyon Lee, voice; James Kasperowicz, trombone; Petr Kotik, flute; Diane Williams, viola. The Music of La Monte Young.

May 16, 1987, Dia Art Foundation, 155 Mercer Street, New York, NY. "87 V 16 PM NYC," AFMM Ensemble and Theatre of Eternal Music Ensemble, Johnny Reinhard and Ben Neill, Associate Directors: Rob Bethea, trombone; Andrew Bolotowsky, alto flute; April Chapman, bassoon; Rhys Chatham, trumpet; Petr Kotik, alto flute; Ron Lawrence, viola; Pat McCarty, bass trombone; Ben Neill, trumpet; Christiane Pors, violin; Johnny Reinhard, bassoon; Mary Wooten, cello. MELA Foundation La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective, Concert of Works from the 50s, 60s & 70s.

July 19, 1993, Podewill, Klosterstr. 68-70, Berlin, Germany. "93 VII 19 ca. 9:30 - ca. 9:50 PM Berlin," Joseph Kubera, piano. U.S. Minimal Recital.

February 21, 1998, Barnsdall Art Park Gallery Theatre, Los Angeles, California. California Premiere. "98 II 21 PM California," Charles Curtis, cello; Connie Dieter, bass; Hugh Livingston, cello; Joseph McNalley, bass. Beyond the Pink Festival, The 1960's World of La Monte Young.

July 15, 2000, Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Germany. "00 VIII 15 PM Polling," Charles Curtis, Yuri-Charlotte Bertelmann, Christof Groth, Reynard Rott, cellos.

August 04, 2000, Rolf Liebermann Studio, NDR, Hamburg, Germany. "00 VIII 04 7:00 PM Hamburg," Charles Curtis, cello with Henry Grant, electric guitar with e-bow, Peter Imig, electric guitar with e-bow, Reynard Rott, cello. Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival.

Biographical Information

La Monte Young

La Monte Young has pioneered the concept of extended time durations in contemporary music for over 40 years. He contributed extensively to the study of just intonation and to the development of rational number based tuning systems that are used in his periodic composite sound waveform environments, as well as in many of his major performance works. Presentations of Young's work in the U.S. and Europe, as well as his theoretical writings, gradually influenced a group of composers to create a static, periodic music which became known as Minimalism. Musician magazine stated, "As the acknowledged father of minimalism and guru emeritus to the British art-rock school, his influence is pervasive," and in 1985 the Los Angeles Herald Examiner wrote, " for the past quarter of a century he has been the most influential composer in America. Maybe in the world." In Minimalism:Origins, 1993, Edward Strickland added, 'Young is now widely recognized as the originator of the most influential classical music style of the final third of the twentieth century.'

In L.A. in the '50s Young played jazz saxophone, leading a group with Billy Higgins, Dennis Budimir and Don Cherry. He also played with Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Terry Jennings, Don Friedman and Tiger Echols. At Yoko Ono's studio in 1960 he was director of the first New York loft concert series. He was the editor of An Anthology (NY 1963), which with his Compositions 1960 became a primary influence on concept art and the Fluxus movement. In 1962 Young founded his group, The Theatre of Eternal Music, and embarked on The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964- ), a large work involving improvisation within strict predetermined guidelines. Young played sopranino saxophone and sang with the group. Dennis Johnson, Terry Riley, Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, John Cale, Jon Gibson, Jon Hassell, Lee Konitz and David Rosenboom are among those who worked in this group under Young's direction.

With Marian Zazeela in the early '60s he formulated the concept of a Dream House, a permanent space with sound and light environments in which a work would be played continuously. Young and Zazeela have presented works in sound and light worldwide, from music and light box sculptures to large-scale environmental installations, culminating in two Dia Art Foundation realizations: the 6-year continuous 6-story Harrison Street Dream House (NYC 1979-85) and the 1-year environment (22nd Street NYC 1989-90) within which Young presented The Lower Map of The Eleven's Division in The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119 with the Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band. This 23-piece chamber orchestra was the largest Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble to appear in concert to date. Young has since presented Dream House sound environments at MAC Lyon (1999); Espace Donguy, Paris (1990); Ruine der Künste, Berlin (1992); Pompidou Center, Paris (1994-95); Musee Art Contemporain Lyon (1999) and the MELA Foundation Dream House: Seven+Eight Years of Sound and Light, which opened at MELA Foundation, New York in 1993 and will be on view through 2008. As the first western disciple of renowned master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Young has performed and taught the Kirana style of Indian classical music since 1970.

The 1974 Rome live world premiere of Young's magnum opus The Well-Tuned Piano (1964-73-81-present), was celebrated by a commission for him to sign the Bösendorfer piano, which remains permanently in the special tuning. Gramavision's full-length recording of the continuously evolving 5-hour-plus work has been acclaimed by critics to be "the most important and beautiful new work recorded in the 1980s," "one of the great monuments of modern culture" and "the most important piano music composed by an American since the Concord Sonata." At the 1987 MELA Foundation La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective he played the work for a continuous 6 hours and 24 minutes.

In the '80s and '90s, The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensembles led by Ben Neill and Charles Curtis presented numerous performances in the U.S. and Europe of The Melodic Versions (1984) of The Four Dreams of China (1962), one of Young's most important early minimal works, from which in 1991 Gramavision released a CD of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. In 1990 Young formed The Forever Bad Blues Band, which has performed extensively in Germany, Austria, Holland, Italy and the U.S., presenting two to three-hour continuous concerts of Young's Dorian Blues, with Young, keyboard, Jon Catler, just intonation and fretless guitar, Brad Catler, bass, Jonathan Kane, drums, and Marian Zazeela, light design. In 1993 Gramavision released the 2-CD set, La Monte Young, The Forever Bad Blues Band, Just Stompin'/Live at the Kitchen.

For La Beaute, the celebration of the Year 2000, the French government invited Young and Zazeela to create a four-month, continuous large-scale Dream House in a church in Avignon. L'Express L'An 2000 Supplement headlined their appraisal of the project: 'La Monte Young: Le Son du Siecle.'

Marian Zazeela

Marian Zazeela is one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a medium of expression. Over four decades Zazeela has exhibited a unique iconographic vision in media encompassing painting, calligraphic drawing, graphics, film, light projection, sculpture and environment.

Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, she developed an innovative visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with sculptural forms to create seemingly three-dimensional colored shadows in radiant vibrational fields. Light and scale are manipulated in such a way that the colored shadows, in their apparent corporeality, become indistinguishable from the sculptural forms, enveloping the viewer in the continual interplay of reality and illusion. Her work has taken the directions of performance in Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, sculpture in the series Still Light and recent neon pieces, and environment in Dusk/Dawn Adaptation, Magenta Day / Magenta Night and her major work Light.

As artistic director of The Theatre of Eternal Music, she creates the works that form the visual components of Dream House, a sound and light work in which she collaborates with composer La Monte Young. Zazeela has presented Dream Houses, light installations, performances and calligraphic drawing exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Recent installations include MAC Lyon, Pompidou Center, Paris; Ruine der Künste, Berlin; 44th Venice Biennale; Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf; MELA Foundation's "La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective," New York City; and Köln Kunstverein. She has received grants from the NEA, EAT, CAPS, Lannan Foundation and Cassandra Foundation.

Under a commission from the Dia Art Foundation (1979-85), Zazeela and Young collaborated in a 6-year continuous Dream House presentation set in the 6-story Harrison Street building in New York City, featuring multiple interrelated sound and light environments, exhibitions, performances, research and listening facilities, and archives. Arts Magazine described the centerpiece of this installation: "There is a retreat to reverie as if one were staring up into the summer night sky. The Magenta Lights is experienced as a meteorological or astronomical event, a changing color display above one's head, like an art equivalent of the Northern Lights." And Artforum wrote: "Zazeela transforms material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual encounter a spiritual experience. The Magenta Lights is an environmental piece in every sense of the word. What Zazeela has represented is the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality."

Zazeela's one-year sound and light environment collaboration with Young, The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119 / Time Light Symmetry (Dia Art Foundation, 22nd Street, NYC 1989-90) was acclaimed by Village Voice critic Kyle Gann as "some of the strangest and most forward-looking art New York has to offer." Her 1990 Donguy Gallery, Paris exhibition of light works, purchased by the French Cultural Ministry National Foundation of Contemporary Art (FNAC) for their permanent collection, was exhibited from February-April 1999 at the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art. Filling the entire top floor of this Renzo Piano museum structure, her blue and magenta gel design of the glass-roofed space, combined with the light sculptures and swirling eddies of the harmonically related twin prime frequencies of Young’s sound environment, created one of her largest installations. Zazeela's current long-term installation, Imagic Light, forms a part of Dream House: Seven+Eight Years of Sound and Light, which opened at MELA Foundation, New York in 1993 and will be on view through 2008. Sound and Light: La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela, published by Bucknell University Press in 1996, provides an in depth collection of primary source materials on her work.

At the invitation of the French government for La Beaute exhibition celebrating the Year 2000, Young and Zazeela created a four-month Dream House in St. Joseph Chapel in Avignon. The installation featured the continuous DVD projection of the 1987 six-hour 24-minute performance of their collaborative masterwork, The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights, in a site-specific light environment created by Zazeela. The new art center, Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Bavaria, presented a comprehensive solo exhibition of Zazeela’s drawings from May through October 2000, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog including reproductions of 71 works, essays, photographs and documentation. In May 2001, Kunst im Regenbogenstadl opened a six month light installation designed by Zazeela featuring The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights DVD projection, two new sculptures from her Still Light series and her neon work, Dream House Variation III.

Charles Curtis

Charles Curtis studied cello at the Juilliard School under Leonard Rose and Harvey Shapiro. Before receiving his Bachelors and Masters degrees in 1985, he spent two terms reading history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Upon graduating from Juilliard, Curtis was appointed to the faculty of Princeton University, where for three years he taught cello and chamber music, advised graduate composition students on matters of string performance and technique, and performed virtually all of the new music for strings by faculty and student composers.

From 1989 through 2000, Curtis was principal cellist of the Symphony Orchestra of the North German Radio (NDR) in Hamburg. In this capacity and as a concert soloist he has soloed under the baton of distinguished conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Andre Previn, John Eliot Gardiner, Gunter Wand and Max Rudolf. He has been guest soloist with such orchestras as the San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, National Symphony, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Symphony Orchestra of Berlin, Orquestra de la Maggio Musicale Florence, and the orchestras of Sao Paolo, Brazil and Santiago de Chile, among many others.

Since the early 1980's Curtis has played an active role in the New York new music scene. He has been a regular guest with Speculum Musicae, the Da Capo Chamber Players, The Princeton Ensemble and Continuum; and in these and in his solo appearances he has premiered or performed works by Carter, Babbitt, Ferneyhough, Davidovsky, Perle, Imbrie, Wuorinen, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Penderecki, Kurtag, Ligeti, Cage, Feldman, Young, Mackey, Lansky, Spies, Erickson, Ran, Hyla, Yuasa, Niblock, Westergard, Birtwistle, Matthus, Part, Schnittke, Rihm, Ruzicka and many others; as well as major works of early modernists such as Schoenberg, Ives, Webern and Dallapiccola. Curtis particularly championed the works of his brother, composer Henry Curtis, several of whose expressionistic theatre pieces with extended techniques were written expressly for him.

Curtis has enjoyed an extensive and distinguished chamber music career. At the age of seventeen he won first prize in the Coleman International Chamber Music Competition as cellist of the Gagliano Quartet, and at nineteen made his Carnegie Hall debut playing the Tchaikovsky Trio with Oscar Shumsky and Earl Wild. As cellist of the Ridge Quartet from 1986 to1988 he toured Europe, Japan and North America, including an extensive tour with Rudolf Firkusny as guest pianist. Curtis' collaboration with the Ridge concluded with a concert on the string quartet series at Carnegie Hall. He was twice a participant in the Marlboro Festival and toured nationally several times with Musicians from Marlboro; he has guested with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, at the Wolf Trap, Ravinia and Victoria Festivals, and at the invitation of Shlomo Mintz, in the concert series "Shlomo Mintz et ses amis" at the Louvre. He was featured as continuo soloist on Kathleen Battle's album "Grace" for Sony Classical, and toured with Miss Battle and Anthony Newman performing Purcell, Dowland, Handel and Bach. The list of his chamber music collaborators includes musicians such as Bruno Canino, Christoph Eschenbach, Joseph Kalichstein, Ursula Oppens, Lillian Kallir, Jeffrey Kahane, Joshua Bell, Norbert Brainin, Vladimir Spivakov, Leila Josefowicz, Jaime Laredo, Janos Negyesi, Rolf Schulte, Yuri Bashmet, Nobuko Imai, Lynn Harrell, Fred Sherry and Aurele Nicolet.

Since 1987, Curtis has worked closely with avant-garde legend La Monte Young. He is Director of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble and in the last ten years has participated in more performances and premieres of Young's works than any other interpreter. These have included major performances at the Barbican Centre in London, the Darmstadt Festival, the Inventionen Festival in Berlin, the Cathedral of Dreams Festival in Krems, Austria, the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, the Beyond the Pink Festival in Los Angeles, and leading the strings of Ensemble Modern for the Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt. Curtis is one of the few instrumentalists to have perfected Young's highly complex just intonation tunings, and is one of only a handful of musicians to have appeared in duo formations with Young, performing works by early minimalists Richard Maxfield and Terry Jennings. Frequently Curtis contributes program notes on Young's music, a selection of which are to appear in a special issue on Young of the periodical MusikTexte. A new work by Young for solo cello and electronics is in planning through Ateliers Upic in Paris. Curtis performs regularly in Young's MELA Foundation Dream House loft concerts in New York. On Young's recommendation, Curtis attended master classes in Indian classical music with the late North Indian master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath.

For the last fifteen years Curtis has maintained an interest and a presence in the downtown New York free music scene, performing in clubs like the Knitting Factory, the Cooler, ABC No Rio, CBGB and Acme Underground. He is an active collaborator with poetry-rock pioneers King Missile, John S. Hall and Kramer, and has been a guest of artists and groups such as Elliott Sharp, Malcolm Goldstein, Ned Rothenberg, David First, Ben Neill, Donald Miller, Dogbowl, Michael J. Schumacher, Bongwater, Borbetomagus, Circle X, and with individual members of the bands Television, Pere Ubu and Public Image Limited.

Curtis is currently Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he had previously been guest lecturer and performer. He teaches cello and chamber music, and lectures on Stockhausen, La Monte Young and the Velvet Underground. Master classes and performing residencies have also taken him to Brandeis University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Musikhochschule Luebeck and the Steans Institute of the Ravinia Festival. He has held seminars in new music for the classes of Peter Niklas Wilson at the Musicological Institute of the University of Hamburg.

He was a guest soloist on Herbie Hancock's "Gershwin's World" album for Verve/Deutsche Grammophon, and recently he contributed ensemble arrangements and led a chamber group in a Deutsche Grammophon production of the singer Robert Metcalf. At last year's Casals Festival in Puerto Rico, Curtis was the cellist chosen to perform a special solo tribute to Casals on the late master's own cello. In Spring 2000 he toured Germany, Holland and Belgium in a trio with two of New York's premier avant-garde guitarists, Alan Licht and Dean Roberts. He continues to work with his own group, the Charles Curtis Trio, with whom he has released three albums and toured much of Europe.

Curtis is recipient of the Piatigorsky Prize of the New York Cello Society, and a laureate of the Naumburg, Geneva and Cassado International competitions. He is a native of Southern California.

Jon Catler

Jon Catler is the world’s leading innovator on microtonal guitar. For many years, Catler's life has been devoted to the exploration of the 'notes-between-the-notes,' or microtonal music. Specifically, he has devised his own system of tuning based on Just Intonation or the pure intervals of the Harmonic Series. He has redesigned his guitar to allow an unprecedented range of consonance and dissonance, alternating between a 62-note per octave and a fretless neck. Noted for his work with legendary minimalist, La Monte Young, Mr. Catler can be heard as featured soloist on the Gramavision Double-CD La Monte Young and the Forever Bad Blues Band. The CD has been widely reviewed (four stars in Rolling Stone) and the band has toured Europe and played Alice Tully Hall, the Kitchen and The Knitting Factory. He performed the world premiere of the Just Intonation Version of La Monte Young's for Guitar in Venice, Italy in 1986, and the New York premiere in 1987. He was assistant piano tuner in Young's 1987 concert series of The Well-Tuned Piano for the La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective, studying the piece for a future guitar version, and he also formed and led the sustained electric guitar and bass section for Young's The Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band 1990 5-Concert world premiere of The Lower Map of The Eleven's Division In The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119. Catler played the German premiere of the Just Intonation Version of for Guitar and, with his brother Brad Catler on fretless bass, played the world premiere of the Just Intonation Version of Young's Sarabande in Munich in 1992.

He has appeared as composer and performer on the Futurismo/Futurismi Festival, Manca Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Quebec Festival d'Éte and The American Festival of Microtonal Music of which he is co-founder. Catler performed in the world premier version of Ives' Universe Symphony at Lincoln Center, a climax of AFMM's 15-year history. Catler also performed on the original Harry Partch guitars with Newband in a performance of Partch's Oedipus at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Catler has recorded and performed throughout Europe and the U.S. with three Just Intonation rock bands, and can be heard on The Microtones' recording Cowpeople on the M-Tone label and on the Just Intonation CD, Steel Blue, on the Koch International label, both of which feature his own compositions. As the founder of microtonal music label, FreeNote Records, Catler has released the CD Crash Landing, which features Catler on guitar, brother Brad on bass, and Jonathan Kane on drums, as well as a new release, Birdhouse, featuring Catler on guitars and Meredith Borden on vocals. Catler recently premiered his piece Evolution for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in New York City in which he performed with the orchestra in Just Intonation.

Brad Catler

Brad Catler, electric just intonation and fretless bass, is a multi-instrumentalist, world percussionist and composer. He experiments with different tunings on many instruments and has built and played his own Irish tin whistles using just tunings based on overtone-undertone series. He studied tabla with Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussein Khan, and sitar with Peter Rowe. He also studied sheng with T.N. Chang, director of the Chinese Ensemble. Since the early '80s he has performed regularly at the American Festival of Microtonal Music. He has worked with La Monte Young for 10 years and is a founding member of The Forever Bad Blues Band. With his brother Jon Catler, he founded the overtone trio, 'The Catler Brothers' and FreeNote Records, a label dedicated to microtonal music. Over the last years Catler performed many works of Harry Partch, including the world premiere of the Harry Partch work December 1942 on fretless electric guitar. For 20 years he has toured throughout the U.S. and Europe. With Bettina Pelz, Catler founded the International Forum for World Music, 'Common Language.' He regularly teaches workshops and guides Drum Circles. Catler is also a member of Young's The Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band and played electric bass in the 1990 5-Concert world premiere of The Lower Map of The Eleven's Division In The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119. He performed the world premiere of the Just Intonation Version of Young's Sarabande on fretless bass, with his brother Jon Catler on just intonation guitar, in Munich, 1992. He played tabla with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, voices and tamburas, for their performances of Indian classical raga at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1992. Catler plays the first prototype of the just intonation bass guitar designed by Jon Catler as one of his instruments on The Forever Bad Blues Band recording, Just Stompin' Live at The Kitchen.

Joseph McNalley

Joseph McNalley attended the New England Conservatory, where he studied contrabass with Edwin Barker, and the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Bertram Turetzky. He is the director and plays large bass violin with The Hutchins Consort, a group that plays on the eight scaled violins of the violin octet designed and built by the famous luthier, Dr. Carleen Hutchins. He has performed professionally across the gamut of styles, including jazz, rock, folk, Hawaiian, paniolo, country, latin and klezmer. He taught elementary school music at the Kauai Waldorf School, and has taught music at U.C. San Diego. He has performed as soloist, tutti or principal contrabass with a number of orchestras, and is acting principal bass of the San Diego Chamber Orchestra. He performed Composition 1960 #7 with Charles Curtis at the Beyond the Pink Festival, Los Angeles, 1998.

Reynard Rott

Reynard Rott studied cello at The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and graduated from The Juilliard School. He has studied cello technique with Charles Curtis for two and one-half years and performed works of La Monte Young at Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Hamburg in 2000.

Chris Williams

Chris Williams is currently a student at U.C. San Diego and studies with Bertram Turetzky and Chaya Czernowin and extended bowing techniques with Charles Curtis. As a composer, he is currently finishing a work to be premiered by The Hutchins Consort in Fall, 2001.

MELA at DIAPASON, 1026 Sixth Avenue, New York City

World Out Of Tune (WOOT) Festival Presented in cooperation with FreeNote Records

Production: Michelle Dorvillier, Joseph Kubera, Ursula Scherrer, Michael Schumacher

Audio Technician & Recording Engineer: Bob Bielecki

Lighting Design: Marian Zazeela

Video Documentation: Jung Hee Choi, Mantra TV

Webmaster: David Beardsley

Ushers: Michelle Dorvillier, Lisa Hoashi, Eva Lawrence, Kenta Nagai

MELA's programs are been made possible, in part, with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and from Dia Center for the Arts, and individual MELA contributors.

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of MELA contributors: Fariha and Heiner Friedrich, Guarantors; Christopher Dark, Donor; David Beardsley, Alexander Dea, Sponsors; and our many Associate, Friend, Artist and Student Members.

Special thanks to Fariha and Heiner Friedrich, William M. Borchard, Robert W. Clarida, Robert J. Giordanella, Michael Schumacher, Diapason Gallery, Meredith Borden, Jon Catler, FreeNote Records, Jamie Mereness, Kurt Munkacsi, and the MELA Board of Directors and Advisory Board.

MELA Foundation, Inc., 275 Church Street, New York, N.Y. 10013, 212-925-8270

Artistic Directors: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela. Honorary Director: the late Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996). Board of Directors: Robert Adler, President; Michael L. Commons, Vice-President; David Farneth, Secretary; Jon Hendricks, Treasurer; Alex Dea, Terry Riley, Diane Wakoski.

www.virtulink.com/mela/main.htm, www.lamonteyoung.com

email: melafoundation@rcn.com