"Now 'refined and perfected,' as its composer calls it, the approach already identified in for Brass and for Guitar is here [in the Trio for Strings] taken to extremes. In excluding 'almost any semblance of what had been generally known as melody,' Young may not have entirely purged his music from past associations. But he had certainly created music with a degree of reductive focus - both of means and of expression - unusual, if not unique, in Western composition of the time. Edward Strickland has suggested that the 'dodecaphony' of the Trio could be argued as 'exclud[ing] the harmonic stasis theoretically afforded by tonal organization.' Yet the models Young had selected from the output of the Second Viennese School suggested that both free atonality and the twelve-note method could produce music much more static than anything propelled by the dynamism properly implied by 'tonal organization.'"

Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists

NOTES

La Monte Young edited with Marian Zazeela

The selection of works on this concert traces one line of the Second Viennese School's influence on minimalism from 1911 through the present and includes my cello-piano arrangements of Arnold Schoenberg's Klavierstuecke II and VI from Sechs Kleine Klavierstuecke, Op. 19 (1913), and of my Five Small Pieces for String Quartet (1956), as well as performances of Anton Webern’s Drei Kleine Stuecke, Op. 11 (1914), Morton Feldman's Durations 2, Terry Jennings' Winter Sun (1966), Michael Schumacher's Constellations (1994) and Charles Curtis' Continuous / intermittent frequency comparison. The second half of the concert includes my arabic numeral (any integer) (1960) in the realization 997, performed by Michael Schumacher in the classic solo piano version.

Historical and Theor'tical 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 Schoenberg. I entered LA City College in 1953 and there I took classes under Leonard Stein, the noted pianist and former assistant to Schoenberg. 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 sustained tones 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, sustained tones 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 - 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 were sustained tones in Eastern and Western music but they were always in the form of 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 sustained tones 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.

Arnold Schoenberg

from Sechs Kleine Klavierstuecke, Op. 19 (1913)

Arrangement for cello and piano, La Monte Young, May 2001

Klavierstueck VI

Klavierstueck II

"Schoenberg completed his Five Pieces for Orchestra in 1909 and they were heard for the first time on September 3, 1912, with Sir Henry Wood conducting at Queen's Hall, London. [Schoenberg's] program notes for that performance spoke of the Five Pieces as follows: 'This music seeks to express all that dwells in us subconsciously like a dream; which is a great fluctuant power, and is built upon none of the lines that are familiar to us; which has a rhythm, as the blood has its pulsating rhythm, as all life in us has its rhythm; which has a tonality, but only as the sea or the storm has its tonality; which has harmonies, though we cannot grasp or analyze them nor can we trace its themes. All its technical craft is submerged, made one and indivisible with the content of the work.'"

Notes by D.H. from Mercury LP MG50024 Schoenberg, Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16

In my program notes on my Trio for Strings, I wrote:

"Terry Riley has said that his exposure to the Trio for Strings in the late fifties made a deep impression on him. Now, in looking back, it seems to me that it is possible to trace the Viennese line of the derivation of minimalism in music from the static approach presented in "The Changing Chord -Summer Morning by a Lake - Colors" of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, through Webern's technique for the repetition of given pitch identities at the same octave placement, to the static, sustained tones in the Trio for Strings and on to Terry Riley and the ensuing generations of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, Jon Hassell and Brian Eno."

In fact, both Morton Feldman and I acknowledged in writing separately (and perhaps together in conversation) that there was no doubt about the influence of "The Changing Chord -Summer Morning by a Lake - Colors" of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra on our work. However, at least in my case, the Klavierstuecke II and VI from Sechs Kleine Klavierstuecke played a similarly important, and probably even earlier, role. Not only did my harmony teacher at John Marshall High School, Clyde Sorenson, study with Schoenberg at UCLA, in my Spring 1953 fifth semester of harmony class, he actually played a recording of the Sechs Kleine Klavierstuecke. I can never forget it. Although composed three years later than the Five Pieces for Orchestra, I heard it first, and at that point in my life I had never heard anything like it. In retrospect, Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke may have made a much deeper impression on my subconscious than I had realized.

If we need look beyond my 1958 Trio for Strings for the precedent of sustained tones in piano music, such as they appear in my Studies I (1958) and III (1959), and in the Jennings piano pieces of 1958 and June 1960 (published in An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young, New York, 1963), Klavierstueck VI is a potential model. Here we find not only repetition but sustenance. The same sustained chords coming again and again with melodic events interspersed in between.

In Klavier tueck II the repeated pattern of G and B in the treble clef,with a whimsical ornamentation of C and Em above, seems to have indeed represented the eternal clock, remembered as in the fragment of a dream.

I made these arrangements of Klaviersuecke II and VI because they meant so much to me. Here we find another thread of the Second Viennese School’s influence on my work and the origins of minimalism in Western classical music.

Anton Webern

Drei Kleine Stuecke, Op. 11 (1914)

From the very first notes of Schoenberg's offerings, it seems that Webern was there, listening and quietly composing. It was another time, another dream, but one that changed the history of Western classical music forever. While Schoenberg may have discovered stasis from deep within his subconscious, it may be that Webern focused on this phenomenon and developed it. Schoenberg may have considered these premonitions as special events, but for Webern they became the imaginative inspirations of a new music the likes of which had never been heard before. When we consider the eternal polar opposites, positive and negative, yin and yang, night and day, it is as though Schoenberg was the outgoing romanticist, expressionist. Webern, on the other hand, was the retiring, inner-directed, self-aware, complement.

When asked to define minimalism, I frequently give the definition: "That which is created with a minimum of means." There are other early Webern works which demonstrate stasis but the Drei Kleine Stuecke are not minimalist in terms of stasis but rather minimalist in their extreme brevity. They are like the Schoenberg Sechs Kleine Klavierstuecke, but without the repetition demonstrated in #s II and VI.

La Monte Young

Five Small Pieces for String Quartet (1956)

On Remembering a Naiad

Arrangement for cello and piano (2001)

"After periods of flirtation with the blues and Bartok in high school and college, Young began writing in the 12-tone idiom at UCLA under the tutelage of Leonard Stein, who was Arnold Schoenberg's protege. Young's first 12-tone work, Five Small Pieces for String Quartet: On Remembering a Naiad (1956) is classically Webernesque in the extreme brevity of its movements and its gestures seesawing between two notes a major seventh apart. (When I asked Young why the movements were all so similar, he replied, "Contrast is for people who can't write music.")

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

The Composition

The Five Small Pieces for String Quartet, On Remembering A Naiad were written November 2 through 16, 1956 in Los Angeles, just after I had turned twenty-one. I was deep into my studies with Leonard Stein and the Five Small Pieces for String Quartet were the first works that I composed using 12-tone row technique. They were inspired by the Webern 6 Bagatelles for string quartet, Op.9 and 5 Pieces for orchestra, Op.10, however, they already demonstrate elements of the style that I began to develop in my subsequent works of that period.

The Five Small Pieces are essentially more sparse and transparent than the Webern works. As we trace the influence of the repeated dyad of G and B from Schoenberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstuecke, in the rhythmic pattern of three eighth notes, j&j&j&, on my work, we find in bar 9 of #1 A Wisp, at the exact same pitch, treble clef second line G, j&j&j&, echoed in bar 10, 11 with j&j&j& at the pitches A, C, C. C, A, are the opening pitches of the work and of the 12-tone row, which is used in its original version without transposition throughout the Five Small Pieces for String Quartet. In #2 A Gnarl, we find in bars 3 and 6, the same rhythmic pattern represented as quarter-notes in augmentation X 2 on the off-beats. In #3 A Leaf, we find in bar 2 another form of augmentation on the off-beats.

The Five Small Pieces feature longer static sections of pulses and ostinato figures than in the Webern works, and even a hint of the longer sustained pitches to come in my later works. They also present the beginnings of my own musical vocabulary of intervallic and chordal structures, which were the premonitions of the "dream chords" that progressively became the primary harmonic material of for Brass, for Guitar, Trio for Strings, and finally, the exclusive tonal content of The Four Dreams of China (1962).

The Arrangement for Cello and Piano

In recognition of the extraordinary level of performance demonstrated by Charles Curtis and Michael Schumacher in their duo appearances, I created this arrangement for them.

Performance History

After a single Los Angeles State College Composers Concert performance in January 1957, the Five Small Pieces were not performed publicly until twenty-eight years later on January 17, 1985 when they were given their world premiere by the Kronos Quartet at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The European premiere then followed five months later when the Kronos performed it at the Festival St. Denis, Paris, on June 21, 1985. The Kronos continued to include the Five Small Pieces at festivals such as Musica, London, July 1986 (UK premiere), BAM Next Wave, Brooklyn, New York, November 1986, the La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective, May 1987, and others, while the work began to be taken up by other groups such as the Saarlandischer Streichquartett, Saarbrucken, May 1986 (German premiere) and the Continuum Quartet, Alice Tully Hall, New York, December 1988.

The Arditti Quartet gave the Austrian premiere in Vienna, as well as many other performances and broadcasts in Europe and the U.S., including the Almeida Festival, London, June 1989, Berlin and New York's Town Hall. In 1993, the Arditti released the first recording of the Five Small Pieces on their Disques Montaigne CD, USA.

The first performance of the cello-piano version was by Charles Curtis, cello, with Haesook Rhee, piano on November 19, 1994 at the University of Texas, Austin. On May 26, 1995, Charles and Michael presented the work in New York City at Greenwich House Music School.

Morton Feldman

Durations 2 (1961)

I have been an admirer of Morton Feldman's music since I first heard an album of his music played by David Tudor and others around 1960. I was interested in the way he continued the technique found in late Webern, where constellations of limited sets of pitches were repeated with pitch identities occurring at the same octave placements to create long static harmonic sections. The New American Grove Dictionary of Music states: "Perhaps Feldman's most important development was the invention of what he called 'race-course' notation. Here most aspects of precise notation are retained in each instrument's own part, but durations and vertical coordination are relatively free. This is the case in the Durations series (1960-61), a group of works showing Feldman's mastery of instrumentation." I first heard Charles Curtis and Michael Schumacher play Durations 2 at the Greenwich House concert in 1995. It is a good example of the musical world I was involved in when I came to New York in 1960.

Michael Schumacher

Constellations (1994)

Notes by Michael Schumacher

Constellations are pieces consisting of groups of six intervals played and repeated in no particular order, like a mobile of sound events. The title comes from Calder. The instrumentation is open, and a certain amount of melodic improvisation is possible. This particular Constellation (I've composed 27) contains all twelve pitches of the equal-tempered scale, distributed among the six intervals. In the context of this program, it relates on the one hand to Schoenberg and Webern, being twelve-tone, and to Young and Feldman, being in open form and static.

Terry Jennings

Winter Sun (Piano Piece #2) (February 1966)

The concert series I directed at Yoko Ono's studio on Chambers Street in 1960-61 was perhaps the first series to take place in a loft in New York City, thus representing one of the beginnings of alternative performance spaces. Because of the advantages of unlimited rehearsal and performance time, I was able to give each composer two entire evenings devoted to their own works. It is significant that I chose the work of Terry Jennings to open the series. Without doubt, I considered Terry the most talented musician I knew at that time. Terry, who was then only 20 years old, flew to New York to perform for the occasion. A tape recorded by Richard Maxfield exists of the actual opening night performance of the series.

Winter Sun was written at Aqua Caliente, Arizona. Winter Trees (1965) and Winter Sun have become perhaps Jennings' most well-known and loved pieces. Michael Schumacher premiered the piano/cello duo version of Winter Sun with Charles Curtis at Greenwich House Music School on Barrow Street, New York City on May 26, 1995. They also performed this version of the work at the Terry Jennings Memorial Concert at MELA Foundation on January 30, 2000.

La Monte Young

997 (to H F) (April 1960)

arabic numeral (any integer) was one of my best-known, radical early works. As we continue to trace the influence of the repeated dyad of G and B from Schoenberg'sSechs Kleine Klavierstuecke, in the rhythmic pattern of three eighth notes, j&j&j&, on my work, we must eventually come to arabic numeral. This work consists only of a repeated forearm cluster when performed on piano, or of a repeated snare drum stroke when performed on gong. arabic numeral may consist of any number of clusters or strokes (including only one), the number of clusters or strokes to be selected by the performer before the concert and printed in the program, for example, as 1066 (to Henry Flynt) in the case where there are 1066 clusters or strokes. This work shows a definitive beginning for what I call the more mainstream or 'hard core' minimalism that is based on repeated rhythmic cells, as introduced by Terry Riley with In C in 1964 and later continued by Reich, Glass and others. I first began to play the piece with drumstick on a gong, which was lying flat on the floor, in April 1960 at an improvised rehearsal for the Ann Halprin Dance Company in Marin County when Terry Riley and I were the co-musical directors. It was really hypnotic and like many of the other "wild sounds" I composed and performed during that period, I really felt that I could "get inside of the sound" (see Lecture 1960). arabic numeral (any integer) became a real showpiece, guaranteed to rouse audiences, and was greatly sought after by performers in the early '60s. The work is actually extremely difficult to perform well, and although I was very careful to give copies of the score to only the best performers, the work was in such demand that some musicians actually tried to perform it simply after reading some of the more sensational newspaper reviews. I performed the work myself, and it was performed in Europe and the U.S. by David Tudor, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Cornelius Cardew, Amalia Rosati, Nam June Paik, Peter Yates, John Cale, and Dieter Schnebel, as well as at many Fluxus festivals. Jan Williams performed the work at the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo on April 7, 1990. Joseph Kubera performed the work at the Inventionen Festival in Berlin on February 6, 1992, and in New York City at Greenwich House on April 22, 1993.

In 1993, the group Zeitgeist presented the world premiere of a special ensemble arrangement of arabic numeral (any integer), which I created for them. This was part of a full evening concert of a number of my early works at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, on February 18, 1993, and also included the world premiere of Annod, a jazz composition from 1953-55.

On March 15, 1995, Steffen Schleiermacher of the Ensemble Avantgarde Leipzig performed the work as a piano solo during the 15th Musik-Biennale Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin.

On June 1 and 2, 1996, Tom Goldstein gave the first performance of the "drumstick on gong" version of the work in New York City since my own performance on the Gong made by Robert Morris in the Robert Morris / Robert Huot performance piece War at Judson Memorial Church on January 30, 1963.

The 997 version of arabic numeral (any integer) to be performed this afternoon, June 24, 2001, was also performed on August 4, 2000, in Hamburg at the Schleswig Holstein Musik Festival as an ensemble version with two keyboards and three gongs by Charles Curtis, Henry Grant, Christof Hahn, Peter Imig and Reynard Rott.

Regarding my selection of the prime 997 as the number of events in these performances, Charles had asked for a number near to 1000 because he felt that would produce a performance of the duration he had in mind. I selected 997 because it is not only a prime, it is a Young Prime of the type PyI. Additionally, 997 is within the range of 9/7 and its octave multiples, in this case 896 and 1152. This range, 9/7 and its octave multiples, has been the subject of much of my recent work in composition, especially my sound environments such as The Symmetries in Prime Time from 144 to 112 with 119 (89 I NYC). We find 997 between octave multiples of the integers 63 and 62, (2 x the prime 31), that is, 16 x 63 = 1008 and 32 x 31 = 992, resulting in the ratio 1008/992. I have been interested in the ratio 63/62 since 1964, when I included it in the tuning for Pre-Tortoise Dream Music and the first notation of the tuning for The Well-Tuned Piano. For the definition of Young Primes and a discussion of The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) from The Symmetries in Prime Time from 144 to 112 with 119, see Sound and Light: La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela, page 211, Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, 1996).

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 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. 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.

Charles Curtis and Michael Schumacher have studied the interpretation of Jennings’ music with me and represent the next generation of musicians to become specialists in its performance. They have both had the opportunity to study the tapes of Jennings playing. Since Jennings improvised extensively with the pitch constellations of the notated score, the study of this tape was absolutely necessary in order to convey the spirit of the music. Charles has studied the work of Terry Jennings for over twelve years, and has presented a number of his works in performance, including the String Quartet (September 1960), Song in A (December 1960), Winter Sun (February 1966) and several performances of the Piece for Cello and Saxophone (December 1960), two of which were in support of my vocal realization of the saxophone part. Charles has also frequently performed Jennings' music as a duo with Michael.

Program Notes Copyright © La Monte Young 1998, 2000, 2001

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.

Terry Jennings

Terry Jennings was born in Eagle Rock, California on July 19, 1940. At the age of two he began to select records from his parents’ collection, showing a lack of interest in the “records for young people” that they had chosen for him. He was taught by both of his parents and began playing piano duets with his mother at the age of four. By the age of 12, he was studying John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. In junior high school Jennings was a featured clarinet soloist with the orchestra. He also made arrangements of Stravinsky piano pieces so that the orchestra would have music to play that he liked. He also worked on an opera during this period and, one day, while visiting the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Art, a group of professional musicians was rehearsing the Schoenberg Op. 29 Suite. The group needed an E-flat clarinet player, so Terry sight-read the part on his B-flat clarinet. He attended John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, the alma mater of composer La Monte Young, whom Jennings met in 1953. Jennings played and studied with Young and was greatly influenced by him. In 1954, at the age of 14, Jennings entered the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Art where he studied saxophone with William Green. It was in 1957 that he met Dennis Johnson, another composer who was not just an influence on him, but also a great appreciator of his music. In addition to his study of composition with La Monte Young, he also studied with Robert Erickson at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Leonard Stein at the California Institute of the Arts.

Jennings' first serious works were composed in 1958 with his style of composition eventually developing in the direction of modal improvisations, through which his saxophone playing prompted comparison with the great Indian shahnai player Bismillah Khan, and the American jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Jennings first came to musical prominence in the late 1950s when he began to compose in the style of Young's influential early works involving sustained tones and expanded time concepts. He was introduced to the New York avant garde in 1960, when Young opened his series of concerts at Yoko Ono's loft with two programs of Jennings' music. Jennings was a part of many important new music concerts of the 1960's, both as a composer and a performer, premiering, among others, Richard Maxfield's Wind for tape and saxophone composed as a portrait of Jennings. He worked with the James Waring Dance Company (1962) and performed and recorded with Young's Theatre of Eternal Music. Jennings' Piano Piece (June 1960) and String Quartet (1960) were published in An Anthology (edited by Young in 1963), which led to their performance in England by Cornelius Cardew, John Tilbury and others. Jennings also wrote a collection of very beautiful poems that have remained almost completely unknown outside a small circle of his closest friends. Jennings' music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe, including concerts in New York, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Boston and Los Angeles. Terry Jennings died in San Pablo, California on December 11, 1981.

The New Grove Dictionary of American Music states: "With Young and Terry Riley, Jennings was involved in the earliest developments of drone-inspired, modal, repetitive music. He is best known for two piano works of 1965, Winter Trees and Winter Sun, both of which exemplify the repetitive, nonvirtuoso keyboard style he was among the first to employ; sets of phrases are played quietly in a specified order but repeated at will, in relatively free rhythm, and with liberal use of the sustaining pedal, creating a meditative mood and an understated lyricism. Jennings had a decisive influence on such composers as Harold Budd, Peter Garland, and Howard Skempton, who in the early 1970s created a body of so-called 'minimalist' keyboard music and were among the few musicians to perform his works. In later years Jennings composed works in a neo-romantic style, including the song cycle The Seasons (1975)."

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.

Michael J. Schumacher

Michael Joseph Schumacher was born on May 30, 1961 in Washington, DC. He has studied piano and taught himself the guitar, forming a number of improvising bands while in high school. He also played in the early music group and sang in the chorus. He has composed from the age of 7 and began receiving lessons at 15 years from Stanley Applebaum, who had studied with Stefan Wolpe, in NYC. In college he devoted himself to composition, studying with Bernhard Heiden (who had studied with Paul Hindemith) and John Eaton at Indiana University, where he won the composition prize, and with Vincent Persichetti at Juilliard where he earned the Doctorate degree in 1988. He has studied piano with Seymour Bernstein in NYC and John Ogdon at Indiana University. He has also studied privately with La Monte Young.

Schumacher has composed over 70 works for all manner of instruments and voice, including two symphonies, 2 song cycles and numerous works for solo piano. Since 1988 he has worked primarily with electronic media, specializing in computer generated sound environments, utilizing up to 16 speakers, which evolve continuously for prolonged time periods. He has developed random and process oriented compositional structures and extended instrumental techniques (including prepared electric guitar). Recently he has created a system for live computer performance.

Schumacher's works have been performed in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has presented sound installations at The Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia, at the Technical University in Berlin, and at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House, among other places. He has received grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, and Harvestworks. He has performed and recorded with the cellist Charles Curtis, guitarist Donald Miller, and with Stephen Tunney. In 1996 he founded, with Ursula Scherrer, Studio Five Beekman, a multi-media art gallery that has presented installations by David Behrman, Phill Niblock, Alvin Lucier, David First, Ben Manley, Tom Hamilton and others. In April 2001, with Liz Gerring, he founded Diapason, a sound and intermedia gallery at 1026 Sixth Avenue, New York City.

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