La Monte Young

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La Monte Young (born October 14, 1935 in Bern, Idaho ) is an American composer and musician and, along with Philip Glass , Steve Reich and Terry Riley, is one of the most influential representatives of minimal music in the United States .

Live and act

Young studied clarinet , saxophone and composition at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1951 to 1954 and at the University of California, Berkeley from 1958 to 1960 . In the mid-1950s he played jazz with Terry Jennings , who drew his attention to the composer John Cage . In 1959 he took part in a seminar by Karlheinz Stockhausen as part of the Darmstadt summer courses . He was strongly influenced by classical Indian and Japanese Gagaku music and was a member of the Fluxus movement. Numerous minimalist pieces with extremely long-lasting or often repetitive sequences and ribbon loops with extremely long playing times come from this period . For example, Composition 1960 # 7 consists of just two notated notes with the interpretation instruction "to be held for a long time".

In 1962 he founded the Theater of Eternal Music , which initially also appeared in Fluxus concerts. First of all, drone tones were developed with fast, modal improvisations, for example using a so-called dream chord , which is based on the tones c sharp-dgac, but which are no longer rhythmically identifiable. The soprano saxophone was replaced by the voice in the mid-1960s (although La Monte Young had been taking lessons from Pran Nath since 1970 ).

Since about 1964 he has worked at the The Well-Tuned Piano - compositions and thereby develops his second composition of gravity, which in just intonation systems and a complex mathematical based calculation: basic rhythmic phrases appear, only to disappear again; Chords are performed in tremolo ; Arpeggios serve as a starting point for improvisations. The performances of the play have stretched over the years to several hours; of the fullness of the piano, only the middle register tends to remain.

Young has been married to the artist Marian Zazeela since 1963 , with whom he has developed numerous »Sound / Light Environments «. Increasingly, he dealt with the fiction of perpetual music. Selected basic tones that sound permanently are contrasted with improvised, long-lasting tones. In 1972 he performed the Dream House performance and installation at Documenta 5 in Kassel (together with Marian Zazeela) in the Individual Mythologies : Self-Presentation - Performances - Activities - Changes department from July 30th to 7th from 3pm: 00 a.m. to 6 p.m.

La Monte Young had a lasting influence on numerous alternative, punk and rock musicians . This is how John Cale , who was a member of Young's ensemble Dream Syndicate (not to be confused with the rock band of the same name ), and Lou Reed from the Velvet Underground at the time name him as an early source of inspiration .

Works (selection)

  • Trio for Strings (1958)
  • The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (Young's first use of electronic musical instruments), ( ca.1960 )
  • The Four Dreams of China works with only four tunings and frequencies (G, C, + C #, D)
  • Composition 1960 # 7 (1959/60)
  • 566 for Henry Flint (1960)
  • The Well-Tuned Piano (continuously developed since 1964) (in a tuning that is based only on octaves , perfect fifths and natural sevenths )
  • Various environments and art events in collaboration with Marian Zazeela.

literature

  • Exhibition catalog: documenta 5. Survey of Reality - Imagery Today. Catalog (as a file folder) Volume 1: (Material), Volume 2: (List of exhibits). Kassel 1972.
  • documenta archive (ed.); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive on documenta 1972. Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X .
  • Ulli Götte: Minimal Music - History, Aesthetics, Environment. Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 2000, ISBN 978-3-7959-0777-8 .
  • Gregor Herzfeld : Time as Process and Epiphany in Experimental American Music. Charles Ives to La Monte Young. Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-515-09033-9 .
  • Juan María Solare : El Trío serial de La Monte Young . [About Young's Trio for Strings (1958)]. Doce Notas Preliminares (Madrid), no. 17: 112-42.

Web links

Commons : La Monte Young  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Baumgärtel, Tilman: grinding. On the history and aesthetics of the loop . Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86599-271-0 , p. 189-224 .
personal data
SURNAME Young, La Monte
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American musician
DATE OF BIRTH October 14, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Bern , Idaho