La Monte Young is credited with being the first composer to work in the Minimalist style, with the first piece being his 1958 Trio for Strings which was written while he was still a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Consisting of long, sustained tones interspersed with equally long rests, the Trio brings to mind some of Anton Webern's later works, only slower and barer.2 Edward Strickland conjectures that "the spare figures of Minimal music would very likely not have emerged but from the intricate ground of academic Serialism," . 3 which has a sense of truth to it as all four of the composers discussed in this paper at one time studied serial technique but were dissatisfied with the system.
Young's conceptual work Compositions 1960 # 7 consists of a noted open fifth and directions for the interval "to be held for a long time." . 5 This piece, like his earlier Trio, is a forerunner of his later "drone" style, which becomes more evident in his 1962 composition The Four Dreams of China, in particular part two, The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, which has a constant drone under repetitious figures. 6
The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer is a excellent example of the style of music which he still writes and performs today, namely "drone music." The music is, as the name implies, made up almost completely of long, sustained pitches, produced either with a sine wave generator or other electronic device, an acoustic instrument, or voice. Young's music has an epic quality in the sense that most performances are only sections of works. An example of this is his The Tortoise, his Dreams and Journeys, which began evolution in 1964 when he began tuning his ensemble to the fundamental pitch of his pet turtle's aquarium motor. 7 The piece is dated from 1964 to the present; subsequently all performances are only part of the whole work. While Young's titles before 1962 where themselves spare with titles like for Brass and for Guitar, afterwards his music remained bare, but his titles assumed an almost Baroque air. As most of his works are merely parts of a larger work, most often Tortoise, the titles reflect or allude to certain drone frequencies involved and often to dates associated with the poem year by poet and member of Young's ensemble the Theatre of Eternal Music Angus MacLise; 8 one of the best examples of Young's titles is The Day of the Antler The Obsidian Ocelot, the Sawmill and the Blue Sawtooth High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer Refracting the Legend of the Dream of the Tortoise Traversing the 189/98 Lost Ancestral Lake Region Illuminating Scenes from the Black Tiger Tapestries of the Drone of the Holy Numbers. Later in the 1970's, Young's drone music was elongated to the extreme with the construction of his "Dream House." A continual light and sound environment employing sine-wave generators and slowly shifting light patterns, as well as live performers supplementing the electronic drones, Young was able to theoretically keep Tortoise going forever (although the longest span ran from 1979 to 1985 in New York). 9
Young's other epic project is a piano piece entitled The Well-Tuned Piano (WTP), most likely in reference to J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. The work was begun in 1964, and is still in revision; like most of Young's works, it has an almost organic quality about it. In the WTP Young employs a system known as just intonation, which involves retuning the piano to resonate with the harmonics produced by an E-flat ten octaves below the lowest E-flat on a B–sendorfer grand piano. The tuning is quite different from the now standard equal temperament, but because every note is in the same overtone series as every other, each note resonates the other, creating a drone-like effect. The WTP is improvised, but only within a set formal structure with Young sets out that employs the use of certain chords and themes (again with poetic titles). 10 Also of interest in the WTP is Young's use of "clouds," a passage in which certain pitches are played quickly and with repetition, producing a "cloud" of sound rather than individual pitches.11 Young himself plays the piece on a specially constructed B–sendorfer, and performances take upwards of three hours.
Last updated on 95/07/26 21:57:13 EDT.