In his essay; Notes on The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (Young 2000), La Monte Young offers the reader personal reflections on his experiences at the time he set up and worked within the group; The Theatre of Eternal Music. The essay is sub-divided into eight sections and is published on the MELA foundation website of whom he and Marian Zazeela are artistic directors. On reading the essay it is clear to see that Young has published it in order to indicate his undeniable position as composer of the work, albeit ongoing, The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys. In the penultimate section, Young states that the work is his composition and not a co-composition with John Cale and Tony Conrad. In writing this essay, Young is responding to an assertion that Cale and Conrad are co-composers. Nevertheless the essay is a clear, well-written description of Young’s activities in founding, setting up and composing the group. It offers strong contextual foundations for an attentive reading of his work at a time when Young’s work was of enormous significance.
Section I is entitled, Regarding the underlying composition of The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys. This section offers precise descriptions of composition and improvisation techniques set out by Young, particularly the use of prolonged held notes to produce drones and their resulting harmonics. It is important to remember the continuity inherent in Young’s compositions prior to setting up the Theatre of Eternal Music; he composed strict rule based and algorithmic pieces. He describes the make up and dynamic of the group known as The Theatre of Eternal Music that formed to facilitate this work. The early group is made up of La Monte Young, Sopranino Saxophone; Terry Jennings, Soprano Saxophone; Marian Zazeela, voice drone; Tony Conrad, violin and John Cale, viola. Reference is made to Angus MacLise’s calendar poem YEAR, which appears to have informed a method employed by Young and Zazeela for naming recordings and subsequently for providing titles to compositions. The series of numbers and letters used to form titles for works also indicates the ratio of frequencies played as a drone within the piece.
There are significantly large sections dedicated to Young’s personal descriptions of frequency systems, both pre, during and post Theatre of Eternal Music. He describes the relationship of tones to one another in terms of ratio, or as Just Intonation. This frees him from the confines of a necessarily geographical or cultural system of notation. In his description of the primary concerns of the group, Young presents the elements of duration, rhythm, harmony and melody.
Young describes the underlying musical composition of the body of work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys in terms of it’s structure, formed entirely of intervals factorable by the primes 7, 3, and 2. He claims the creation of his own musical mode that excluded major thirds. He describes his style developed on the Saxophone as fast combination-permutations (Young 2000 p.1) in which a chord is inferred by rapidly playing notes one after another rather than by playing individual notes simultaneously. It is impossible to play more than one fundamental at a time on an instrument such as the saxophone. However, the listening audience remembers recent sounds and allows echoes from memory to become part of a current listening experience. The result is a feeling that simultaneous notes are sounding to form a chord. La Monte Young was generating original work by method as well as inspired intuition. In a quote from the programme notes of Trio for Strings (Young 2000 p.2) he points to the works for Brass [1957], for guitar [1958] as the utility of focused sustained tones in which combination-permutations are the original raw material. It is important to remember that Young took a practical leap throughout the realisation of these compositions. This is evident in his written notes on Trio for Strings. He has developed his method from the sequential rapid sounding of notes to the overlapping of long sustained tones. He also makes the claim that he was credited for being the first to make a work composed entirely of sustained tones where the presence of such was not simply an accompaniment or the assertion of a fundamental as a basis to a melodic frame.
Section II, History of My Groups, is a detailed rundown of Young’s career. He begins with a nod to jazz groups he played in at school. He mentions his and David Tudor’s performances of John Cage compositions and the attention he attained for his contribution to other composers work. Section II positions a historical context that relates Young’s practical experience and technique prior to and during work on The Tortoise. He describes his duet work with Terry Riley at Ann Halprin’s Dance Company in 1959 and their subsequent tape improvisations. There is a description of the relevance of dance and gesture in his work at that time.
Young had started playing saxophone again with MacLise on drums in 1962 when he got together with Marian Zazeela. The recordings continued and John Cale appeared for the first time on tape in autumn 1963. Young describes numerous performances and comings and goings of group members throughout the next few years. In a manner appropriate to eternal music, Young states that,
My involvement with The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys was so complete and consuming that I continued performing sub-sections of the work through 1975, and wrote that I fully expected to be performing throughout my lifetime. (Young 2000 p.11)
In section III Young begins to place emphasis on the nature of silence in relation to his underlying work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys. With particular reference to the program notes for the 1963 composition The Four Dreams of China, Young states that the work is an interweaving of the sounded and silent parts of the composition. In this section of the essay he describes imagery, particularly that of the word dream to express the possibility of endlessness. The use of the word tortoise stems from the gift of a turtle to he and Marian. They began to keep turtles in their loft on Church Street where improvisations and recordings took place. Young includes programme notes from a performance given in 1965 that mention generations of turtles. The longevity of the species of tortoise is obviously a symbolic vehicle for the sustenance of a drone. The existence of the turtle in Young and Zazeela’s loft is also a motivation to acquire the aquarium motor that will maintain a perfect habitable temperature for the tortoise. The motor when amplified provides the 120 cycle hum required as what Young terms a primary drone. Section IV concerns primary and secondary drones. Primary drones centring on the 60 Hz AC power line of the American grid. This is focused in the small tortoise motor. Young recognises that by 1965 his primary drone was a concert B and that secondary drones are harmonics thereof. He briefly mentions difficulties associated with the playback of tape recordings made during the 1960s in relation to tape speed and the present day AC power supply.
Section V is a break down of issues surrounding ownership of the composers credit to a work of significant improvisation with an emphasis on the Copyright Act revision of 1978. Since the revision, Young states that sound recordings can be deposited when registering compositions. He cites three areas related to his practice; Jazz improvisations and the complexities of crediting the composer of an improvisation over a standard tune; Basso continuo (figured bass) in which the performer of a work is given freedom by the composer to ‘improvise’ around the structure. This is typical in baroque works and Young draws attention to it in a contemporary context and relates it to his point of crediting the composer; Indian classical music is Young’s final example. He describes and evidences a tradition that often gives credit to the improvising master soloist but sometimes no credit at all to other supporting musicians who also often improvise. In section VI Young asserts his position as producer of his group The Theatre of Eternal Music by listing his actions and responsibilities that set the group in motion. Section VII is clearly a statement of composer status attributable to Young, evidenced in the title,
The Tortoise, His Dreams and Jouneys is a composition by La Monte Young
(Young 2000 p.17)
The section is dedicated to first person accounts that all verify Young as the composer of this work. He cites fellow performers including Angus MacLise’s widow, reviewers and engineers. He concludes with reference to his compositional method as outlined in section I and restates that John Cale and Tony Conrad are performers, not co-composers of this work. Finally in section VIII entitled On the Release of Recordings of My Music Young announces that Cale and Conrad threatened to sue in 1987 should any recordings be released that contained their performance. Young outlines how this threat has become an obstruction to the publication of such works, if only by making record companies fearful of potential legal battles. He concludes the essay with the announcement that he and Zazeela have produced a DVD disc publication of the recent 6-hour 25-minute performance of The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights. He states that with financial support he would like to be able to release a 1958 recording of Trio for Strings and some other recordings that predate The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys.
YOUNG, L.M. (2000). Notes on the Theatre of Eternal Music and The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys [online]. New York: Mela Foundation, Inc. Available at: http://melafoundation.org/lmy.htm [Accessed 14th November 2007]
No comments:
Post a Comment