The American composer William Duckworth conducted a series of interviews with late 20th century composers for his comprehensive textbook written during a period of around ten years from the mid 1980s. He has compiled interviews with seminal composers and included a brief biographical introduction to each at the beginning of each chapter. He applies labels for convenience to further categorise each artist and I will look at his interview with Young and Zazeela, which is placed at the front of the section entitled Minimalists.
Duckworth begins by introducing La Monte Young’s childhood through an enquiry into his Mormon family upbringing in an Idaho community of only 149 people. The Mormon notion of eternal life is mentioned as a possible source of inspiration in Young’s drone work. Young elucidates on this by explaining that as he matured and questioned his beliefs he began to focus on the spiritual rather than the religious. He quotes the singer Pandit Pran Nath when describing spiritual music and names Ali Akbar Khan as an early influence on his musical taste. Duckworth asks about Young’s childhood memories of constant-frequency sounds and some examples are mentioned. Young recalls listening closely to telephone poles as they hum with electricity in remote landscapes. He remembers the grasshopper’s constant pulse and perhaps one of his earliest memories is reported to be the sound of the wind gently howling through his log cabin home. Young grew older and began buying records of music from other cultures. He heard drones in music from southern India that echoed his memories of childhood and influenced his developing personal philosophy.
Young describes a very personal attitude when talking about his relationship to long tones. He clearly talks about a distinction between rhythm and tone while considering both forms within the same frame of reference.
I felt that the rhythms, as we find them in normal music, tended to lead one back to a more earthy and earthly kind of existence and behaviour, whereas the long sustained tones tended to lead me – and I felt it would other people – toward a more spiritual path. They were a higher form of vibration. (Duckworth 1999 p.218)
It is clear from the interview that Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young’s lives are inscribed within each other and Zazeela’s presence in the interview is complimentary as she supports Young’s recollections from time to time. Duckworth enquires about the inspiration behind several of Young’s compositions and Zazeela draws out some childhood memories that relate directly to sounds written into scores. She refers to the sounds of metal wheels on the train tracks echoed in Young’s Trio for Brass. Young discusses the compositional techniques applied to different works. Trio for Strings was composed on the organ at UCLA so that he could use an instrument that enabled him to listen to the long tones. He also states that it is partly because of this method that the work itself became very difficult to play with relative accuracy on the violin. He describes his and Zazeela’s interest in the compositional methods employed by Webern, Stockhausen and Boulez, which he describes as notated in terms of duration. They were developing new ways to write duration into a score. Young explains that after studying with Stockhausen in 1959 he became more aware that Cage and Stockhausen were not coming from very different approaches, that their scores influenced each other and that they shared concerns.
Young describes the ongoing compositional method applied to The Well-Tuned Piano. This piece is a lengthy example of Young’s fascination with long tones and just intonation. Since it was first performed in 1964 the piece has organically grown in duration and form almost every time it has been performed. It is in some sense still being composed. Zazeela’s use of light is discussed in relation to this ongoing work entitled The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights. Young describes performances that share characteristics with the Fluxus movement but insists that he withdrew from that association because of his individuality. Duckworth asks how Young feels to be entitled “Father of Minimalism”. Young accepts this title with pleasure and explains that Terry Riley followed Young in the sense that he began to make repetitive rhythmic sounds within a limited tonal range. Steve Reich and Philip Glass also took inspiration from Riley and Young and soon minimalism in music took root and was growing strong.
Young talks about the history and make up of the group The Theatre of Eternal Music, especially the coming together of Young and Zazeela with drummer Angus MacLise. Duckworth asks about the teachings of Pandit Pran Nath and his influence on their work. Young and Zazeela talk affectionately about his teachings, they talk about him as a guru who initiated a study of Hindustani music that enriched their work and enlightened them spiritually. Young also discusses improvisation and indeterminacy in relation to the necessary meditative condition of their execution.
In the following chapter Duckworth outlines Terry Riley’s work with particular reference to his seminal composition In C. The composition was first performed in 1964 in San Francisco. Riley describes the premier as an underground performance and Duckworth reflects that it was this particular performance that contributed to Riley’s rapid rise in popularity as the audience was made up of performers, musicians and dancers. Riley refers to La Monte Young’s influence upon his work and talks at length about the spiritual side to music especially tuning and intonation. Referring to just intonation, Riley emphasises the spiritual in his work;
You know the idea of Yoga is union, union with God. And tuning means atonement, or trying to make two things one, right? So, just intonation has a lot to do with achieving the correct proportional balances of notes in order to create one. And when you sing into a perfectly tuned tambura, you sing one note, which is as satisfying as any other musical experience. So I think that’s the spiritual significance. (Duckworth 1999 p.283)
In this interview and in those of La Monte Young interviewed by Richard Kostelanetz (Young & Zazeela 1969), the physical presence of Pandit Pran Nath in New York appears to herald the beginning of a wave of consciousness about the work being produced by this group of artists. Riley states that Young helped to fund Pran Nath’s residency in America and was the administrator for several of his concerts. Both Young and Riley became his disciples and they individually state that they learned a lot from his musical and philosophical teaching. Riley is questioned about taking and using a tradition from a non-Western source and whether he considers himself to have done a disservice. He quickly responds as a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath that he has learned the raga and how to improvise within that framework. Riley also refers to the parallel that Young draws with the blues. He states that in Dorian Blues in G Young handles twelve bar blues in a very similar way to a raga but that they are different frameworks.
DUCKWORTH, W. (1999). Talking music: conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and five generations of American experimental composers. New York, Da Capo Press.
YOUNG, L. M., & ZAZEELA, M. (1969). Selected writings. München, H. Friedrich. Available at http://www.ubu.com/historical/young/index.html [Accessed 9th December 2007] Republication on UbuWeb edited by Kenneth Goldsmith 2004.
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