by Alvin Lucier
This past year I did one in a Kunsthalle in Austria. It was an old, large monastery. There were seven rooms; a big main space with a high altar, five rooms in the back, and a crypt down in the basement. You went down these stone steps. I chose different kinds of music for that, whereas in Japan I could make very distinct things as if something was up here, or here, or you heard back there, or something coming from very far away, whereas in the other place everything … it was just floating. I couldn’t use any pulse music. I love those characteristics. In my Mini-Sound Series, I like to work with narrative involvements. It’s interesting, the communication with an audience and their reactions. I’ve done about eight of them. The audiences are exciting, particularly the ones that are extended over five or six weeks. It’s such a different experience to go somewhere and do an overnight piece. I guess when you’re as experienced as I am, you like getting in there. It’s proved to me to be a good way to do it. Thank you.
ALVIN LUCIER
We’ll just have to ask you back.
5
LA MONTE YOUNG
November 5, 1996
ALVIN LUCIER
You are lucky if you come into contact with a single germinal artist in your lifetime whose work you know well and whom you know in a personal manner. I have been lucky to know two already in my lifetime: one is John Cage, whom we’re all very well acquainted with here at Wesleyan; the other is La Monte Young. I couldn’t begin to list the first things he did, that hadn’t been done before, that then would become part and parcel of everybody’s music. That’s what I mean by germinal—somebody gets an idea that proliferates and spreads out and can be used in productive ways by other artists.
La Monte Young was the first composer to explore music with long sound durations. Early in his life, he discovered a world of self-awareness and perceptiveness by paying attention to something for a long time. Since the art of music is concerned with time, it was a very provocative and innovative thing to do. It spurred a whole genre of new age and drone music. Along with that came thinking about the purity of intervals and how tuning and very close attention to pure intervals affects one who experiences them. The idea of a piece that could last a lifetime, if not several lifetimes, as well as paying attention to one sound for a very long time are just two of the things that La Monte envisioned that defined experimental music. One also has to mention the beautiful light sculptures that Marian Zazeela, Young’s lifelong partner, exhibits simultaneously with La Monte’s performances and installations. During a recent performance of his one-and-a-half-hour long work for string quartet, Chronos Kristalla, at BAM Marian said that she “sequenced slowly dissolving colors on the poetically configured back wall of the stage while alternating complementary and contrasting colors on the musicians.” The lights changed so slowly that one only noticed the changes after they had occurred.
I feel very fortunate to have been able to teach La Monte’s work from the very beginning of my tenure here at Wesleyan in 1968. Every year in Music 109 we sing his Composition 1960 #7, letting students experience being in one musical interval for a long time. Tonight, eighty students from my Music 109 class will perform an hour-long version of his Poem for Chairs, Tables, and Benches. So, it is a wonderful honor for me to have this chance to invite somebody so essentially important to the world of music and art, and that is La Monte Young.
LA MONTE YOUNG
I prefer it if you [students] ask me questions because I want to find out what you’re thinking about, what kind of interests you have, and, in the course of it, I will start talking about ideas that relate to what you’re interested in.
QUESTION
I’d like to know about your abandonment of chance.
LA MONTE YOUNG
As most of you probably know, if you’ve read something about me, I became interested in chance when I was at Darmstadt. I was especially impressed when I met David Tudor. I thought he was the greatest living performer of contemporary music. He was a big inspiration for me. At the same time, I observed how much of himself he put into these works in spite of all the chance techniques involved. But it wasn’t until around 1960 that I began to lose interest in chance. And one of the things I began to notice, if you know my Trio for Strings, which I composed in 1958 just after I got my BA at UCLA, was that although it was a serial work, it broke new ground: it was the first work composed entirely of long-sustained tones and silences. Additionally, each tone or each interval had its own point of entry and point of exit, and, in that sense, it was rather contrapuntal and harmonic at the same time. The intervals were very carefully selected and thought through, and I had begun to develop my own harmonic language, in that these chords, which I later called Dream Chords, began to emerge. A simple Dream Chord, for instance, consists of G—C—C-sharp—D. That’s one position of a Dream Chord. The same chord, G—C—D—C-sharp is also a Dream Chord. There are inversions: G—D—C-sharp—C and G—D—C—D-flat. Almost all of the harmonies in the Trio for Strings are based on these chords. Harmonies like that had already begun to develop in for Brass, 1957, and in for Guitar, 1958.
But then, after Trio for Strings, I began to discover John Cage. I went to Darmstadt in the summer of 1959, where I met David Tudor. Stockhausen talked a lot about John Cage in his advanced composition seminar. I came back very inspired with the kinds of sounds that David and John were beginning to work with, and I was also interested in the idea of chance. I composed Vision, which took thirteen minutes of time and used random numbers to determine the points of entry and exit of events. I predetermined the number of events and set of events and then used various techniques to determine which of these events would receive which durations and therefore find a way to fill up the thirteen minutes of time. I composed Poem for Chairs, Tables, and Benches in January 1960. This piece was entirely based on random techniques; you would even determine the duration of the piece randomly. It could be a year, a thousand years, a second, or no length at all. There were a lot of possibilities depending on what parameters you chose to work within.
But as time went on, and I began to work more and more with the kinds of long-sustained tones that I had been working with in Trio for Strings and in the middle section of for Brass, I began to think more and more about longer periods of time, extended duration relationships, and I began to observe that … well, really, it came about around the time I created the Four Dreams of China, which was in December 1962. I decided that each one of the Dream Chords that I described to you a few minutes ago could be the total harmonic material for one composition. And having decided that, I evolved a set of rules within the framework of which the performers would improvise. Since I had grown up on jazz, I was interested in improvisation. I was interested in having intervals and textures of the type that were in Trio for Strings. It was a completely notated work, every timbre, every dynamic marking. It lasted fifty-eight minutes. In Four Dreams of China, I set up harmonic rules. Let’s take the case of the dream that goes G—C—D—C-sharp. The C-sharp was, in my mind, a very dissonant tone, and I developed a set of rules whereby the D, C, and G could play together in any kind of relationship. But the C-sharp could only play alone, or with the D, or with the D and the C, or with the D and the C and the G. The C-sharp could not play alone with the G, it could not play alone with the C, and it could not play with the C and G without the D. So the D always had to be in for the C-sharp to be there. The C-sharp could be alone, or it could play with the D; the D had to be in with the C-sharp, if the C was there. Then the C and the D had to be in with the C-sharp, if the G was there. These were the rules that the performers improvised with. Later on, in the ’80s, I decided to make a Melodic Version of this original Harmonic Version in order to allow wind instruments to better play the piece and be able to have the full chord and sustain various intervals.
At the time—1962—I created the Four Dreams of China. In this first version, which we call the Harmonic Version as opposed to the Melodic Version that I created in the ’80s, I began to
conceive of the idea of a composition that could be without beginning and end. I had already touched on the idea in the rules for Poem for Chairs, Tables, and Benches. But in Four Dreams of China I decided that, in the same way that you can have rests during performances onstage, one can also think of the work in larger terms. And if you have the same set of pitches in two different performances, the two performances could be considered part of one performance with a long silence between them. In Composition 1960 #7, which I composed in July 1960—the B and F-sharp fifth piece—the instructions are “To be held for a long time.” This was probably the beginning of the idea, the step between the concepts that might happen in Poem and deciding that it was happening in the Four Dreams of China. Once I had the idea that the silences between concerts were like big silences, even in daily rehearsals of the same piece, that the same piece was still going on and it was developing over time. Actually, it was the same piece. And when you work with improvisation with sets of rules, you have a sense of evolution from rehearsal to rehearsal to concert. It’s never the same piece. It’s the same framework, the same concept, same algorithm, but it doesn’t sound exactly the way it sounded the last time or the next time you play it.
I began to observe that I was very interested in sounds that took place over long periods of time. It was difficult to do concerts the way I wanted. It became a waste of time to put silences into the pieces, no matter how randomly composed. The real problem that confronted me was how would I ever get a chance in my lifetime to make as much sound as I wanted to make. Once I discovered that that was the real problem—and most people won’t pay my prices to do the concerts, most people won’t give me the conditions that I want—there are these enormous periods of silence. Finally, somebody goes for it. So I fill that up with sound. The way that we do Poem for Chairs, Tables, and Benches now, as just a block of sound starting when it starts and ending when it ends, is exactly an example of this approach toward sound. The problem is that there isn’t really enough sound. There aren’t enough situations where you can really hear sound taking place over extended periods of time. What you usually get is a little variety show, a piece for ten minutes, one for twenty minutes, continuous sensory titillation. Concert producers want to please the crowds. I am really interested in getting into states that are much more meditative and profound and that utilize sound as a way to tune in to the structural relationships of the universe.
John Cage was a noble person, and as long as he had David [Tudor], he had the noblest performer of all time. He could write extraordinarily aloof chance works, hand them to David, and have a performance that was a masterpiece. Then, he would give it to an orchestra, and many times he actually admitted, you know, “I’m very discouraged about what they’re doing, you know. They’re doing this, they’re doing that.” They didn’t really have these noble thoughts that John had in mind. They had their own thoughts; in fact, they thought it was silly. And what he got wasn’t really what he wanted. Now, you can say he shouldn’t want something. Why does he want something if he’s writing these chance compositions? Well, turns out he actually had something in mind. And I found that, after working with chance for just a couple years, I thought it was fine for John. It really represented his approach to meditation. You know, he said to me, “We’re opposite poles; we’re like two sides of a coin.” Positive can’t exist without negative, and negative can’t exist without positive, night and day. He was interested in a kind of meditation that grew out of a certain kind of Zen that accepted things as they were and let things flow. But I became very interested in a kind of meditation that was coming out of yoga and had to do with focus, concentration, discipline, and really knowing what you were going to do and making up your mind and being in control and deciding what you were going to do with your life.
And this relates directly to the kind of work that I do with tuning, for instance. John would let somebody make a bunch of noises. Fine. I’m very interested in noise. But I also know what kind of intervals I’m interested in and what kind I want to produce, and I became clearer and clearer about it as my life went on. I finally decided it was a total waste of time for me to work with chance and that I should be doing what I knew I should be doing and following my inspiration and listening to the chords I really like to listen to and determining the intervals I wanted to hear, setting up the structures that I wanted to take place, and trying to organize my life and my music the way I wanted it to be, and that’s why I stopped. It was a great lesson, and I got a lot out of it. Next question.
QUESTION
Your piece, X for Henry Flynt, had a lot of repetition, and you described that you were trying to gain control. Is repetition actually control?
LA MONTE YOUNG
Repetition implies control. For something to be able to repeat exactly, it has to be totally in control. That piece is unique of all my works. But, clearly, it’s very much related to everything else of mine; it’s the only piece that uses repetition in this obvious way. There were much more subtle kinds of repetition, in my sopranino saxophone playing or in The Well-Tuned Piano. But, yes, I think that piece is all about control. Just as in the fifth piece, Composition 1960 #7, you try to make it exactly the same and perfect. Many variations take place by themselves over time. The same thing happens in X for Henry Flynt. The performer does his best to make every stroke of the gong exactly the same, and, of course, it’s impossible. So the variation, depending on the capabilities of the performer, can be more or less subtle.
QUESTION
Tell me about an experience you’ve had in one of your Dream Houses.
LA MONTE YOUNG
When I go into my Dream Houses, I become involved in the complex of frequencies. How many of you have heard the current Dream House that I have in New York City right now? A few people have. This particular Dream House has, I think it’s thirty-five discrete frequencies. And all of the frequencies … how many people know anything about my Dream Houses at all? Who’s never heard of my Dream Houses? OK. Let me tell you what they are. Some time after I created the Four Dreams of China, but not long after, since I had conceived of pieces that would have no beginning and end and that would go on in time, I began thinking about, well, where could you really set up a piece and let it run? So, I conceived of this idea of the Dream House, where originally it was going to be just musicians, and it would be a building where the musicians could live as well. And they would have little monitor speakers in their own apartments so they could be listening to how the piece was developing in the main space. It would take about eighty musicians, I figured, to have a team of maybe eight playing all the time. The piece would run continuously. And this was the beginning concept of a Dream House. And I found after doing a few short-term Dream Houses with live musicians, and going to Europe with two tons of electronic equipment and six to eight people, that it would become very expensive to be able to pay musicians to keep it going continuously.
And gradually in the ’60s, we began to move sufficiently into the age of electronics that more and more stable sine wave oscillators became available. By the ’70s, we were easily getting them phase locked, and we went into digital by the late ’70s. And, eventually, you had young people like David Rayna making the Rayna synthesizer, which you could program with a computer and enter ratios of intervals with rather large numerators and denominators and have them precisely in tune. Forget about the Korg’s and Kurzweil’s that have a resolution of 1200 cents to an octave. The Rayna synthesizer is—well, it’s not perfect. Some people talk about it as if it were. How many of you know about acoustical beats? Beats are when you have two tones; let’s say you have two pure sine waves. And when you get within a certain threshold, you begin to be able to observe beats. The threshold is usually described to be around a minor third. It becomes clearer when you get down to around 9/8 which is like D to C. You begin to notice, if the interval is harmonically related—that is, if the two frequencies can be represented as the numerator or denominator of some whole-number fr
action—then the beating that you hear is periodic. If it’s not representable by a whole-number fraction, then the beating is nonperiodic. And as you make the interval smaller, down toward a semitone, and gradually smaller than a semitone and closer and closer to unison, the amplitudes of the two sine wave frequencies add algebraically. And what this means is, you have something like [draws in air with finger], this is the way they usually portray a sine wave. That’s one vibration of a sine wave, and there’s a line going through the middle of that. And when the frequencies get very, very close, or fairly close together, the amplitudes add. So it means when you get two of the peaks lining up, the two add together and they get twice as high. And if you put the thing completely out of phase, 180 degrees, so that you have the peak of one where the valley of the other is, they completely cancel each other out, and you get silence. And so, if you have the frequency fairly close, the beats are going along like [sings], and the closer you get them together, the slower the beats become. So that if you have a bowed instrument, for instance, there’s a threshold of possibility of how in tune you can get an interval. You can never get the interval more closely in tune than the duration of a beat that lasts the length of a bow change, because as soon as the bow changes, you introduce change. And this change is an interruption in the same way that the beat is a kind of interruption. So these are called acoustical beats, and they’re the only way to tune an interval precisely.
You know, we differentiate between pitch and frequency. Pitch is your subjective sense of whether a tone is high or low, and frequency is the actual reality of that tone. So that with beats you can tune frequency very precisely. And with pitch it can be a rather complex situation. I’ve had very good musicians performing in my groups, and we perform with sine wave drones, and we tune to the drones and match our voices and instruments to them. And we found that if people just listened, using their best subjective ears, that a couple of people sitting in two different places would sing two completely different pitches. That’s because pitch is subject to loudness. Loudness is to amplitude as pitch is to frequency. Loudness is how loud you think something is; amplitude is how loud it actually is. And we found that the same musicians could be using pitch to tune and not both sing the same pitch, because one could be sitting in the node of the sine wave and the other in the antinode.