La Monte Young

La Monte Young (Bern, Idaho, 14 October 1935) is an American composer and performer generally regarded as the founder of minimalism, although his work differs in several respects from that of the other composers who later worked in the movement. His importance lies above all in the idea of extending the duration of sounds until musical time is almost suspended, and in his revival of just intonation.

His childhood was spent in a rural setting and among modest trades. He learnt guitar and cowboy songs from his aunt, played the saxophone from the age of seven, and received lessons from his father and from his great-uncle, a bandleader. Between 1951 and 1954 he studied at the Los Angeles Conservatory with William Green, who also taught him the clarinet, and he played in numerous blues and jazz groups around the city. He then studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Berkeley, where he wrote Trio for Strings (1958), composed almost entirely of long notes and rests, some lasting more than a minute. His teacher Seymour Shifrin organised the premiere in his own house, apparently intending to show him his mistakes. Young cited the Japanese gagaku and the static music of Webern as his principal influences, and at the 1959 Darmstadt course he encountered the work of Cage, partly performed by David Tudor.

In 1960 he moved to New York on a Hertz travelling fellowship to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield. There, in Yoko Ono's studio, he organised the first series of loft concerts in the city and edited An Anthology, a proto-Fluxus anthology of avant-garde art, published in 1963 after numerous delays. His pieces in Compositions 1960 were described as "conceptual art" by Henry Flynt. In 1963 he founded the Theatre of Eternal Music, with John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise and Marian Zazeela, whom he married that same year. Young gradually developed the idea of drones and extended durations, which is manifest in The Tortoise, his Dreams and Journeys (1964). Together with Zazeela he also created the Dream Houses, long-duration installations in which light and sound complement each other. Around 1964 he began to use just intonation, which, according to some accounts, is of comparable importance to his extended durations.

This line of work culminated in The Well-Tuned Piano, which began as a 45-minute tape piece in 1964 and can now last 384 minutes in concert. His studies with the vocal master Pandit Pran Nath, from 1970 until the latter's death in 1996, are also reflected in his return to the blues with the Forever Bad Blues Band in the 1990s. His legacy is greater than his limited discography would suggest, since his influence extends to minimalism, New Age music and rock.