Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, John McLaughlin, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. It is rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postmodern art practices.

The terms have expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, as in the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams. Minimalist compositions are sometimes known as systems music. (See also Postminimalism).

The term "minimalist" is often applied colloquially to designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials. It has also been used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman. The word was first used in English in the early 20th century to describe the Mensheviks.

Minimalist design

The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture where in the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture. In addition, the work of De Stijl artists is a major source of reference for this kind of work. De Stijl expanded the ideas that could be expressed by using basic elements such as lines and planes organized in very particular manners.

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto "''Less is more''" to describe his aesthetic tactic of arranging the numerous necessary components of a building to create an impression of extreme simplicity, by enlisting every element and detail to serve multiple visual and functional purposes (such as designing a floor to also serve as the radiator, or a massive fireplace to also house the bathroom). Designer Buckminster Fuller adopted the engineer's goal of "Doing more with less", but his concerns were oriented towards technology and engineering rather than aesthetics. A similar sentiment was industrial designer Dieter Rams' motto, "Less but better" adapted from van der Rohe. The structure uses relatively simple elegant designs; ornamentations are quality rather than quantity. The structure's beauty is also determined by playing with lighting, using the basic geometric shapes as outlines, using only a single shape or a small number of like shapes for components for design unity, using tasteful non-fussy bright color combinations, usually natural textures and colors, and clean and fine finishes. Using sometimes the beauty of natural patterns on stone cladding and real wood encapsulated within ordered simplified structures, and real metal producing a simplified but prestigious architecture and interior design. May use color brightness balance and contrast between surface colors to improve visual aesthetics. The structure would usually have industrial and space age style utilities (lamps, stoves, stairs, technology, etc.), neat and straight components (like walls or stairs) that appear to be machined with machines, flat or nearly flat roofs, pleasing negative spaces, and large windows to let in lots of sunlight. This and science fiction may have contributed to the late twentieth century futuristic architecture design, and modern home decor. Modern minimalist home architecture with its unnecessary internal walls removed probably have led to the popularity of the open plan kitchen and living room style.

Another modern master who exemplifies reductivist ideas is Luis Barragán. In minimalism, the architectural designers pay special attention to the connection between perfect planes, elegant lighting, and careful consideration of the void spaces left by the removal of three-dimensional shapes from an architectural design. The more attractive looking minimalist home designs are not truly minimalist, because these use more expensive building materials and finishes, and are relatively larger.

Contemporary architects working in this tradition include John Pawson, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Álvaro Siza Vieira, Tadao Ando, Alberto Campo Baeza, Yoshio Taniguchi, Peter Zumthor, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Vincent Van Duysen, Claudio Silvestrin, Michael Gabellini, and Richard Gluckman.

Minimalist music

Minimalist music is an originally American genre of experimental or Downtown music named in the 1960s based mostly in consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells. It may include features such as additive process and phase shifting. Starting in the early 1960s as a scruffy underground scene in San Francisco alternative spaces and New York lofts, minimalism spread to become the most popular experimental music style of the late 20th century. The movement originally involved dozens of composers, although only five—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams and, less visibly if more seminally, La Monte Young—emerged to become publicly associated with it in America. In Europe, its chief exponents were Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and Martin Rev. The term "minimalist music" was derived around 1970 by Michael Nyman from the concept of minimalism, which was earlier applied to the visual arts. For some of the music, especially that which transforms itself according to strict rules, the term "process music" has also been used. Recently, Minimal techno has started gaining popularity among dance music enthusiasts. It takes the same idea that "less is more" from classical composers and applies to this new genre.

Minimalism in visual art

Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as literalist art and ABC Art emerged in New York in the 1960s. It is regarded as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism as well as the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it. As artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1977 catalog essay ''Last Exit: Painting,'' minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg's claims about Modernist Painting's reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. Minimalism was the result, even though the term "minimalism" was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as such.

In contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists were influenced by composers John Cage and LaMonte Young, poet William Carlos Williams, and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. They very explicitly stated that their art was not self-expression, in opposition to the previous decade's Abstract Expressionists. In general, Minimalism's features included geometric, often cubic forms purged of much metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials.

Robert Morris, an influential theorist and artist, wrote a three part essay, "Notes on Sculpture 1-3", originally published across three issues of ''Artforum'' in 1966. In these essays, Morris attempted to define a conceptual framework and formal elements for himself and one that would embrace the practices of his contemporaries. These essays paid great attention to the idea of the gestalt - "parts... bound together in such a way that they create a maximum resistance to perceptual separation." Morris later described an art represented by a "marked lateral spread and no regularized units or symmetrical intervals..." in "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects", originally published in ''Artforum'', 1969, continuing to say that "indeterminacy of arrangement of parts is a literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing." The general shift in theory of which this essay is an expression suggests the transitions into what would later be referred to as ''Postminimalism''.

One of the first artists specifically associated with Minimalism was the painter, Frank Stella, whose early "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, "16 Americans", organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Frank Stellas's stripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched. The decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical construction of the support. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently highly subjective and emotionally-charged paintings of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward less gestural, often somber coloristic field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MOMA show, artists like Kenneth Noland, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and Hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.

Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of Minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Earl Ortman, who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.

In a much more broad and general sense, one might, in fact, find European roots of Minimalism in the geometric abstractions painters in the Bauhaus, in the works of Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the movement DeStijl, in Russian Constructivists and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi.

This movement was heavily criticised by high modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some anxious critics thought Minimalist art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a Greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In ''Art and Objecthood'' (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the Minimalist work of art, particularly Minimalist sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act observation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of Minimal art. Fried's opinionated essay was immediately challenged by artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum. Smithson stated the following: "What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing--namely being himself theatrical."

Other Minimalist artists include: Richard Allen, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Bell, Ronald Bladen, Mel Bochner, Norman Carlberg, Erwin Hauer, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, John McCracken, Paul Mogensen, David Novros, Ad Reinhardt, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Blinky Palermo and Anne Truitt.

Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but one whose reductive nearly all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, had this to say about the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."

Literary minimalism

Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist authors eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story, to "choose sides" based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than reacting to directions from the author. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.

Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some classify this prose style as minimalism.

Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the Metafiction trend of the 1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Robert Coover, and William H. Gass). These writers were also spare with prose and kept a psychological distance from their subject matter.

Minimalist authors, or those who are identified with minimalism during certain periods of their writing careers, include the following: Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, K. J. Stevens, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, Richard Ford, and Alicia Erian.

American poets such as Stephen Crane, William Carlos Williams, early Ezra Pound, Robert Creeley, Robert Grenier, and Aram Saroyan are sometimes identified with their ''minimalist'' style. The term "minimalism" is also sometimes associated with the briefest of poetic genres, haiku, which originated in Japan but has been domesticated in English literature by poets such as Nick Virgilio, Raymond Roseliep, and George Swede.

The Irish author Samuel Beckett is also known for his minimalist plays and prose, as is the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse.

See also

List of minimalist artists

Minimal techno

Minimalism (computing)

Minimalist music

Neo-minimalism

Abstract Imagists

Capsule wardrobe

Formalism (art)

Geometric abstraction

KISS principle

Kmart realism

Lyrical Abstraction

Maximalism

Modular constructivism

Monochrome painting

Postminimalism

Shaped canvas

Simple living

Verb displacement

Footnotes

Haskell, Barbara. ''BLAM! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism and Performance 1958-1964''. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984.

External links

Article on Minimalist Art at the Dia Beacon Museum"Dia Beacon", Tiziano Thomas Dossena, Bridge Apulia USA N.9, 2003

Category:Contemporary art Category:Modern art Category:Abstract art Category:Western art Category:Modernism Category:Musical techniques Category:Music genres Category:Art movements

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La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.

Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is especially known for his development of drone music. Both his proto-Fluxus and "minimal" compositions question the nature and definition of music and often stress elements of performance art.

Life

Born in Bern, Idaho, he moved with his family several times in childhood, while his father searched for work before settling in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from John Marshall High School and studied at Los Angeles City College where he came out ahead of Eric Dolphy in a saxophone audition for the school's jazz band . In LA's jazz milieu, he played alongside notable musicians including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Billy Higgins.

He undertook further studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received a BA in 1958, then at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1958 to 1960. In 1959 he attended the summer courses at Darmstadt under Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in 1960 relocated to New York in order to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield at the New School for Social Research. His compositions during this period were influenced by Anton Webern, Gregorian chant, Indian classical music, Gagaku, and Indonesian gamelan music.

A number of Young's early works use the twelve-tone technique, which he studied under Leonard Stein at Los Angeles City College. (Stein had served as an assistant to Arnold Schoenberg when Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone method, had taught at UCLA.) Young also studied composition with Robert Stevenson at UCLA and with Seymore Shifrin at UCB. When Young visited Darmstadt in 1959, he encountered the music and writings of John Cage. There he also met Cage's collaborator, pianist David Tudor, who subsequently gave premières of some of Young's works. At Tudor's suggestion, Young engaged in a correspondence with Cage. Within a few months Young was presenting some of Cage's music on the West Coast. In turn, Cage and Tudor included some of Young's works in performances throughout the U.S. and Europe. By this time Young had taken a turn toward the conceptual, using principles of indeterminacy in his compositions and incorporating non-traditional sounds, noises, and actions.

When Young moved to New York in 1960, he had already established a reputation as an ''enfant terrible'' of the avant garde. He initially developed an artistic relationship with Fluxus founder George Maciunas (with whom he published a text titled ''An Anthology'') and other members of the nascent movement. Yoko Ono, for example, hosted a series of concerts curated by Young at her loft, and absorbed, it seems, his often parodic and politically charged aesthetic. Young's works of the time, scored as short haiku-like texts, though conceptual and extreme, were not meant to be merely provocative but, rather, dream-like.

His ''Compositions 1960'' includes a number of unusual actions. Some of them are un-performable, but each deliberatively examines a certain presupposition about the nature of music and art and carries ideas to an extreme. One instructs: "draw a straight line and follow it" (a directive which he has said has guided his life and work since). Another instructs the performer to build a fire. Another states that "this piece is a little whirlpool out in the middle of the ocean." Another says the performer should release a butterfly into the room. Yet another challenges the performer to push a piano through a wall. ''Composition 1960 #7'' proved especially pertinent to his future endeavors: it consisted of a B, an F#, a perfect fifth, and the instruction: "To be held for a long time."

In 1962 Young wrote ''The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer''. One of ''The Four Dreams of China'', the piece is based on four pitches, which he later gave as the frequency ratios: 36-35-32-24 (G, C, +C#, D), and limits as to which may be combined with any other. Most of his pieces after this point are based on select pitches, played continuously, and a group of long held pitches to be improvised upon. For ''The Four Dreams of China'' Young began to plan the "Dream House", a light and sound installation where musicians would live and create music twenty-four hours a day. He formed the Theatre of Eternal Music to realize "Dream House" and other pieces. The group initially included Marian Zazeela (who has provided the light work ''The Ornamental Lightyears Tracery'' for all performances since 1965), Angus MacLise, and Billy Name. In 1964 the ensemble comprised Young and Zazeela; John Cale and Tony Conrad, a former Harvard mathematics major, and sometimes Terry Riley (voices). Since 1966 the group has seen many permutations and has included Garrett List, Jon Hassell, Alex Dea, and many others, including members of the 60s groups. Young has realized the "Theatre of Eternal Music" only intermittently, as it requires expensive and exceptional demands of rehearsal and mounting time.

Most realizations of the piece have long titles, such as ''The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers as they were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong, Illuminated by the Sawmill, the Green Sawtooth Ocelot and the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.'' His works are often extreme in length, conceived by Young as having no beginning and no end, existing before and after any particular performance. In their daily lives, too, Young and Zazeela practice an extended sleep-waking schedule—with "days" longer than twenty-four hours.

Beginning in 1970 interests in Asian classical music and a wish to be able to find the intervals he had been using in his work led Young to pursue studies with Pandit Pran Nath. Fellow students included calligrapher and light artist Marian Zazeela (who married Young in 1963), composers Terry Riley and Yoshi Wada, philosophers Henry Flynt and Catherine Christer Hennix and many others.

Young considers ''The Well Tuned Piano''—a permuting composition of themes and improvisations for just-intuned solo piano—to be his masterpiece. Performances have exceeded six hours in length, and so far have been documented twice: first on a five-CD set issued by Gramavision, then a later performance on a DVD on Young's own Just Dreams label. One of the defining works of American musical minimalism, it is strongly influenced by mathematical composition as well as Hindustani classical music practice.

Together Young and Zazeela have realized a long series of semi-permanent "Dream House" installations, which combine Young's just-intuned sine waves in elaborate, symmetrical configurations and Zazeela's quasi-calligraphic light sculptures. The effect is rigorous yet sensual, utilizing aspects of the viewer/auditor's perception to create sensory overload within a barely defined physical space. From January through April 19, 2009, "Dream House" was installed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as part of ''The Third Mind'' exhibition.

Influences

His first musical influence came in his early childhood in Bern. Young relates that "the very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of wind blowing under the eaves and around the log extensions at the corners of the log cabin". Continuous sounds—man-made as well as natural—fascinated him as a child. The four pitches he later named the "Dream Chord", on which he based many of his mature works, came from his early age appreciation of the continuous sound made by the telephone poles in Bern.

Jazz is one of his main influences and until 1956 he planned to devote his career to it. At first, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh influenced his alto saxophone playing style, and later John Coltrane shaped Young's use of the sopranino saxophone. Jazz was, together with Indian music, an important influence on the use of improvisation in his works after 1962. La Monte Young discovered Indian music in 1957 on the campus of the UCLA. He cites Ali Akbar Khan (sarod) and Chatur Lal (tabla) as particularly significant. The discovery of the tambura, which he learned to play with Pandit Pran Nath, was a decisive influence in his interest in long sustained sounds. Young also acknowledges the influence of Japanese music, especially Gagaku, and Pygmy music.

La Monte Young discovered classical music rather late, thanks to his teachers at university. He cites Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Perotin, Leonin, Claude Debussy and Organum musical style as important influences, but what made the biggest impact on his compositions was the serialism of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern.

Young was also keen to pursue his musical endeavors with the help of experimental aids. Cannabis, LSD and Peyote played an important part in Young's life from mid-1950s onwards, when he was introduced to them by Terry Jennings and Billy Higgins. He said that "everybody [he] knew and worked with was very much into drugs as a creative tool as well as a consciousness-expanding tool". This was the case with the musicians of the Theatre of Eternal Music, with whom he "got high for every concert: the whole group". He considers that the cannabis experience helped him open up to where he went with ''Trio for Strings'', though sometimes it proved a disadvantage when performing anything which required keeping track of the number of elapsed bars. He commented on the subject:

Reputation

La Monte Young's use of long tones and exceptionally high volume has been extremely influential with Young's associates: Tony Conrad, Jon Hassell, Rhys Chatham, Michael Harrison, Henry Flynt, Ben Neill, Charles Curtis, and Catherine Christer Hennix. Young's students include Arnold Dreyblatt, Daniel James Wolf and Lawrence Chandler. It has also been notably influential on John Cale's contribution to The Velvet Underground's sound; Cale has been quoted as saying "LaMonte [Young] was perhaps the best part of my education and my introduction to musical discipline."

Brian Eno was similarly influenced by Young's use of repetition in music. In 1981, he referred to ''X for Henry Flynt'' by saying "It really is a cornerstone of everything I've done since". Eno had himself performed the piece as a student in 1960.

Andy Warhol attended the 1962 première of the static composition by La Monte Young called ''Trio for Strings'' and subsequently created his famous series of static films including ''Kiss'', ''Eat'', and ''Sleep'' (for which Young was initially commissioned to provide music). Uwe Husslein cites film-maker Jonas Mekas, who accompanied Warhol to the ''Trio'' premiere and claims that Warhol's static films were directly inspired by the performance. In 1963 Warhol, Young, and Walter de Maria briefly formulated a musical group, which included lyrics written by Jasper Johns.

The album ''Dreamweapon: An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music'' by the band Spacemen 3 is influenced by La Monte Young's concept of ''Dream Music'', evidenced by their inclusion of his notes on the jacket.

Bowery Electric, co-founded by Chandler, dedicated the song "Postscript" on the 1996 album ''Beat'' to Young and Riley.

Lou Reed's 1975 album ''Metal Machine Music'' lists (misspelling included) "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont Young's Dream Music" among its "Specifications".

Drone rock pioneer Dylan Carlson has stated Young's work as being a major influence to him.

Quotes about Young

"If you were going across the prairie in a Conestoga wagon, La Monte was the father and he always had a wife and everything was like his scene. Everybody was there playing with him, but he was the hierarchical chief." Billy Name

List of works

Scherzo in a minor (c. 1953), piano;

Rondo in d minor (c. 1953), piano;

Annod (1953–55), dance band or jazz ensemble;

Wind Quintet (1954);

Variations (1955), string quartet;

Young's Blues (c. 1955-59);

Fugue in d minor (c. 1956), violin, viola, cello;

Op. 4 (1956), brass, percussion;

Five Small Pieces for String Quartet, On Remembering A Naiad, 1. A Wisp, 2. A Gnarl, 3. A Leaf, 4. A Twig, 5. A Tooth (1956);

Canon (1957), any two instruments;

Fugue in a minor (1957), any four instruments;

Fugue in c minor (1957), organ or harpsichord;

Fugue in eb minor (1957), brass or other instruments;

Fugue in f minor (1957), two pianos;

Prelude in f minor (1957), piano;

Variations for Alto Flute, Bassoon, Harp and String Trio (1957);

for Brass (1957), brass octet;

for Guitar (1958), guitar;

Trio for Strings (1958), violin, viola, cello;

Study (c.1958-59), violin, viola (unfinished);

Sarabande (1959), keyboard, brass octet, string quartet, orchestra, others;

Studies I, II, and III (1959), piano;

Vision (1959), piano, 2 brass, recorder, 4 bassoons, violin, viola, cello, contrabass;

[Untitled] (1959–60), live friction sounds;

[Untitled] (1959–62), jazz-drone improvisations;

Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. (1960), chairs, tables, benches and unspecified sound sources;

2 Sounds (1960), recorded friction sounds;

Compositions 1960 #s 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15 (1960), performance pieces;

Piano Pieces for David Tudor #s 1, 2, 3 (1960), performance pieces;

Invisible Poem Sent to Terry Jennings (1960), performance pieces;

Piano Pieces for Terry Riley #s 1, 2 (1960), performance pieces;

Target for Jasper Johns (1960), piano;

Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F. (1960), piano(s) or gong(s) or ensembles of at least 45 instruments of the same timbre, or combinations of the above, or orchestra;

Compositions 1961 #s 1 - 29 (1961), performance pieces;

Young's Dorian Blues in Bb (c. 1960 or 1961);

Young's Dorian Blues in G (c. 1960-1961–present);

Young's Aeolian Blues in Bb (Summer 1961);

Death Chant (1961), male voices, carillon or large bells;

Response to Henry Flynt Work Such That No One Knows What's Going On (c. 1962);

[Improvisations] (1962–64), sopranino saxophone, vocal drones, various instruments. Realizations include: Bb Dorian Blues, The Fifth/Fourth Piece, ABABA, EbDEAD, The Overday, Early Tuesday Morning Blues, and Sunday Morning Blues;

Poem on Dennis' Birthday (1962), unspecified instruments;

The Four Dreams of China (The Harmonic Versions) (1962), including The First Dream of China, The First Blossom of Spring, The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, tunable, sustaining instruments of like timbre, in multiples of 4;

Studies in The Bowed Disc (1963), gong;

Pre-Tortoise Dream Music (1964), sopranino saxophone, soprano saxophone, vocal drone, violin, viola, sine waves;

The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964–present), voices, various instruments, sine waves. Realizations include: Prelude to The Tortoise, The Tortoise Droning Selected Pitches from The Holy Numbers for The Two Black Tigers, The Green Tiger and The Hermit, The Tortoise Recalling The Drone of The Holy Numbers as They Were Revealed in The Dreams of The Whirlwind and The Obsidian Gong and Illuminated by The Sawmill, The Green Sawtooth Ocelot and The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer;

The Well-Tuned Piano (1964-73-81-present). Each realization is a separately titled and independent composition. Over 60 realizations to date. World première: Rome 1974. American première: New York 1975;

Sunday Morning Dreams (1965), tunable sustaining instruments and/or sine waves;

Composition 1965 $50 (1965), performance piece;

Map of 49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (1966–present), voices, various instruments, sine waves;

Bowed Mortar Relays (1964) (realization of Composition 1960 # 9), Soundtracks for Andy Warhol Films "Eat," "Sleep," "Kiss," "Haircut," tape;

The Two Systems of Eleven Categories (1966–present), theory work;

Chords from The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1967–present), sine waves. Realizations include: Intervals and Triads from Map of 49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (1967), sound environment;

Robert C. Scull Commission (1967), sine waves;

Claes and Patty Oldenburg Commission (1967), sine waves;

Betty Freeman Commission (1967), sound and light box & sound environment;

Drift Studies (1967–present), sine waves;

for Guitar (Just Intonation Version) (1978), guitar;

for Guitar Prelude and Postlude (1980), one or more guitars;

The Subsequent Dreams of China (1980), tunable, sustaining instruments of like timbre, in multiples of 8;

The Gilbert B. Silverman Commission to Write, in Ten Words or Less, a Complete History of Fluxus Including Philosophy, Attitudes, Influences, Purposes (1981);

Chords from The Well-Tuned Piano (1981–present), sound environments. Includes: The Opening Chord (1981), The Magic Chord (1984), The Magic Opening Chord (1984);

Trio for Strings (1983) Versions for string quartet, string orchestra, and violin, viola, cello, bass;

Trio for Strings, trio basso version (1984), viola, cello, bass;

Trio for Strings, sextet version (1984);

Trio for Strings, String Octet Version (1984), 2 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos, 2 basses;

Trio for Strings Postlude from The Subsequent Dreams of China (c. 1984), bowed strings;

The Melodic Versions (1984) of The Four Dreams of China (1962), including The First Dream of China, The First Blossom of Spring, The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, tunable, sustaining instruments of like timbre, in multiples of 4;

The Melodic Versions (1984) of The Subsequent Dreams of China, (1980) including The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer's Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring, tunable, sustaining instruments of like timbre, in multiples of 8;

The Big Dream (1984), sound environment;

Orchestral Dreams (1985), orchestra;

The Big Dream Symmetries #s 1 - 6 (1988), sound environments;

The Symmetries in Prime Time from 144 to 112 with 119 (1989), including The Close Position Symmetry, The Symmetry Modeled on BDS # 1, The Symmetry Modeled on BDS # 4, The Symmetry Modeled on BDS # 7, The Romantic Symmetry, The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base), The Great Romantic Symmetry, sound environments;

The Lower Map of The Eleven's Division in The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 144 to 112 with 119 (1989–1990), unspecified instruments and sound environment;

The Prime Time Twins (1989–90) including The Prime Time Twins in The Ranges 144 to 112; 72 to 56 and 38 to 28; Including The Special Primes 1 and 2 (1989);

The Prime Time Twins in The Ranges 576 to 448; 288 to 224; 144 to 112; 72 to 56; 36 to 28; with The Range Limits 576, 448, 288, 224, 144, 56 and 28 (1990), sound environments;

Chronos Kristalla (1990), string quartet;

The Young Prime Time Twins (1991), including The Young Prime Time Twins in The Ranges 2304 to 1792; 1152 to 896; 576 to 448; 288 to 224; 144 to 112; 72 to 56; 36 to 28; Including or Excluding The Range Limits 2304, 1792, 1152, 576, 448, 288, 224, 56 and 28 (1991),

The Young Prime Time Twins in The Ranges 2304 to 1792; 1152 to 896; 576 to 448; 288 to 224; 144 to 112; 72 to 56; 36 to 28; 18 to 14; Including or Excluding The Range Limits 2304, 1792, 1152, 576, 448, 288, 224, 56, 28 and 18; and Including The Special Young Prime Twins Straddling The Range Limits 1152, 72 and 18 (1991),

The Young Prime Time Twins in The Ranges 1152 to 896; 576 to 448; 288 to 224; 144 to 112; 72 to 56; 36 to 28; Including or Excluding The Range Limits 1152, 576, 448, 288, 224, 56 and 28; with One of The Inclusory Optional Bases: 7; 8; 14:8; 18:14:8; 18:16:14; 18:16:14:8; 9:7:4; or The Empty Base (1991), sound environments;

The Symmetries in Prime Time from 288 to 224 with 279, 261 and 2 X 119 with One of The Inclusory Optional Bases: 7; 8; 14:8; 18:14:8; 18:16:14; 18:16:14:8; 9:7:4; or The Empty Base (1991–present), including The Symmetries in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119 and with One of The Inclusory Optional Bases: 7; 8; 14:8; 18:14:8; 18:16:14; 18:16:14:8; 9:7:4; or The Empty Base (1991), sound environments;

Annod (1953–55) 92 X 19 Version for Zeitgeist (1992), alto saxophone, vibraphone, piano, bass, drums, including 92 XII 22 Two-Part Harmony and The 1992 XII Annod Backup Riffs;

Just Charles & Cello in The Romantic Chord (2002–2003), cello, pre-recorded cello drones and light design;

Raga Sundara, vilampit khayal set in Raga Yaman Kalyan (2002–present), voices, various instruments, tambura drone;

Trio for Strings (1958) Just Intonation Version (1984-2001-2005), 2 cellos, 2 violins, 2 violas;

Discography

''Inside the Dream Syndicate, Volume One: Day of Niagara'' with John Cale, Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela, and Angus Maclise [Recorded 1965] (Table of the Elements, 2000. Bootleg recording of dubious title, credits, and quality ''Not authorized by La Monte Young'')

''31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM Munich from Map of 49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery; 23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM the Volga Delta from Studies in The Bowed Disc'' [a.k.a. ''The Black Record''] (Edition X, West Germany, 1969)

''La Monte Young Marian Zazeela The Theatre of Eternal Music - Dream House 78' 17" (Shandar, 1974)

''The Well Tuned Piano 81 X 25 (6:17.50 - 11:18:59 PM NYC)'' (Gramavision, 1988)

''90 XII C. 9:35-10:52 PM NYC, The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From the Four Dreams of China'' (Gramavision, 1991)

''Just Stompin': Live at The Kitchen'' (Gramavision, 1993)

''The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath" (82 V11 15 c. 6:35 - c.7:35 PM + c.6:37-6:52:30 PM NYC) (Just Dreams JD001) 1999

''The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights (87 V 10 6:43:00 PM 87 V 11 01:07:45 AM NYC)'' (Just Dreams, DVD-9, 2000)

Compilations

''Small Pieces (5) for String Quartet'' ("On Remembering a Naiad") (1956) [included on ''Arditti String Quartet Edition, No. 15: U.S.A.'' (Disques Montaigne, 1993)]

''Sarabande'' for any instruments (1959) [included on ''Just West Coast'' (Bridge, 1993)]

"89 VI 8 c. 1:45-1:52 AM Paris Encore" from ''Poem for Tables, Chairs and Benches, etc.'' (1960) [included on ''Flux: Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine #24'']

Excerpt "31 I 69 c. 12:17:33-12:24:33 PM NYC" [included on ''Aspen'' #8's flexi-disc (1970)] from ''Drift Study''; "31 I 69 c. 12:17:33-12:49:58 PM NYC" from ''Map of 49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals'' (1969) [included on ''Ohm'' and ''Ohm+'' (Ellipsis Arts, 2000 & 2005)]

''566 for Henry Flynt'' [included on ''Music in Germany 1950–2000: Experimental Music Theatre'' (Eurodisc 173675, 7-CD set, 2004)]

See also

Terry Riley

Steve Reich

Philip Glass

Angus MacLise

Tony Conrad

Arnold Dreyblatt

Drone music

Minimalism (music)

References

Duckworth, William. 1995. ''Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers''. New York: Schirmer Books; London: Prentice-Hall International. ISBN 0-02-870823-7 Reprinted 1999, New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80893-5

Eno, Brian, and Russell Mills. 1986. ''More Dark than Shark.'' London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-13883-7

Grimshaw, Jeremy. 2005. "Music of a 'More Exalted Sphere': Compositional Practice, Biography, and Cosmology in the Music of La Monte Young." Doctoral dissertation, Eastman School of Music. Ann Arbor: UMI/ProQuest.

Herzfeld, Gregor. 2007. ''Zeit als Prozess und Epiphanie in der experimentellen amerikanischen Musik. Charles Ives bis La Monte Young''. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 285-341. ISBN 978-3-515-09033-9

Howard, Ed. 2003. "The Dream House". ''Stylus'' (online magazine, 17 November).

Husslein, Uwe (ed.). 1990. ''Pop Goes Art: Andy Warhol & Velvet Underground: anläßlich der gleichnamigen Ausstellung in der Hamburger Kunsthalle, 30.11.1990–3.2. 1991''. Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Popkultur 1. Wuppertal: Institut für Popkultur.

LaBelle, Brandon. 2006. ''Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art''. New York and London: Continuum International Publishing.

Potter, Keith. 2000. ''Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Music in the Twentieth Century series. Cambridge, UK; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Scherman, Tony, and David Dalton. 2009. ''POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol''. New York: Harper Collins.

Smith, Dave. 2004. "Following a Straight Line: La Monte Young." ''Journal of Experimental Music Studies'' (21 June). Updated reprint of ''Contact'' 18 (1977–78), 4-9.

Solare, Juan Maria. 2006. "El Trío serial de La Monte Young". [About Young's Trio for Strings (1958)]. ''Doce Notas Preliminares'', no. 17:112–42.

Strickland, Edward. 2001. "Young, La Monte". ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.

Watson, Steven. 2003. ''Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties''. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-679-42372-9

Ghosn, Joseph. 2010. "''La Monte Young''". Marseilles, France : Le Mot Et Le Reste. (http://josephghosn.com/2010/01/23/mon-livre-sur-la-monte-young-est-la/)

Footnotes

External links

La Monte Young page on Mela Foundation

La Monte Young page on Other Minds

La Monte Young page on UbuWeb

La Monte Young biography at Kunst im Regenbogenstadl

La Monte Young on Record from The Wire magazine

Farley, William (Dir.). ''In Between the Notes: A Portrait of Pandit Pran Nath, Master Indian Musician''. Video documentary produced by Other Minds.

Gann, Kyle. “La Monte Young.”

(Ed.). “An Anthology of Chance Operations.” Something Else, 1963. (PDF version of the original publication on UbuWeb)

Young, La Monte. “Notes on Continuous Periodic Composite Sound Waveform Environment Realizations.” ''Aspen'' 8 — The Fluxus Issue, edited by Dan Graham, designed by George Maciunas (1970–71). The issue also features a sound recording of Young’s ''Drift Study 31 1 69''.

Young, La Monte. ''89 VI 8 c. 1:42-1:52 AM Paris Encore'' (audio duration 10:33). ''Tellus #24 Flux Tellus'', published on the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine.

link to page at Guggenheim Museum in New York where Young is represented in the exhibition ''The Third Mind'' and during which he will perform on March 14 & 21, 2009.

Interviews

Golden, Barbara. “Conversation with La Monte Young.” ''eContact! 12.2 — Interviews (2)'' (April 2010). Montréal: CEC.

Oteri, Frank J. “La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Dream House.” Interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela from 13–14 August 2003. ''NewMusicBox — People & Ideas in Profile''conversation with Frank J. Oteri, 1 October 2003 (includes video).

La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela on WNYC’s ''New Sounds'' #449. Audio of a 1990 radio show featuring an interview and sound recordings.

Category:1935 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century classical composers Category:Minimalist composers Category:Los Angeles City College alumni Category:University of California, Los Angeles alumni Category:Experimental composers Category:Postmodern composers Category:American composers Category:21st-century classical composers Category:American Latter Day Saints Category:Fluxus Category:Microtonal musicians Category:Contemporary classical music performers Category:People from Bear Lake County, Idaho

cs:La Monte Young da:La Monte Young de:La Monte Young es:La Monte Young fr:La Monte Young nl:La Monte Young ja:ラ・モンテ・ヤング no:La Monte Young pl:La Monte Young ru:Янг, Ла Монте sv:La Monte Young zh:拉蒙特·扬

Coordinates	12°2′36″N77°1′42″N
name	Fred Frith
background	non_vocal_instrumentalist
birth name	Fred Frith
birth date	February 17, 1949
birth place	Heathfield, Sussex, England
instrument	Guitar, violin, bass guitar, keyboards, percussion
genre	Avant-rock, experimental, free improvisation, contemporary classical
occupation	Musician, Composer,Professor of Composition
years active	1968–present
label	Caroline, Moers Music, Ralph, RecRec, Recommended, Fred, Tzadik, Winter & Winter
associated acts	Henry Cow, Art Bears, Massacre, Skeleton Crew, Keep the Dog, Chris Cutler, John Zorn
website	www.fredfrith.com }}

Fred Frith (born 17 February 1949) is an English multi-instrumentalist, composer and improvisor.

Probably best-known for his guitar work, Frith first came to attention as one of the founding members of the English avant-rock group Henry Cow. Frith was also a member of Art Bears, Massacre and Skeleton Crew. He has collaborated with a number of prominent musicians, including Robert Wyatt, Derek Bailey, The Residents, Lol Coxhill, John Zorn, Brian Eno, Lars Hollmer, Bill Laswell, Iva Bittová, the ARTE Quartett and Bob Ostertag. He has also composed several long works, including ''Traffic Continues'' (1996, performed 1998 by Frith and Ensemble Modern) and ''Freedom in Fragments'' (1993, performed 1999 by Rova Saxophone Quartet). Frith produces most of his own music, and has also produced many albums by other musicians, including Curlew, The Muffins, Etron Fou Leloublan and Orthotonics.

Frith is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel's award-winning 1990 documentary film ''Step Across the Border''. He also appears in the Canadian documentary ''Act of God'', which is about the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning. Frith has contributed to a number of music publications, including ''New Musical Express'' and ''Trouser Press'', and has conducted improvising workshops across the world. Frith's career spans over three decades and he appears on over 400 albums. He still performs actively throughout the world.

Currently Frith is Professor of Composition in the Music Department at Mills College in Oakland, California. He lives in the United States with his wife, German photographer Heike Liss, and their children, Finn Liss (born 1991) and Lucia Liss (born 1994).

Frith was awarded the 2008 Demetrio Stratos Prize for his career achievements in experimental music. The prize was established in 2005 in honour of experimental vocalist Demetrio Stratos, of the Italian group Area, who died in 1979. In 2010 Frith received an honorary doctorate from the University of Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, England in recognition of his contribution to music.

Frith is the brother of Simon Frith, a well-known music critic and sociologist, and Chris Frith, a psychologist working at University College London.

Biography

Frith was born in Heathfield in Sussex, England into a family where music was considered an essential part of life. He started violin lessons at the age of five and became a member of his school orchestra. But at 13 he switched to guitar after watching a group imitating a popular instrumental band at the time, The Shadows. He decided to learn how to play guitar and get into a band. Frith taught himself guitar from a book of guitar chords and soon found himself in a school group called The Chaperones, playing Shadows and Beatles covers. But when Frith started hearing blues music from the likes of Snooks Eaglin and Alexis Korner it changed his whole approach to the guitar, and by the time he was 15, The Chaperones had become a blues band. Frith's first public performances were in 1967 in folk clubs in the North of England, where he sang and played traditional and blues songs.

Besides the blues, Frith started listening to any music that had guitar in it, including folk, classical, ragtime and flamenco. He also listened to Indian, Japanese and Balinese music and was particularly drawn to East European music after a Yugoslav school friend taught him folk tunes from his home. Frith went to Cambridge University in 1967 where his musical horizons were expanded further by the philosophies of John Cage and Frank Zappa's manipulation of rock music. Frith graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge with a BA (English Literature) in 1970, and an MA (English Literature) in 1974, but the real significance of Cambridge for him was that that was where the seminal avant-rock group Henry Cow were formed.

Henry Cow

Frith met Tim Hodgkinson, a fellow student, in a blues club at Cambridge University in 1968. "We’d never met before, and he had an alto sax, and I had my violin, and we just improvised this ghastly screaming noise for about half an hour." But something clicked and recognizing their mutual open-minded approach to music, Frith and Hodgkinson formed a band there and then. They called it Henry Cow and they remained with the band until its demise in 1978. In the early 70's Fred's grey Morris Minor sported the band's heraldic logo, much to the amusement of boys at his dad's grammar school in York where he was the headmaster.

Frith composed a number of the band's notable pieces, including "Nirvana for Mice" and "Ruins". While guitar was his principal instrument, he also played violin (drawing on his classical training), bass guitar, piano and xylophone.

In November 1973, Frith (and other members of Henry Cow) participated in a live-in-the-studio performance of Mike Oldfield's ''Tubular Bells'' for the BBC. It is available on Oldfield's ''Elements'' DVD.

Guitar Solos

After Henry Cow's first album, Frith released ''Guitar Solos'' in 1974, his first solo album and a glimpse at what he had been doing with his guitar. The album comprised eight tracks of unaccompanied and improvised music played on prepared guitars. It was recorded in four days at the Kaleidophon Studios in London without any overdubbing.

When it was released, ''Guitar Solos'' was considered a landmark album because of its innovative and experimental approach to guitar playing. The January 1983 edition of ''Down Beat'' magazine remarked that ''Guitar Solos'' "... must have stunned listeners of the day. Even today that album stands up as uniquely innovative and undeniably daring." It also attracted the attention of some "famous" musicians, including Brian Eno, resulting in Frith playing guitar on two of Eno's albums, ''Before and After Science'' (1977) and ''Music for Films'' (1978).

In the mid-1970s, Frith contributed a series of articles to British weekly music magazine, New Musical Express entitled "Great Rock Solos of our Time". In them he analysed prominent rock guitarists of the day and their contribution to the development of the rock guitar, including Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.

Post Henry Cow

While recording Henry Cow's last album, differences emerged between the group members over the album's content. Frith and Chris Cutler favoured song-oriented material, while Hodgkinson and Lindsay Cooper wanted purely instrumental compositions. As a compromise, Frith and Cutler agreed, early in 1978, to release the songs already created on their own album, ''Hopes and Fears'', under the name Art Bears (with Dagmar Krause). The instrumental material was recorded by Henry Cow on ''Western Culture'' later that year, after which the band split. The Art Bears trio continued purely as a studio group until 1981, releasing two more albums, ''Winter Songs'' in 1979 and ''The World as It Is Today'' in 1981.

During this time Frith also released ''Gravity'' (1980), his second solo album, recorded at Norrgården Nyvla in Uppsala, Sweden with Swedish group Samla Mammas Manna, and at the Catch-a-Buzz studio in Rockville, Maryland with United States band The Muffins. It showed Frith breaking free from the highly structured and orchestrated music of Henry Cow and experimenting with folk and dance music. "Norrgården Nyvla" was also the title of one of the tracks on the album and is considered one of Frith's most recognisable tunes.

New York

Towards the end of 1979 Frith relocated to New York City where he immediately hooked-up with the local avant-garde/Downtown music scene. The impact on him was uplifting: "... New York was a profoundly liberating experience for me; for the first time I felt that I could be myself and not try to live up to what I imagined people were thinking about me." Frith met and began recording with a number of musicians and groups, including Henry Kaiser, Bob Ostertag, Tom Cora, Eugene Chadbourne, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, The Residents, Material, The Golden Palominos and Curlew. He spent some 14 years in New York, during which time he joined a few bands, including John Zorn's Naked City (in which Frith played bass) and French Frith Kaiser Thompson (consisting of John French, Frith, Henry Kaiser and Richard Thompson). Frith also started three bands himself, namely Massacre, Skeleton Crew and Keep the Dog.

Massacre was formed in 1980 with bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Fred Maher. A high energy experimental rock band, they toured the United States and Europe in 1980 and 1981, and released one album, ''Killing Time'' (1981), recorded at Martin Bisi's later-to-be historic studio in Brooklyn. Massacre split in 1981 when Maher left, but later reformed again in 1998 when drummer Charles Hayward joined. The new Massacre released three more albums.

Skeleton Crew, a collaboration with Tom Cora from 1982 to 1986, was an experimental group noted for its live improvisations where Frith (guitar, violin, keyboards, drums) and Cora (cello, bass guitar, homemade drums and contraptions) played a number of instruments simultaneously. They performed extensively across Europe, North America and Japan and released ''Learn to Talk'' in 1984. Zeena Parkins (electric harp and keyboards) joined in 1984 and the trio released ''The Country of Blinds'' in 1986. In October 1983 Skeleton Crew joined Duck and Cover, a commission from the Berlin Jazz Festival, for a performance in West Berlin, followed by another in February 1984 in East Berlin.

Frith formed Keep the Dog in 1989, a sextet and review band for performing selections of his extensive repertoire of compositions from the previous 15 years. The lineup was Frith (guitar, violin, bass guitar), René Lussier (guitar, bass guitar), Jean Derome (winds), Zeena Parkins (piano, synthesizer, harp, accordion), Bob Ostertag (sampling keyboard) and Kevin Norton (drums, percussion). Later Charles Hayward replaced Norton on drums. The group existed until mid-1991, performing live in Europe, North America and the former Soviet Union. A double CD, ''That House We Lived In'', from their final performances in Austria, Germany and Italy in May and June 1991, was released in 2003.

Other projects

During the 1980s, Frith began writing music for dance, film and theatre, and a number of his solo albums from this time reflect this genre, including ''The Technology of Tears (And Other Music for Dance and Theatre)'' (1988), ''Middle of the Moment'' (1995), ''Allies (Music for Dance volume 2)'' (1996) and ''Rivers and Tides'' (2003). Exploring new forms of composition, Frith also experimented with chance or accidental compositions, often created by building music around "found sounds" and field recordings, examples of which can be found on ''Accidental (Music for Dance volume 3)'' (2002) and ''Prints: Snapshots, Postcards, Messages and Miniatures, 1987-2001'' (2002).

As a composer, Frith began composing works for other musicians and groups in the late 1980s, including the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Ensemble Modern and Arditti Quartet. In the late 1990s, Frith established his own Fred Frith Guitar Quartet consisting of Frith, René Lussier, Nick Didkovsky and Mark Stewart. Their guitar music, varying from "tuneful and pretty, to noisy, aggressive and quite challenging", appears on two albums, ''Ayaya Moses'' (1997) and ''Upbeat'' (1999), both on Lussier's own Ambiances Magnétiques label.

The ex-Henry Cow members have always maintained close contact with each other and Frith still collaborates with many of them, including Chris Cutler, Tim Hodgkinson and Lindsay Cooper. Cutler and Frith have been touring Europe, Asia and the Americas since 1978 and have given dozens of duo performances. Three albums from some of these concerts have been released by Recommended Records. In December 2006, Cutler, Frith and Hodgkinson performed together at The Stone in New York City, their first concert performance since Henry Cow's demise in 1978.

In 1995 Frith moved to Stuttgart in Germany to live with his wife, German photographer Heike Liss and their children Finn and Lucia. Between 1994 and 1996, Frith was Composer-in-Residence at L’Ecole Nationale de Musique in Villeurbanne, France.

Frith relocated to the United States in 1997 to become Composer-in-Residence at Mills College in Oakland, California. In 1999 he was appointed the Luther B. Marchant Professor of Composition in the Music Department at Mills where he currently teaches composition, contemporary performance and improvisation. While he had never studied music in college, Frith's credentials of over forty years of continuous practice and self-discovery got him the position. He has, however, maintained that "most of my students are better qualified to teach composition than I am," and that he learns as much from them as they learn from him.

In March 1997 Frith formed the electro-acoustic improvisation and experimental trio Maybe Monday with saxophonist Larry Ochs from Rova Saxophone Quartet and koto player Miya Masaoka. Between 1997 and 2008 they toured the United States, Canada and Europe and released three albums. In March 2008 Frith formed Cosa Brava, an experimental rock and improvisation quartet with Zeena Parkins from Skeleton Crew and Keep the Dog, and Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and The Norman Conquest. They toured Europe in April 2008 and performed at the 25th Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Victoriaville, Quebec, Canada in May 2008.

==Equipment==

Guitars and playing technique

Fred Frith has used a number of different guitars, including homemades, over the years, depending on the type of music he is playing. For the more structured and refined music he has often used a Gibson ES-345, for example on his solo album, ''Gravity''. For the heavier "rock" sound, as in Massacre, he has used an old 1961 solid body Burns guitar, created by the British craftsman Jim Burns. On his landmark ''Guitar Solos'' album, Frith used a modified 1936 Gibson K-11 guitar (q.v. for details).

For Frith's early unstructured music, as with Henry Kaiser on ''With Friends Like These'', and his early table-top guitar solo performances, he used a homemade six- and eight-string double-neck guitar, created by a friend Charles Fletcher. Frith told ''Down Beat'' magazine in 1983: "It was the one and only guitar that he ever built ... he constructed it mainly out of old pieces from other guitars that I had, and for the body I think he used an old door." The possibilities offered by homemade instruments prompted Frith to start creating his own guitars, basically slabs of wood on which he mounted a pickup, a bridge, and strings stretched over metal screws. "The basic design of the instrument is supposed to be as rudimentary and flexible as possible," Frith said, "so I can use an electric drill to bore holes into the body of it to achieve certain sounds ... ."

Frith has used a variety of picks with his guitars, from traditional guitar picks to violin bows, drum sticks, egg beaters, paint brushes, lengths of metal chain and other found objects. Frith remarked: "It's more to do with my interest in found objects and the use of certain kinds of textures which have an effect on the string ... the difference between the touch of stone, the touch of glass, the touch of wood, the touch of paper — those kinds of basic elements that you're using against the surface of the strings which produce different sounds."

In a typical solo improvising concert, Frith would lay a couple of his homemade guitars flat on a table and play them with a collection of found objects (varying from concert to concert). He would drop objects, like ball bearings, dried beans and rice, on the strings while stroking, scraping and hitting them with whatever was on hand. Later he added a live sampler to his on-stage equipment, which he controlled with pedals. The sampler enabled him to dynamically capture and loop guitar sounds, over which he would capture and loop new sounds, and so on, until he had a bed of repeated patterns on top of which he would then begin his solo performance.

Effects and amplification

;Effect pedals:

Pro Co RAT Distortion Pedal

Boss FV-50L Volume Foot Controller

Boss RC20-XL Delay

DigiTech DigiTech Whammy 4

Line 6 DL4 Delay

EBow

;Amplification:

Fender Amplifiers

Step Across the Border

''Step Across the Border'' is an award winning 1990 documentary film on Fred Frith, written and directed by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel, and released in Germany and Switzerland. It was filmed in Japan, Europe and the United States, and also features musicians René Lussier, Iva Bittová, Tom Cora, Tim Hodgkinson, Bob Ostertag and John Zorn.

Fred Records

In 2002, Fred Frith created his own record label, Fred Records to re-release his back catalogue of recordings and previously unreleased material. Frith also appears on several releases by Tzadik Records and Winter & Winter.

Compositions

Since the late 1980s, Fred Frith has composed a number of longer works. Here is a selection, the year indicating when they were composed. For a complete list, see Compositions by Fred Frith.

''The As Usual Dance Towards the Other Flight to What is Not'' (1989) – for four electric guitars

''Helter Skelter'' (1990) – for two sopranos, contralto and a large electric ensemble

''Stick Figures'' (1990) – for six guitars and two players

''Lelekovice'' (1991) – (for Iva Bittová) string quartet no. 1

''Stone, Brick, Glass, Wood, Wire'' (1992) – graphic scores for any number of players

''Freedom in Fragments'' (1993) – a suite of 23 pieces for saxophone quartet

''The Previous Evening'' (1993) – a tribute to John Cage for four clarinets, tapes, bass, footsteps, electric guitars, whirled objects and voice

''Elegy for Elias'' (1993) – for piano, violin and marimba

''Pacifica'' (1994) – a meditation for 21 musicians with texts by Pablo Neruda

''Seven Circles'' (1995) – for piano

''Impur'' (1996) – for 100 musicians, large building and mobile audience

''Shortened Suite'' (1996) – for trumpet, oboe, cello and marimba

''Back to Life'' (1997) – for trumpet, oboe, cello and marimba

''Traffic Continues: Gusto'' (1998) – for large ensemble with improvising soloists

''Landing for Choir'' (2001) – for Flamenco singer, cello, saxophone and samples

''Allegory'' (2002) – for string quartet and electric guitar

''Fell'' (2002) – for string quartet & electric guitar

''The Happy End Problem'' (2003) – for flute, bassoon, gu zheng, percussion, violin and electronics

''The Right Angel'' (2003) – for orchestra and electric guitar

''Save As'' (2005) – for cello and percussion

''Snakes and Ladders'' (2006) – for clarinet, electric guitar, piano, percussion, cello and double bass

''Episodes'' (2007) – for Baroque orchestra

''Water Stories'' (2007) – for clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello

''For Nothing'' (2008) – for contralto and Baroque string quartet

Discography

Fred Frith appears on over 400 recordings: with bands, in collaboration with other musicians, solo, albums he produced for other bands and musicians, and albums featuring his composed work performed by others.

Films

1990 ''Step Across the Border'' – a 90 minute documentary on Fred Frith by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel.

1991 ''Streetwise'' – a documentary by Charles Castella about Frith's work in Marseille with "unemployed rock musicians".

2000 ''Le Voyage Immobile'' – a documentary about Frith's trio with Louis Sclavis and Jean-Pierre Drouet for France 3 national TV.

2004 ''Touch the Sound'' – a documentary by Thomas Riedelsheimer about Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie and her collaboration with Frith.

2007 ''Attwenger Adventure'' – a documentary on Austrian folk-punk duo Attwenger by Markus Kaiser-Mühlecker, with special appearances by Frith rehearsing and performing live with Attwenger and Wolfgang "I-Wolf" Schlögl at Music Unlimited XX. in Wels, Austria.

2009 ''Act of God'' – a documentary by Jennifer Baichwal about the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning, with music by Frith and others, and a segment showing Frith conducting an experiment to measure the effect of improvisation on brain waves.

Footnotes

External links

FredFrith.com ''Official homepage''.

Fred Frith biography ''FredFrith.com'' archive at the ''Internet Archive Wayback Machine''.

Fred Frith biography ''The Canterbury Website''.

Fred Frith interview ''Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic Magazine, March 1998''.

Fred Frith interview ''BBC Music'' archive at the ''Internet Archive Wayback Machine''.

Stage Effects Setup. ''All About Jazz''. .

Fred Frith discography.

Fred Frith interview at allaboutjazz.com

Category:1949 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century classical composers Category:21st-century classical composers Category:English guitarists Category:English violinists Category:English bass guitarists Category:English keyboardists Category:English composers Category:British film score composers Category:English experimental musicians Category:Free improvisation Category:Canterbury scene Category:Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge Category:English multi-instrumentalists Category:People from Wealden (district) Category:Henry Cow members Category:The Golden Palominos members Category:Tzadik Records artists Category:Moers Music artists

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