La Monte Young

La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American avant-garde artist, composer and musician, generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works are cited as notable examples of post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is especially known for his exploration 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, Young and his family moved several times in childhood, as his father searched for work before settling in Los Angeles, California. He was raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He graduated from John Marshall High School and studied at Los Angeles City College. In the jazz milieu of Los Angeles, Young played with 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.

The Well

The Well may refer to:

Titled works

Musical albums

Films

Other

See also

The Well-Tuned Piano

The Well-Tuned Piano is a long, improvisatory, solo piano work by La Monte Young. Young has never considered the composition "finished," and dates the piece as 1964–73–81–present. A typical performance lasts five to six hours.

Biography

La Monte Young was born October 14, 1935, in Bern, Idaho. Growing up, he often listened to the sounds of nature spilling into his log-cabin home. Young cites these sounds as inspirations in later life, and his compositions often involved drones and atypical tuning. With saxophone as his primary instrument, Young attended Los Angeles City College and UCLA, where he studied composition with Leonard Stein, a student of Arnold Schoenberg, and counterpoint with Robert Stevenson, a student of Igor Stravinsky. Young is often described as one of the founding fathers of minimalism, along with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, as well as an advocate for Indian classical music. In 1962, Young married visual artist Marian Zazeela. The two have often collaborated on projects that combine visual art and music, including The Well-Tuned Piano. As an audience member at a live performance of The Well-Tuned Piano, one is surrounded by the, "pure and intense color sensations," of The Magenta Lights. These lights are magenta in color and are installed into the performance area and projected throughout the space.

Marian Zazeela

Marian Zazeela (born April 15, 1940) is a light-artist, designer, painter and musician based in New York City.

Life and work

Born to Russian-Jewish parents and raised in the Bronx, Marian Zazeela was educated at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and at Bennington College where she studied with Paul Feeley, Eugene C. Goossen and Tony Smith. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in painting in 1960.

Shortly after graduation, she relocated to New York City where she provided stage design for LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka's The System of Dante's Hell and acted and modeled for Jack Smith (appearing in his film Flaming Creatures and photography book The Beautiful Book), before being introduced in 1962 to composer La Monte Young, with whom she has been associated ever since.

During a period of rapid growth in the early 60s, Zazeela not only joined Young's musical group Theatre of Eternal Music as vocalist (which also included, at various times photographer Billy Name, minimalist musician Terry Riley, musician John Cale, video artist and musician Tony Conrad, and poet and musician Angus MacLise), but also produced for them light shows (among the earliest in the form) which may have inspired Andy Warhol and were contemporaneous to the early work of better-known light-artist Dan Flavin. This work derived from her earlier - more expressionistic - calligraphic canvases and drawings, now taking on a psychedelic aspect by mostly using slides of still images and colored gels blended in exceedingly slow dissolves from one to the next creating optical effects associated with Op Art. In 1965, she titled this body of work the Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, and it was subsequently presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Maeght Foundation, Moderna Museet, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Documenta 5, Haus der Kunst, and Dia Art Foundation, among other galleries and venues.

Young

Young may refer to:

Music

People

Surname

Given name

Nickname