Big Other and La Monte Young

Big Other is a blog Lil discovered, and it's fast becoming one of my favourites. Their writers mix up short posts with longer posts where they intersperse essays on the avant-garde or experimental art with YouTube videos that illustrate what they're saying. It's one of the better advantages blogging has over more traditional essay-writing. I like the interactive nature, and the ability to illustrate what you are talking about - especially music or cinema - in the body of the work, rather than it being extraneous, an "appendix".

This morning, I read a post entitled "What Is Experimental Art?". As well as having a few very useful things for me about the origins of the term "avant-garde" in artistic circles, it curates some wonderful serial and minimalist music. I think I'd like to write on minimalist music one day, I absolutely love it.* This piece by La Monte Young caught my eyes and ears. I'd vaguely heard his name bandied around at the edges of conversations, but never looked into him in any serious way.

A D Jameson, the author of the Big Other piece, quotes Young:

"The very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of the wind blowing through the chinks and all around the log cabin in Idaho where I was born. I have always considered this among my most important early experiences. It was very awesome and beautiful and mysterious. Since I could not see it and did not know what it was, I questioned my mother about it for long hours.

During my childhood there were certain sound experiences of constant frequency that have influenced my musical ideas and development: the sounds of insects; the sounds of telephone poles and motors; sounds produced by steam escaping, such as my mother’s tea-kettle and the sounds of whistles and signals from trains; and resonations set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic areas such as canyons, valleys, lakes, and plains. Actually, the first sustained single tone at a constant pitch, without a beginning or end, that I heard as a child was the sound of telephone poles, the hum of the wires. This was a very important auditory influence upon the sparse sustained style of work of the genre of the Trio for Strings (1958), Composition 1960 #7 (B and F# “To be held for a long time”) and The Four Dreams of China (1962)."

You can hear that in this piece, also in the Big Other post. (The quote comes from here):



* POST-SCRIPT: Actually, thinking about it, there's something particularly "everyday" to the minimalists. It seems to me that this music gets very close to the sensation of being alive - variations on a theme; that amazing capacity to simultaneously restrict experience to a few notes whilst opening up what seems like the whole universe; the repetition and the exultation; the apparently spiritual in the apparently mundane. Think about that in relation to this Philip Glass piece:



Suddenly the choice of Glass to score The Hours makes beautiful sense.