Seven and Studies in the Bowed Disc

CONCERT SERIES
IN CELEBRATION OF
LA MONTE YOUNG'S 89^TH BIRTHDAY YEAR
THE MELA DREAM HOUSE'S 31^ST YEAR

Jung Hee Choi
Seven (2024)
on
Walter De Maria
Instrument for
La Monte Young (1966)

Avant-Première
Performed by Jung Hee Choi
using Walter De Maria's sculptural Instrument for La Monte Young (1966)

INTERMISSION

La Monte Young
Studies in the Bowed Disc (1963)
on
Robert Morris
Gong for
La Monte Young (1963)

Performed by La Monte Young and Jung Hee Choi
using the gong designed and constructed by Robert Morris (1963)
———

January 18 and 25, 2025, at 7 pm

MELA Foundation Dream House
275 Church Street, 3rd Floor, New York

Admission, $49. MELA Members, Seniors, Student ID, $39.
Limited seating. Advance reservations recommended.
Info and reservations: mail@melafoundation.org Tel: 917-603-9715

NOTE: Robert Morris Gong for La Monte Young (1963) will be displayed in the Dream House as part of the environment on Wednesday, January 15. To prepare for the scheduled concerts, the Dream House installation will close on January 16 and reopen at 2pm on January 22.

Join us for the final live concert of our extraordinary four-concert series, celebrating both the 89th birthday of La Monte Young (born October 14, 1935) and the 31st consecutive year of the MELA Dream House Sound and Light environment. This program will feature two live performances, each utilizing the metallic bodies of the original instruments designed and built for Young by his early close collaborators, artists Walter De Maria (1935-2013) and Robert Morris (1931-2018).

89 and 31 are both prime numbers, and prime numbers (as manifested in the musical domain by numerically expressible frequency relationships among two or more "well-tuned" sounds) have been an elemental source of inspiration for Young throughout his career as a composer.

The music on the four programs emerges from the historically crucial period during the middle of the twentieth century (coinciding with La Monte Young's years as a student and budding master) when certain like-minded musicians—trained in the Western tradition but working under a novel aesthetic aegis famously expressed by Edgard Varèse as "the liberation of sound" and by John Cage as "letting sounds be themselves"—first began to move beyond the limits of a fixed-pitch scale system, to recognize and explore the musical properties inherent in everyday sounds (in other words, "noises").

The series also celebrates the spirit of shared purpose and collaboration in that ecosystem, made tangible in the fruits of creative relationships that are sometimes mentor-to-student (as between Richard Maxfield and La Monte Young or between Young and Jung Hee Choi) and sometimes peer-to-peer (as with Young and his fellow avant-garde travelers Robert Morris, and Walter De Maria). By no means is that history over, however: While each concert is an "event" in the conventional sense, we can—as we contemplate the contributions, influences, reactions, and counter-reactions of these independent artists at independent moments in time—gain a palpable sense of history as a living organism, unfolding over periods of years or even decades.

JUNG HEE CHOI

Seven (2024)
on
Walter De Maria
Instrument for
La Monte Young (1966)

Avant-Première
Performed by Jung Hee Choi
using Walter De Maria's sculptural Instrument for La Monte Young (1966),
with pre-recorded digital sound montage and real-time digital processing
on an algorithm by Jung Hee Choi.
Digital processing programmed by Mason Mann.
 

This avant-première performance will showcase a period instrument and a new set of associations, with Jung Hee Choi performing solo on the Instrument for La Monte Young, an audible sculpture designed and built in 1966 by Young's early close colleague, Walter De Maria (1935-2013). Consisting of an oblong rectangular metal box encasing a rolling metal ball and with contact microphones to amplify the resonant sonorities generated by the ball as it moves back and forth, De Maria's Instrument was directly inspired by Young's intense interest in the properties and potentials of friction as a musical phenomenon. In her piece (entitled Seven for its focus on the seventh harmonic and for its use of the number seven as a constant function to extend the duration of microsounds as the primary thematic and formal element), Choi will route the tactile sounds of the Instrument through a modern digital processor governed by an algorithm of her own devising.

LA MONTE YOUNG

Studies in the Bowed Disc (1963)
on
Robert Morris
Gong for
La Monte Young (1963)

Performed by La Monte Young and Jung Hee Choi
using the gong designed and constructed by Robert Morris (1963)
 

In this program, history will be present both in the person of composer-performer La Monte Young and in the metallic body of the original four-foot diameter gong designed and built for Young by artist Robert Morris (1931-2018). Young wrote Studies in the Bowed Disc in 1963 specifically for this instrument, and the work's many iterations since then include the recording 23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM The Volga Delta(published originally as side B of the celebrated "Black Record" and recently re-released on the Superior Viaduct label), which Young and Marian Zazeela performed together using double-bass bows to set the vibrations in motion. The latest 2025 realization will once again be a duo, with Young and Jung Hee Choi commanding the two bows. 

MELA's programs are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and generous contributions from individuals and MELA Members.