Perspectives for La Monte Young

Fri, December 13, 2024 — 7:00 PM

Location

Dream House
275 Church Street
New York, New York 10013
Location map

About this event

CONCERT SERIES
IN CELEBRATION OF

LA MONTE YOUNG'S 89TH BIRTHDAY YEAR
THE MELA DREAM HOUSE'S 31ST YEAR

MELA is pleased to announce a series of four concerts to celebrate both the 89th birthday of La Monte Young (born 14 October 1935) and the 31th consecutive year of the MELA Dream House sound and light environment at 275 Church Street, New York City. 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. 

Season passes are available for $89 and include admission to each concert series. Purchase season passes HERE.
 
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.
 

Program 3

Richard Maxfield
Perspectives
for
La Monte Young (1961-62)
Performed by La Monte Young and Jung Hee Choi on stringed instruments along
with the tape montage by Maxfield and special symmetrical forward-
retrograde arrangement by Young
December 12 and 13, 2024 at 7 pm

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

Program 3 takes the motif of collaboration further (in a dialog among artists that is, again, both simultaneous and cross-temporal) with a duo performance by Young and Choi of Perspectives for La Monte Young composed by Young’s own teacher, Richard Maxfield (1927-1969). A veritable Mobius strip of seeds and flowers, Perspectives consists first of friction sounds initially made acoustically by Young at the beginning of the 1960s, sounds which were then recorded, processed, and edited by Maxfield into a tape montage, which was then re-edited decades later by Young to serve (as was Maxfield’s plan all along) as an interlocutor to Young and Choi as they improvise frictional sounds in a live performance—for a fresh variant that has never been heard before. 

These concerts make up Program 3 in a four-part celebratory concert series. For a complete listing of all programs, see MELA's website. Season passes are available for $89 and include admission to all concerts. Direct links to tickets for the additional programs are below.

Program 1
La Monte Young
Studies in the Bowed Disc (1963)
on
Robert Morris
Gong for La Monte Young
November 2 and 3, 2024 at 7 pm

• • •

Program 2
Jung Hee Choi
Composition in the Style of
La Monte Young's
Sustained Friction Sounds (2000)
November 10, 2024 at 7 pm

Tickets →

• • •

Program 4
Jung Hee Choi
Seven
on
Walter De Maria
Instrument for
La Monte Young (1966)
December 20 and 21, 2024 at 7 pm

Tickets →

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.

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