La Monte Young

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

La Monte Young is an American composer and musician, born in 1935 in a log cabin in Bern, Idaho. As a child he was fascinated by sustained sounds: the wind along the house and the humming of transformers on the telephone poles. In Los Angeles he played jazz saxophone, with Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy among others, and studied composition. He was influenced by Anton Webern, Gregorian chant, Indian classical music, Japanese gagaku and Indonesian gamelan. In 1959 he attended the summer course in Darmstadt with Karlheinz Stockhausen and became acquainted with the work of John Cage.

Music and breakthrough

His Trio for Strings from 1958, with long sustained tones, is sometimes called the starting point of minimal music. In 1960 he moved to New York, where he became a central figure in the Fluxus movement. His Compositions 1960 were short text scores: one of them consists of two notes with the instruction that they be held for a long time. With his wife, the light artist Marian Zazeela, he founded the Theatre of Eternal Music, in which Tony Conrad and John Cale also played. They made music of droning, endless tones. With Zazeela he also built Dream House, a space full of sound and light where the music sounds continuously. From 1970 he studied Indian singing with Pandit Pran Nath.

Influence

Young released few records, but his influence is great. Through John Cale his long, sustained tones found their way into the music of The Velvet Underground, and his work is seen as a source for drone music and ambient.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1968Drift Study
• 196931 VII 69 10:26–10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45–3:11 AM
• 1974Dream House 78′17″
• 1991The Second Dream of the High‐Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From the Four Dreams of China
• 1999The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath
• 2000Inside the Dream Syndicate, Volume I: Day of Niagara
• 2016Compositions 1960 (Arr. for Guitar)
• 2017Composition 1960 #7

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

• Mixtape 4: When Rock Was Still Pop^NL Reader
• The Dream Factory: Film Reel 5^NL Reader

Mentioned in other articles

• Art rock GenreCale had worked with the composer La Monte Young on long, sustained tones.

See also

• Art rock