La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela

La Monte Young The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China (1962) in a setting of

Dream Light

Marian Zazeela The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble Led by Ben Neill and Marco Blaauw Sunday, April 9, 2017 Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, World Minimal Music Festival

The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble Led by Ben Neill and Marco Blaauw Musical Direction La Monte Young Light Design Marian Zazeela

Trumpets in Harmon Mutes Ben Neill Marco Blaauw Stephen Burns Christine Chapman Markus Schwind Nathan Plante Matthew Conley Bob Koertshuis

Co-producers Marco Blaauw littlebit

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to Marian

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Silence will also be appreciated before and after the concert.

Photographs and recordings are not permitted without the written authorization of the artists.

We would like to continue the tradition of no applause.

This will keep the mood of the music in the air and in our memories.

Let us remain in the world of the music, together.

Notes Copyright Š La Monte Young + Marian Zazeela 1991, 2011, 2015, 2017

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[Each of] The Four Dreams of China is based on four pitches. . . . An apparently static ‘harmonic’ music results--harmonic in the sense of the intervals formed not only between the basic tones but between their upper partials and the combination tones that are produced when these simple fundamental tones are dwelt on. But, as the performers develop their own sensitivity to such ‘harmonies,’ and to the degree that the listener does also, the music is not at all static; a strange, hypnotic, dream-like succession of delicate sound-images unfolds in shimmering, undulating procession.

-- H. Wiley Hitchcock Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction

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The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China (1962)

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La Monte 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, and I’ve always considered this among my most important early experiences. It was awe-inspiring and very beautiful and mysterious. Since I couldn’t see it and didn’t know what it was, I questioned my mother about it for long hours.

The Composition I composed The Four Dreams of China while riding in a car on a trip from San Francisco to New York City in December 1962. I wrote the first sketch on a paper napkin from a restaurant on the road and later wrote the work out in detail after I got back to New York. I was still inspired from hearing the premiere performance a few months earlier of my Trio for Strings.

The Four Dreams of China forms a structural, stylistic and harmonic link between my earlier, fully notated works composed of long sustained tones from the late ‘50s, and later works combining improvisation with predetermined rules and elements.

In the Trio for Strings I began to establish what would become my own musical mode. Premonitions of this exclusive harmonic vocabulary of intervallic and chordal structures had appeared earlier in my works for Brass and for Guitar. The opening four pitches of for Brass exemplify a classic statement of one of my “Dream Chords,” and throughout the work numerous examples of the Dream Chords are stated at various transpositions for the first time in my music. In the Trio for Strings, however, every chord, triad and interval can be found to comprise some transposition of one of the Dream Chords or some subset thereof. I discovered that there were four Dream Chords, and each one eventually became the entire tonal content of one of The Four Dreams of China. As I listened to one of these sustained chords while composing the Trio for Strings, I received a powerful image

of the sound and timelessness of China. This feeling pervades the four Dream Chords and inspired the title, The Four Dreams of China.

The titles of The Four Dreams of China are respectively: 1. The First Dream of China 2. The First Blossom of Spring (originally provisionally entitled The Plains of China) 3. The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer 4. The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer Each of the four “Dreams” is composed of only four pitches. Three of these pitches are essentially the same in two of the four Dream quadrads, The First Dream of China and The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, where these pitches are represented in frequency ratios as the triad 12/9/8. The inversion of these ratios produces the ratios 9/8/6, which constitute the triad of the other two Dream quadrads, The First Blossom of Spring and The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. In each Dream, the fourth pitch of the quadrad functions as divisor of the 9/8 interval (through octave displacement in two cases) and can be represented by the frequency ratio 17 or some octave transposition of it.

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By multiplying the ratios 12/9/8 by two octaves (4) to put them into the correct octave, we get the complete quadrad 48/36/32/17 for The First Dream of China.

The quadrad for The First Blossom of Spring is represented by the ratios 17/9/8/6.

By multiplying the ratios 12/9/8 by an octave (2) to put them into the corresponding octave, we get the complete quadrad 24/18/17/16 for The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.

By multiplying the ratios 9/8/6 by an octave (2) to put them into the corresponding octave, we get the complete quadrad 18/17/16/12 for The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.

These pitches may be isolated in the harmonic structures of the sounds of power plants and telephone poles from which the titles The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer were derived.

I conceived of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China some time around January 7, 1980.

At this time, I had been working on making an archival recording of for Guitar, performed by Ned Sublette, who had performed the world premiere of for Guitar at The Kitchen on December 7 and 8, 1979. During this period that

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I focused intently on for Guitar, I conceived of the for Guitar Prelude and Postlude on January 7, 1980. In the for Guitar Prelude and Postlude, several Dream Chords in their original voicings and pitch placements from for Guitar appear in varying sequence. Within each one of these Dream Chords, the performer utilizes the appropriate rules from The Four Dreams of China. The idea of working on a version of The Four Dreams of China with guitars somehow inspired me to think about the idea of combining the individual Dreams from The Four Dreams of China. Thus, The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China (at that time, the title was simply The Subsequent Dreams of China) were born, based on the principle that any two Dream Chords could be combined, provided that: (1) all of the pitches in the two Dream Chords to be combined were either unisons or octave transpositions of each other; (2) at least one interval must be a unison between the two Dream Chords; and additionally, (3) pairings which met the above conditions but had a conjunct tritone interval were disqualified.

I asked Ned Sublette to make a chart of all the possible pairings meeting the above conditions (1) and (2), and on March 18, 1980, he sent me a letter with the 15 possible pairings. After receiving that letter, I disqualified the three pairings meeting condition (3). And thus there were 12 Subsequent Dreams of China. Of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China, The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring was not only the first to be performed, but it

was also the first to receive its own title, although other titles for some of The Subsequent Dreams such as The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s First Dream of The First Blossom of Spring will logically follow.

Each of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China is composed of two sets of four pitches, making a total of eight pitches. At least one of the pitches in each of the two sets of four pitches is an identical common tone and, in some cases, as many as two or three of the pitches in each of the two sets of four pitches are identical common tones.

By combining the ratios 18/17/16/12 for The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer with the ratios 17/9/8/6 for The First Blossom of Spring, and then multiplying the ratios 17/9/8/6 by an octave (2) to put them into the correct octave, 34/18/16/12, we get the complete octad 18/17/16/12, 34/18/16/12 for The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring.

Regarding the ratio 17, I discovered the harmoniousness of 17 as a divisor of the dyad 9/8 when working with electronically generated sine waves to produce the ratios 17/9/8/6 for The First Blossom of Spring quadrad. In the case where the dyad 9/8 or the triad 9/8/6 is sounding, I tried a number of ratios for the interval of a major seventh above the frequency ratio 9, and I found that only the ratio 17 sounded harmonious. I attributed the

harmoniousness of 17 to the fact that it coincides with and reinforces the sum tone which is produced by the ratio 9/8 (9 + 8 = 17). All other major sevenths make acoustical beats because of their close proximity to the sum tone 17. It is further relevant that, while the ratio 17 makes an ideal divisor of the 9/8 dyad when working with sine waves, when working with acoustic instruments such as violins, trumpets in Harmon mutes, cellos, etc., we search for a value for the divisor of the 9/8 interval that sounds most harmonious in order to take into consideration the special characteristics of the harmonic structures of the timbres of the instruments. Frequently, this new ratio is a little higher than 17, and this may take into account the known inharmonicities of the harmonics of acoustical instruments, or it may be just another ratio that happens to sound better.

After the four Dream Chords were ordered into selective pairings to create The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China, I composed the Orchestral Dreams in 1985. In the Orchestral Dreams, the selective pairings of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China were further combined into expanded sets of pairings and other more complex groupings of the four Dream Chords which appear as extended transpositions in unique octave displacements over the range of the orchestra and meet the above conditions that (1) all of the pitches in the Dream Chords to be combined were either unisons or octave transpositions of each other, and (3) pairings and groupings which met the above condition (1) but had a conjunct

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tritone interval were disqualified. The Orchestral Dreams do not necessarily meet the above condition for The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China that (2) at least one interval must be a unison between the two Dream Chords. In May 1993, while preparing the score and program notes for the June 29, 1993 Ensemble Modern Hessischer Rundfunk world premiere performance of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring from The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China, I further ordered the selected pairings of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China into groupings which combined “more than two” of the Dream Chords from The Four Dreams of China to create a new work which is provisionally titled The Subsequent Dreams of The Four Dreams of China in Simultaneity.

From this new work I discovered only two unique voicings which include all four of the Dream Chords and also meet the above listed conditions (1), (2) and (3) for The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China. These two unique voicings are provisionally titled The Two Subsequent Dreams of The Four Dreams of China in Perfect Simultaneity. There are also two voicings of The Subsequent Dreams of The Four Dreams of China in Simultaneity which meet conditions (1) and (3) above, but regarding condition (2) there are different common tone unisons between every pairing of the four Dream Chords. Each of The Subsequent Dreams of The Four Dreams of China in Simultaneity requires an ensemble of at least 16 bowed strings in sets of four of like timbre, or 32 wind instruments in sets of eight of like timbre,

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or combinations of the above strings and winds in sets of four strings and eight winds for each of the four Dream Chords included.

Stylistically, The Four Dreams of China and, in turn, The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China and the Orchestral Dreams, continue the texture of long sustained tones and silences and the extended-duration time construct set forth in the Trio for Strings. Structurally, however, while the Trio for Strings is fixed in time by its method of conventional notation, The Four Dreams of China is the first work I composed in the style of the Trio that involves the process of improvisation. Inspired by the scores of Cage, Feldman, Brown, Wolff and Bussotti, which require performer interpretation, I evolved a concept of composition that led to rule-based scores such as Vision (1959), Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. (1960), Compositions 1960 and Compositions 1961, and crystallized in The Four Dreams of China. Strict rules in each of the four “Dreams” determine which of the four pitches may be sounded together. Within this framework of fixed rules, the musicians listen to each other and improvise.

This process of actively listening to each other is one of the important aspects of The Four Dreams of China, and it has become a central principle for group improvisation in all of my subsequent ensemble music. Because The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China employ eight pitches instead of four, and combine the rules for two of The Four Dreams of China, which in turn requires new, more comprehensive rules resulting from the combination of

rules, the rule-based improvisation becomes a much more complex process demanding even greater skill, concentration and eventual mastery from the performers. Similarly, in the Orchestral Dreams this process will evolve to a significantly higher level of complexity.

Since improvisation is a part of the performance process, each realization of The Four Dreams of China and of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China is different, and as a method of cataloguing the different recorded realizations of works of this nature, I include the date, time and city of recording within the titles. For example, the 77-minute Gramavision recording of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer is the 9:35 PM, December 9, 1990 realization (notated in the title as “90 XII 9 c. 9:35-10:52 PM NYC”) of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.

Similarly, on the subject of dates and titles: the dates of composition of my works during the ‘60s, when I was working closely with the late poet and hand drummer Angus MacLise, often incorporated the names of the days as written in the original version of his calendar YEAR. Hence, day of the unquiet grave - smoke of the shore, beneath the date of composition on the title page refers to the names of the days December 10 and 11.

I composed The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line

Stepdown Transformer in New York City in 1984. The concept of The Melodic Version also applies to each of the other three Dreams from The Four Dreams of China, as well as to The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China and The Orchestral Dreams. The Melodic Versions of The Four Dreams of China include all of the material of the original “harmonic” versions of 1962. However, while each player performs only one of the four pitches in The Harmonic Versions, The Melodic Versions permit each player to play all of the four pitches provided the pitches are played in sequences prescribed by the harmonic rules; i.e., pitches that are permitted to be played together harmonically may be played in ordered conjunct melodic sequence.

In addition to the sequences of the pitches, the rules for The Melodic Versions also determine the permissible progressions among the dyads, triads and the quadrad. By permitting each player to play all of the four pitches, The Melodic Versions create the possibility of unisons in performances that have only four players, whereas in The Harmonic Versions, unisons are only possible in performances with more than four players. Also, in realizations by wind instruments The Melodic Versions enable any one of the pitches to be sustained longer, since it can be shared by two or more of the players.

Over the course of rehearsals and performances of The Melodic Versions, I have developed special guidelines for the improvised realizations of the work, which I have taught to the musicians as an oral tradition, in addition to the rules already established in the score.

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These guidelines include a suggested proportional duration macrostructure for a performance of a given length. This macrostructure outlines the sections of the work, which include an exposition of the elements section, a development section, a culmination section, a preparation for the ending section, and the ending. Within these sections, the macrostructure also outlines the sequence and duration of the exposition of each of the four pitches, and the sequence and duration of the elements of the work which include silences, sustained tones, pulses, dyads, triads, chords, canons (in single lines, dyads and triads), and dyadic, triadic and chordal progressions (in long sustained tones).

This oral tradition of performance practice continues in The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China.

The Four Dreams of China and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China represent yet a further expansion of time structure in my work: developing on the image of timelessness, I determined that individual performances of The Four Dreams of China had no beginning or ending. Each performance is woven out of an eternal fabric of silence and sound where the first sound emerges from a long silence, and after the last sound the performance does not end but merely evanesces back into silence until a group of musicians “picks up� the same set of pitches again, or from time to time, emphasizing the audible aspect of the performance. It was this concept, in fact, of a work which was eternal, with no beginning and no end, first set forth in The Four Dreams of China, that led

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me to evolve the idea of the Dream House, a permanent performance place where such a work would be played continuously, eventually establishing a life and tradition of its own.

Musical and Environmental Influences on the Evolution of My Music In the mid-’50s I was studying counterpoint and composition in Los Angeles with Leonard Stein, the noted pianist, conductor and principal assistant to Arnold Schoenberg. Stein had introduced me to a broader spectrum of modern music, and I had gradually become totally absorbed in the work of Anton Webern.

While for Brass is a serial work, it also forms the bridge between Webern and what became my own style. Some of the durations of the pitches are still short enough to be reminiscent of Webern, but here for the first time, I introduced long sustained tones into the vocabulary of my music. The introduction of sustenance in for Brass led me to create the Trio for Strings. This was the first work that I composed entirely of tones of long duration, and it is probably my most important early musical statement. To my knowledge, no one had ever before made a work that was composed completely of sustained tones. There was sustenance in Eastern and Western music, but it was always a drone, a pedal point, or a sustained tone of a cantus firmus over which melodies were sung or played. It is difficult to find any other examples of sustenance besides these types of drones in music before the Trio for Strings and for Brass.

The concept of the expanded time structure composed of long sustained tones and the unique tonal palette of these works came to

me not by theoretical deduction, but by totally inspired intuition. This new approach to composition and hearing evolved not only from my great appreciation for the music of Anton Webern, but from environmental influences as well: the sound of the wind; the sounds of crickets and cicadas; the sounds of telephone poles and motors; sounds produced by steam escaping such as my mother’s teakettle and the sounds of whistles and signals from trains; and resonances set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic areas such as canyons, valleys, lakes and plains. In fact, the first sustained single tone at a constant pitch, without a beginning or end, that I recall hearing 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 the work of the genre of the Trio for Strings, Composition 1960 # 7 (where a perfect fifth, B and F#, is “To be held for a long time”) and The Four Dreams of China.

There are two examples of sounds of electrical power transformers that I remember listening to during the first four and a half years of my life. One was a telephone pole on the Bern road (there’s only one road in Bern, Idaho; it is gravel), near where I was born and not too far from the intersection with the road that goes to Montpelier, the closest town. I used to like to

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stand next to this pole and listen to the sound.

The other electrical sound was produced by a small power distribution station just outside of Montpelier next to a Conoco gas depot that my mother’s father, Grandpa Grandy, managed, and where my father worked. I often stood next to this depot outside of a fenced-in area, which had about twenty electrical transformers and produced a louder, more complex sound.

Sometimes on warm days I would climb up on top of the huge gasoline storage tanks and sit in the hot sun, smelling the gasoline fumes, listening to the sounds, daydreaming and looking off at the mountains.

The use of long sustained tones in music allows one to better isolate and listen to the harmonics, and the harmonic series is a clearly audible model for understanding the structure of “just intonation.” Just intonation is that system of tuning based on the idealized principles of harmonics and resonances as our ears hear them and our voices produce them, that is, as they are found in nature. The tunings I invented for The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964-present) and The Well-Tuned Piano (1964-present) were set in the system of just intonation. Additionally, sustained tones help make it possible to achieve finer degrees of precision in tuning. In my book, Selected Writings, I point out that tuning is a function of time. When scientists want to make a comparative measurement of two or more periodic events in time, the longer the period of measurement, the more information they can extract about the relationships between the events in

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time. This is exactly what happens in tuning: whether the frequency is measured with a frequency counter, an oscilloscope, or by ear, the degree of precision possible will always be proportional to the duration of the analysis, i.e., to the duration of the tuning.

The concepts set forth in my works from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s came to characterize my style, forming the beginnings of minimalism in music, and subsequently developed into the creation of continuous sound and light environments which I presented in collaboration with Marian Zazeela in our Dream Houses, large-scale installations extending over durations of weeks and years. Sustenance became one of the basic principles of my work, providing the foundation for the development of my musical expression and, ultimately, the light that illuminated the path which led to my later work in tuning and just intonation, inspiring a new vision of composition evolving from the universal truths of harmonic structure.

Performance History of The Four Dreams of China The world premiere of the original “harmonic version” of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer was presented as part of George Brecht and Robert Watts’ YAM Festival on the afternoon of May 19, 1963 at George Segal’s Farm, North Brunswick, New Jersey. The work was performed outdoors in a meadow of very tall grasses by Marian Zazeela, violin; Angus MacLise, violin; Tony Conrad, viola; Larry Poons, viola; Jack Smith, bowed mandola; Dottie Moskowitz, bowed lute; Joseph Byrd, bowed guitar; and myself, bowed mandolin. The performers were seated in a symmetrical, intersecting, double diamond arrangement designed

by Larry Poons.

This was followed in 1965 by a series of performances by Paul Zukofsky and Charles Joseph, violins, under the auspices of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and at Carnegie Recital Hall and Asia House, in New York City. Between 1972 and 1976, the work was also performed by Petr Kotik’s SEM Ensemble in concerts at Aachen, Berlin, Geneva, Buffalo, New York City, Cologne and Witten.

Trumpeter Ben Neill has studied my work over a long period, and since 1984 has led The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble in many full-length performances of The Melodic

Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, in realizations for four or eight trumpets with Harmon mutes. In addition to the musicians on the Gramavision recording (see below), these performances have included such outstanding trumpeters as Sue Radcliff, Rick Albani, Rhys Chatham, Tom Bontrager, Frank London, David Sampson, Charles Olsen, Christofer Dimitroff, Stephen Haynes and Lesli Dalaba.

Included among these performances are an invitational performance of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer for my 49th birthday, October 14, 1984, at the Dia Art Foundation 6 Harrison Street Dream House, New York City, followed by the world premiere performance of The Melodic Version, presented at the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1985. Both performances were four-trumpet realizations.

The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble also performed the work with eight trumpets at MELA Foundation’s La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective, New York City, on May 20, 1987; with four trumpets at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City, on December 22, 1987; and with eight trumpets at St. Ann’s Center for the Arts, Brooklyn, on November 12, 1988.

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In many of the performances with The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble, The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer has been presented in a special setting of Marian Zazeela’s Light.

On September 24, 1991 Gramavision Inc. released the 77-minute CD version of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China (# R2-79467) performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill with Stephen Burns, Rich Clymer, James Donato, Pamela Fleming, Rich Kelley, James O’Connor and Gary Trosclair.

Charles Curtis has demonstrated a remarkable interest in and dedication to the performance of my music. After moving to Germany to become solo cellist with the Nord Deutscher Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, Curtis formed a cello quartet with Andreas Bleyer, Thomas Grossenbacher and Christof Groth, all members of the Rundfunk Orchestra. In March 1992 the cello quartet gave the world premiere performance of The Melodic Version of The First Blossom of Spring from The Four Dreams of China in the setting of Marian Zazeela’s unique light installation for the dome of the Berlin Zeiss Planetarium as part of the DAAD Inventionen Festival. Following this, the cello quartet presented the European premiere of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China in April 1992 at

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the St. Johannis-Kirche in Hamburg as part of the NDR Kammer-konzerte series.

The cello quartet performances of The First Blossom of Spring and The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer took the performances to date of The Four Dreams of China full circle, back to the bowed-string world premiere in 1963 and the violin duo New York premiere in 1965 by Paul Zukofsky and Charles Joseph of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and harked back to the Trio for Strings, the direct ancestor of The Four Dreams of China.

In November 1992, the Kunst Halle in Krems, Austria, presented the Cathedral of Dreams concert series in the 11th-century Minoritenkirche, in Marian Zazeela’s Dream Light environment. This series represented a landmark in the performances of The Four Dreams of China: it was the first time that two of The Four Dreams of China, The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring, had been performed in the same concert series; and it was also the first time that the eight trumpets from The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led

by Ben Neill and the four cellists from the Nord Deutscher Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra led by Charles Curtis joined forces to create a twelve-piece chamber ensemble performance of each of the two Dreams.

The April 1993 Interpretations/WNYC New

Sounds Live at Merkin Concert Hall performance by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill was the first American presentation of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China after the release of the Gramavision CD.

have been present to hear the performance.

The June 29, 1993 Ensemble Modern Hessischer Rundfunk performance led by Ben Neill and Charles Curtis, brass and string section leaders of The Theatre of Eternal Music, was the world premiere of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring, but it was especially important because it was also the world premiere of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China. Never before had any of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China been performed.

The first of these birthday presentations, the February 4, 1996 Norddeutscher Rundfunk Hamburg performance by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble was the world premiere of The First Dream of China. The First Dream of China was the third of The Four Dreams of China to have its world premiere, and the second of The Four Dreams of China to have its world premiere in Germany

by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble.

The August 4, 1994 Ensemble 5 performance led by Charles Curtis of The Melodic Version of The First Blossom of Spring from The Four Dreams of China was, to my knowledge, the first performance of my music in Darmstadt since David Tudor’s performance of Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F. (1960) in the summer of 1960. When I was a student in Darmstadt in summer 1959, my Study III for piano, which I had written in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Advanced Composition Seminar, was somehow lost the day before it was to have been performed by David Tudor at the student recital, and miraculously found again the next day. With this performance by Charles Curtis and Ensemble 5 miracles continued, and I only wish I could

Produced by the Hessischer Rundfunk, the February 25, 1996 performance at the Städelschule, Frankfurt of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China by Ensemble Innovation led by Charles Curtis was the second of the Dreams to be presented during the 60th Birthday Celebration Year.

1995-96 was the year of my 60th birthday. For this occasion, Charles Curtis and the organization Contemporary Music proposed to present as many of the Dreams from The Four Dreams of China as possible.

The June 3, 1996 concert at Podewil, Berlin, of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer in the Klangwände (Wall of Sound) series curated by Ulrich Krieger, performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble consisting

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of sustaining electric guitars utilizing E bows, was the third performance of one of The Four Dreams of China led by Charles Curtis during the 60th Year Celebration.

The December 1, 1998 final event of the Inventing America Festival at The Barbican Centre, London, was a milestone in that it was both the UK premiere of The Melodic Version of The First Blossom of Spring from The Four Dreams of China and also the first appearance by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensemble in the British Isles.

The August 4, 2007 performance of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble was the first presentation of one of The Four Dreams of China at our Regenbogenstadl Dream House in Polling.

The July 26, 2008 performance of The Melodic Version of The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble in the Regenbogenstadl Dream House was the world premiere of the last of The Four Dreams of China to be premiered, 45 years after the Yam Festival premiere of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer in 1963, the first of the Dreams to be performed.

In honor of the 1000 Year Anniversary of the

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Village of Polling, the First Dreams: Quellen des Raumklangs performance of The First Dream of China from The Four Dreams of China was presented by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble at the Regenbogenstadl Dream House on July 17, 2010.

In 2011, Charles Curtis led The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble in performances of all Four Dreams of China at the Regenbogenstadl Dream House. The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer was performed on July 15 at 8 pm. The First Blossom of Spring was performed on July 16 at 3 pm and The First Dream of China was performed on July 16 at 8 pm. The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer was performed on July 17 at 11 am.

The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensemble with eight trumpets in Harmon mutes and four cellos on July 31 and August 1, 2015 at the Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House was the American premiere of the arrangement for this ensemble of twelve instruments.

The September 20, 2015 Warsaw Autumn Festival performance, the October 14, 2015 Festival d’Autumn Paris performance, the November 22, 2015 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival performance and the September 10, 2016 Ultima Festival Oslo performance of The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream

of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from the Four dreams of China (1962) in Dream Light were presented by eight trumpets with Harmon mutes led by Ben Neil and Marco Blaauw.

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The Theatre of Eternal Music Most of the score development of The Four Dreams of China took place during the many rehearsals and performances of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring.

As a result, of The Four Dreams of China, the most evolved scores are those of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring.

These works are models of algorithmic scores where written instructions and rules describe means for players to realize, in real time, unique versions of the work, and the score for The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring from The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China evolves from this tradition. This contrasts with the convention of Western classical music where a score prescribes an idealized, temporally fixed sequence of events. My approach to composition for my group, The Theatre of Eternal Music, has been to structure pieces with precisely described sets of pitches and rules for their articulation, creating a distinctive, yet potentially infinite macrocosm.

The Theatre of Eternal Music evolved through my relationships to musicians with whom I worked individually as early as 1953 and, although it has been used to refer to everything that the group did from 1962 onward, the name “The Theatre of Eternal Music” did not appear in print until February 1965. In naming the group

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The Theatre of Eternal Music I imagined that these musicians would become the nucleus for the group that would eventually play continuous music in a Dream House. In works such as Dorian Blues, Sunday Morning Blues, Early Tuesday Morning Blues and EbDEAD (based on a Dream Chord of that spelling with an octave doubling of the D), I played sopranino saxophone over vocal and instrumental drones accompanied by hand drums. I played extremely fast permutations and combinations of sets of specific tones as a way of creating the impression of a sustained chord. By February 1964 I was notating the ratios for the melody and all of the possible harmonic combinations for the first work that we played in just intonation. I labeled the harmonic combinations according to which ones should be sounded and which should not, and one of the “permitted” harmonic combinations was a totally new presentation of the Dream Chord of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, modulated to the key of the 7th partial as the quadrad 63/62/56/42. Note the interesting divisor 62 (2 x the prime 31) of the 9/8 interval 63/56.

I played the characteristic melodic patterns on the saxophone, and the entire group sustained the harmonic combinations. We taped this new work in April that same year, and I later titled it Pre-Tortoise Dream Music. After June 1964, I switched to voice and embarked on The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964- ), a large work involving improvisation within strict

predetermined guidelines. In 1967, I began a major new section of The Tortoise entitled Map of 49’s Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery.

Listed chronologically from 1962 through 1975, Terry Jennings, Dennis Johnson, Terry Riley, Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, John Cale, Jon Gibson, Simone Forti, David Rosenboom, Jon Hassell, Garrett List, Lee Konitz, Katrina Krimsky and Alex Dea are among those who worked with me in this group. We recorded, performed in galleries and museums, toured Europe and, in 1974, released Dream House 78’17” on Shandar Disques, Paris, France.

From 1975 I focused primarily on solo performances of The Well-Tuned Piano until, in 1984, I formed The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill, as an extension of The Theatre of Eternal Music, to concentrate on realizations of my works for brass instruments. The Brass Ensemble has performed for Brass and Composition 1960 #7, as well as The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.

In 1989 I formed the Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble led by Charles Curtis, to focus on realizations of my works and related works for string instruments. Charles Curtis led The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble in a performance of the Terry Jennings String Quartet (1960) at the MELA Foundation 1989 Terry Jennings Memorial Concert. At this concert, Curtis and I also performed the

Jennings Piece for Cello and Saxophone (1960). Through the Berlin performance of The First Blossom of Spring and the Hamburg performance of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, the cello quartet of Andreas Bleyer, Thomas Grossenbacher and Christof Groth, led by Charles Curtis is, in spirit, continuing the tradition of The Theatre of Eternal Music.

The largest Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble to appear in concert to date is The Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band which includes four voices, five trumpets with Harmon mutes, three French horns, two tenor trombones, two bass trombones, three tubas, two sustained electric guitars and two sustained electric basses. This 23-piece chamber orchestra performed the five world premiere concerts of The Lower Map of The Eleven’s Division in The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) from The Symmetries in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119 in a Dream House sound and light environment in New York in March 1990, and a live recording of the last concert is planned as a forthcoming CD release. This composition applies the dynamics of large-scale group improvisation according to predetermined rules, articulating a unique symmetrical 7 1/2-octave constellation of precisely notated frequency ratios derived from the range 144 to 112 of the harmonic series.

The intervallic complexity requires extremes of perceptual acuity and results in a work of many intricately related dimensionalities, reflecting a recognizable development of ideas that first appeared in The Four Dreams of China.

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The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensemble, which appeared in Krems in November 1992, was the largest Theatre of Eternal Music Ensemble to perform since The Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band. Each of the two sub-groups, the eight trumpets from The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill and the four cellists from the Nord Deutscher Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra led by Charles Curtis, had specialized in concert presentations of The Four Dreams of China; Ben Neill and Charles Curtis had worked together in The Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band. Under my musical direction, each of the two groups had developed their own approach to performance realizations of The Four Dreams of China, shaped by the characteristics of their respective instruments and interfaced with the collective imaginations of the individual leaders and collaborating musicians. This combination of forces brought not only a unique blending of the instruments but, as well, a merging of energies which together produced performances of the works ranging beyond the horizons of the imagination that each group had already pioneered. Similarly, the appearance of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring on consecutive evenings in one concert series allowed a new understanding of the differences and inter-relationships between The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring from The Four Dreams of China.

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The April 1993 Interpretations/WNYC New Sounds Live at Merkin Concert Hall performance by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill in the transparent acoustical environment of Merkin Concert Hall represented a highly-evolved phase in the nine-year performance practice tradition for The Melodic Versions of The Four Dreams of China, the culmination of countless rehearsals--the cumulative knowledge and devotion of The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble applied to the life of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.

The June 29, 1993 Ensemble Modern Hessischer Rundfunk world premiere of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring from The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China was performed by an even larger ensemble than the The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensemble that performed in Krems.

The eighteen member Ensemble Modern, led

by Ben Neill and Charles Curtis, consisted of eight strings, five trumpets in Harmon mutes and five bass flutes. Never before had any of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China been performed, and since The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China employ eight pitches instead of four (effectively introducing a new fifth pitch in the case of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring), and combine the rules for two of The Four Dreams of China, which in turn requires new, more comprehensive rules, a new, more complex level of rule-based improvisational

process has evolved in my music.

For the February 4, 1996 Norddeutscher Rundfunk Hamburg world premiere of The Melodic Version of The First Dream of China, and for the February 25, 1996 Hessischer Rundfunk performance at the Städelschule Frankfurt of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, Michael Tiepold, contrabass, replaced Thomas Grossenbacher in The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble led by Charles Curtis.

Tiepold had been a member of the Ensemble Modern and performed in the 1993 Hessischer Rundfunk world premiere of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring from The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China.

The June 3, 1996 performance at Podewil, Berlin, of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer in the Klangwände (Wall of Sound) series curated by Ulrich Krieger was unique in that it was presented for the first time by a Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble consisting of sustaining electric guitars utilizing E bows. Indeed, the sound of sustained electric guitars further reinforces the imagery of the sound of the high-tension line stepdown transformer evoked in the title.

Every performance of The Melodic Versions of The Four Dreams of China has featured the performing musicians located around the perimeter of the audience. The sustained electric

guitars concert was a breakthrough because, for the first time, the performing musicians were seated in the center of the audience with their guitar amplifiers placed in the four corners of the auditorium surrounding the listeners. Thus the performers were able to experience the surround sound as they played, much as I, the composer, sitting in the center of the room, have been at each performance immersed in the sound from the perimeters of the concert space. In addition, the performance with four guitars presented Charles Curtis as a performer in a new light in that all of his many previous performances of the Dreams had been with bowed string ensembles in which he was the lead cellist.

About the sustained electric guitar realization Charles Curtis has written, “In my judgment this is probably the ideal instrumentation for the Dreams. Possibly the next best thing to sticking a high-tension line stepdown transformer in a concert hall and listening to it. My interpretation of the Dreams, which stresses both the sinuous linear voice-leading motion tendencies as well as the motionless environment-like standing wave tendencies of the old Harmonic Version, has been newly defined by the electric guitars. The Dreams are set in a radically new light. The spectrum of composite tones that is unveiled transforms any idea anyone has ever had regarding what a single tone is, or what a dyad is. Not to mention a four-note chord. The first time my colleagues and I played the full quadrad 18/17/16/12 was greeted by stunned silence.”

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Dream Light Marian Zazeela Dream Light is created specifically for concert performances of La Monte Young’s The Four Dreams of China, and continues the exploration of ideas set forth in my work Light. Where possible, each installation of Dream Light is realized in response to the specific characteristics of the environmental or theatrical space and the placement of the musicians within it.

Dream Light is related to Light in that both works utilize the inherent properties of colored light mixtures as a medium for the projection of colored shadows in large-scale environments.

features of the performance space to create colored shadows in an environmental setting include the Union Chapel, London, for the 1989 La Monte Young Almeida Festival concert, and Pandit Pran Nath’s annual Raga Cycle concerts at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1991. In November 1992, the 11th-century Minoritenkirche in Krems, Austria was the site of a major installation of a Dream Light environment presented by Kunst.Halle.

Krems for their Cathedral of Dreams concert series.

In installations of Light, precisely positioned pairs of colored lights are focused on symmetrically arrayed pairs of white aluminum mobile sculptures to cause the projection of colored shadows on the ceiling or walls of a room.

In Dream Light, however, the musicians and the ornamental architectural features of the performance space function in the role of the sculptural forms as the elements upon which colored light sources are focused to create colored shadows.

For the April 1993 Interpretations/New Sounds Live performance of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer at Merkin Concert Hall, eight musicians were positioned at locations around the perimeter of the audience to create a live sound environment engulfing the listeners in a tranquil yet drifting cosmos of harmonically related vibrations. Pairs of magenta and blue lights were focused both to cast shadows of the musicians and to create shadows on the latticework of the back wall of the stage, outlining in relief the architectural characteristics of the hall, while bathing the audience in a sea of reflected light.

An environment of Dream Light was created for a performance of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer at St. Ann’s Center for the Arts, Brooklyn, 1988.

Other concert presentations in which colored light sources were focused on architectural

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For the June 1993 Hessischer Rundfunk performance of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First

Blossom of Spring from The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China, blue and magenta lights were used to create large washes of color on each of the four groups of musicians located on the stage, rear and two sides of the Sendesaal.

At the February 1996 Norddeutscher Rundfunk performance of The First Dream of China, I applied magenta gel to the symmetrically placed sets of six existing fixtures on each side of the Studio 10 Sendesaal three-story ceiling, and blue gel to the four central ceiling fixtures, casting the room, players and audience in a mirage-like dusky atmosphere reminiscent of the mood of The Magenta Lights.

The light design of Regenbogenstadl is by its nature a setting of Dream Light and it was always assumed there would be performances in the space. The light sources in the large interior gallery were treated with a magenta gel and an extremely deep ‘Congo’ blue gel to blend into a magenta canopy in the entire upper area of the room, dimmed so as not to reduce the light level of the projections on the walls. Subtle shadows cast by the structure of the beams appear as faint linear patterns on the ceiling and eaves.

A different approach was taken in creating a light design for the June 1996 performance at Podewil Berlin since the space was more of a “black-box theatre” without architectural ornamentation. Although the musicians were seated together in the center of the audience, the sound emanated from their guitar amplifiers placed in the four corners of the auditorium surrounding the audience. Instead of illuminating the musicians, magenta and blue spotlights were focused on a white curtain stretched across the stage and on the white rear wall of the auditorium to reflect the resulting purplish color back into the space. In the same way that the sound was directed toward the audience from the perimeters of the space, the color was reflected into the audience from the front and back.

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Performance Practice as Social Sculpture in The Four Dreams of China and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China Ben Neill Throughout history composers have chosen a variety of approaches to the control of the performance of their music. La Monte Young insists on having his music performed in situations where he can personally interact with the musicians extensively during the rehearsal process, thereby asserting greater influence over the evolution of his music’s performance practice than most composers. Since beginning my work with La Monte Young in 1984 as a student and performer, I have made some observations about the unique performance techniques required in his music, particularly in The Four Dreams of China and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China, which may not be fully apparent to the listener.

The artist Joseph Beuys frequently used the term “Social Sculpture” to refer to his concept of art as an “evolutionary-revolutionary power capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system.” Beuys classified art into two categories: “the traditional art, which is unable to change anything in society or in the ability and the joy for life; and another kind of art, which is related to everybody’s needs and the problems existing in society. This kind of art has to be worked out from the beginning; it has to start from the molding power of thought

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as a sculptural means.”

The Four Dreams of China and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China are brilliant examples of the second type of art that Beuys described. In this work a set of rules, which might be likened to the laws or constitution of a society, govern the interaction of the musicians. In The Melodic Versions of each of the four Dreams and the twelve Subsequent Dreams of China there are three levels on which the rules function for the performers.

First, each performer is guided by a rule that governs the sequence in which his/her individual pitches may be played. Second, the performers must listen to and shape the overall harmonic structure, and third, the overall melodic structure. These parameters are similarly governed by sets of rules. The nature of the rules is such that each performer, in addition to his/her individual responsibility to a melodic progression, must always know what every other performer is playing at all times and be ready to adjust accordingly to prevent proscribed combinations or progressions of pitches in the overall unfolding of the work.

This unique way of controlling the interaction of a group of musicians can be thought of not

only as a model for music-making but also as a concept for general social organization.

Individual and communal responsibilities are balanced in a way that produces an equilibrium which differs according to the personalities involved, but which always functions, forcing the players to give up any egocentric notions of performance practice. This distinguishes The Four Dreams of China and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China from free improvisation where the results depend solely on the individual performers. Young has described his outlook on this unique method of control:

Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China and any other performance of one of The Four Dreams of China or The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China is but one combination of the infinite possibilities for a piece which has no beginning, no end, and no boundaries to its implications for music and for humanity.

Copyright © Ben Neill 1991.

I Beuys, Joseph, “I am searching for field character,”

At one time [ca. 1959-61] I fell under the influence of John Cage and experimented with the use of chance in my works. I had also been doing a lot of improvisation in jazz [since ca. 1950]. However, I found that if I left things to chance or to the imaginations of other improvisers, I didn’t always get the most imaginative, radical and far-reaching results. I found that I was best able to go beyond the outer realms of all imagination and discover what creativity could be when I exercised control over certain parameters.

in Energy Plan for the Western Man, ed. Carin Kuoni (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), 21.

II Beuys, Joseph, “Interview with Kate Horsefield,” ibid., 75.

III Interview with La Monte Young, New York City, 7 March 1991

The control Young chose to exercise over the parameters certainly produces results which are imaginative, far-reaching and radical in their scope, and the performance of this work ultimately becomes a transcendent, mystical experience for the performers--always different, always profound. The Gramavision 77-minute CD recording of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line

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Certain Aspects of Interpretation Charles Curtis The act of tuning to beats surprises one at first by its palpability. One doubts for a moment whether it is even the ear which is registering the phenomenon—or even to what extent one is personally in charge of the curious alterations taking place. At times one feels one is subject to something like air pressure changes, such as when taking off in an airplane. One can forget that one is playing at all, one is for brief instants more like a participant or even a witness at an event beyond oneself, a particularly intense change in the weather, for instance, which one senses palpably more than one sees it or hears it.

Likewise one observes with astonishment that when an interval is being played perfectly in tune one does not hear oneself playing at all.

Again, when the pitch is a little bit off, the result might be some beating all the way over on the other side of the room. *** We endeavor to play together not as a group of twelve instruments but as a single instrument with twelve separate resonating bodies. If we could act too as a single interpreter, as an interpretive unity, all musicians being, as one says “of one mind”, this would be nice. Certainly this is not easy to achieve and even after long

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practice one cannot count on this occurring. It is something that just happens now and then, also between friends, for instance, when they discover that they were just having the same thought.

But indeed, the individual too thinks in multiplicities; as one says, “I was of three minds” or “I was of twelve minds”. *** Curiously, one has to be good at making beats in order to be good at playing perfectly in tune.

Ultimately the biggest intonation problems are the pitch changes that come from bow-pressure changes. For instance, every up-bow has a slightly different pitch from the preceding down-bow. *** A specific interpretive problem arises in relation to silences. It is without irony that I say: the silences are the most difficult element of the piece to perform well! Of course, the intonation is very difficult, the articulation too, and by all means the highly detailed voice-leading rules; yet even when these aspects are more or less mastered the difficulty of silences remains. To introduce them in a logical fashion, to let them

emerge from an inner logic, to render them in such a way that they do not seem to be lapses or interruptions or in any way incongruous or arbitrary—these are the difficulties. And they reflect exactly the difficulties involved in the self-generating structure as a whole.

security of intonation. One could almost say, the rules make it possible to play the difficult intervals in tune. Certainly renaissance voice-leading rules have their source too in the practice of choral singing. ***

The difficulty has also to do with the very strong effect that silences have on gatherings of people. Dare one say, they have a strong expressive character? I am made to think of Quaker meetings, in which long silences intensify the receptivity to inspiration. Indeed, the best way to perform the silences is to listen to them just as intently as one listens to the tones: as though to a kind of discernible nothingness. *** Rules: the interpreter easily becomes intimidated by the complex voice-leading rules, afraid of breaking them and annoyed that they seem to stand in the way of self expression.

Sports-oriented players tend to think in terms of fouls and of being penalized.

Properly seen the rules are less restrictions than they are a model or a blue-print for the structure—they serve to mark the contours of a particular beauty—they enunciate the conditions which lead to a kind of musical geometry, a shape, indeed a nearly palpable, a sculptural or architectural shape.

And it is well-built: the rules guide one to build up the abstract intervals in ways that serve the

As one moves through the piece one notices that the interpretation is always involved in a process of striving for equilibrium; which equilibrium, once achieved, becomes the pre-condition for renewed complexity; which again seeks its own balance. Its own balance, as each moment of balance is a new one, and hence each moment of complexity is new as well. It is a series of situations which interlock, each situation carrying within it certain possibilities for the next: for the establishing of equilibrium in complex situations, for the introduction of renewed complexity in stable situations. It is in this sense that the structure reveals itself. The interpreter who is intensely aware of each situation and its possibilities moves with the inner motion of the work’s structure.

From a practical standpoint, the striving for equilibrium nearly describes the ongoing tuning process, the fundamental pitches and beats teetering and pendulating into equilibrium. This can be observed in the episodes which the composer calls canons, where tones are passed gradually from player to player.

The complexity is of two musicians playing the same tone; through the elimination of beats equilibrium is approached; which equilibrium,

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once achieved, becomes the signal for the next musician to enter. *** The ideal interpretation rests on the utmost discipline. It is best when not a single unnecessary note is played—yet when always that note is played which is necessary for the fulfillment of the rules.

The complexity of this music is a complexity of inter-connectedness; nothing occurs which is without influence on every other occurrence; and the complexity of each element is not less complex than the complexity of multiple dimensions. For instance, the voice-leading rules, which govern both vertical and horizontal alignments, apply not only to the entire piece as heard from the outside, but also to the private phrasing of each individual musician. Yet it is beyond the interpreter to regulate, or even to take in, every aspect of such complexity. The interpreter returns to the common thread of playing each note perfectly in tune. * * *

Copyright Š Charles Curtis 1993

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On Trio for Strings and The Four Dreams of China Charles Curtis 6 instruments, 4 musicians The decision to perform Trio for Strings with four musicians, rather than three, reflects a commitment to the four-note Dream Chords as the source of all pitch material in the piece. Only with four musicians can the Dream Chords be tuned and sustained with the necessary stability. In the original version, the requirement of playing double stops (on one occasion, in artificial harmonics) skews the structural balance and the integrity of the tuning. Four musicians are required to satisfactorily sustain the four-note chords.

of three (six instruments), thus fulfilling the original intent of the title, Trio for Strings, and the denominator four as number of musicians, corresponding to the number of pitches in the Dream Chords. This ratio reduces to 3:2, the perfect fifth, and the boundary interval of the Dream Chords.

The disposition of the pitches, however, requires that violas be used for some pitches and violins for others; thus I suggested to La Monte that, as in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, one violinist could switch to viola for certain sections, as required. He proposed further that both violinists have both violin and viola available. This unusual solution makes possible a rich and variegated timbral palette spanning various combinations of like and unlike timbres, while preserving the appropriate number of musicians.

dreamchords At three points in Trio for Strings a four note chord is prominently sustained: shortly after the beginning, shortly before the structural midpoint, and shortly before the end. These chords are the only four note textures, and the largest vertical textures overall. They are immediately identifiable as such, as well as by the distinctive sonority of their frequency alignments. Variously voiced, they outline the following essential chordal shape: a framing 3:2 perfect fifth; nested within it a 9:8 major second with 4:3 quotient; and, nested within the 9:8, an 18:17 minor second with 17:16 quotient.

This chordal shape is the model for the Dream Chords, elaborated a few years later in The Four Dreams of China.

Therefore one could suggest that the current grouping contains as numerator a multiple

The relational shape of the Dream Chord defines its internal relationships, relative to any

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given pitch referent. In Trio, the first and last statements, though voiced differently, share identical frequencies. The chord at the midpoint is raised by a 17:16 semitone.

From the standpoint of twelve-tone operations these three statements are not the only appearances of the full Dream Chord; indeed it must appear more frequently, as required by inversion and retrograde-inversion operations.

In fact it appears six times, but in three of those cases it has been decoupled, or staggered in time, such that one hears only subsets of it at once. The comprehensive vertical statements are reserved for only three carefully calculated architectural points.

The instances of the decoupled Dream Chord do not, upon listening, reveal themselves to be that. Only when following the fate of the chord on paper, as it is subjected to the strictures of twelve-tone technique, is it clear that these moments are in fact excerpts, or partial appearances, of the Dream Chord. It is as though the Dream Chord, when required to appear according to the rules, sometimes decides to show up with only some of its members, then disappears, then reappears with the ones missing the first time. From the standpoint of the listener, these moments do not differ in any way from any other section of the entire Trio.

Indeed, every audible combination of tones in Trio is one or more of the four intervals making up the Dream Chord: descending asymmetrically in size, they are the perfect fifth, the 9:8 major second, and the two minor seconds,

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17:16 and the incrementally smaller 18:17. These are the only intervals heard in the piece. Thus, whether a particular chord or interval represents a partial structural appearance of the entire dream chord, or a complete structural appearance of a subset, is not discernible, and actually irrelevant.

In other words, from the first note the Dream Chord is being excerpted. Or, one could say the Dream Chord is being filled in. The ongoing sense of an unheard whole being filled in, and again being thinned out, is a characteristic of the listening experience. There is a kind of drama to the experience of waiting to discover which shape will be outlined next, and how nearly complete it will be. It is even questionable if the four-note, complete Dream Chord can really be perceived as a completion. In time it cannot, if only for the reason that it shifts up a half step and down again. Ultimately it too seems a partial fulfillment of something larger.

dreamwords Evidently the earliest meaning of dream, in Old English, is joy, merriment, but also noise, or music. Noisy merriment may have given rise to visions, trances, and dream states. It is striking that the word, at its source, identifies not the discrete action of dreaming, nor the remembered narrative, but rather an emotional state and, even more, a possible stimulant or conduit to that state. The lineage of meanings is obscure; sleep, at any rate, is very far from this constellation. Conceivably, the experience

of dreaming and the experience of joy are equated; the dream is a source of joy, and a powerful emotion of joy initiates the dream state.

Or a state of joy is unattainable, and remains a dream. In this case sound may stand as a physical analogue to dreaming and to joy, as the dream that is real.

the array of resultant frequencies cannot be “more infinite� than with two; however, the audible subset is more dense and labyrinthine. The performer negotiates a more detailed map, and must locate the exact positions of the played frequencies against a field of densely overlaid coordinates.

The dream is the state that one does not want to end, and which, while one is in it, does not have an ending: the dream itself never ends, only the state in which it occurs. This is also true of a joyful state, which has the power to suspend one’s comprehension of the passage of time. Sound has the same power, and it is most evident when frequencies are perfectly aligned and unchanging; the effect of perfectly-tuned chordal shapes is to render sequential, ordinal, time-based aspects of consciousness moot or non-existent. The singular, vertical tonal structure is an absorbing and undeniably emotional state of awareness.

Human perception being finite, we perceive only a tiny subset of what is in fact sounding; yet even this tiny subset seems immeasurably rich and mysterious. The performers gladly surrender their identities too, assuming the attitude of witness to an overwhelming experience of nature. The harmonic series is nature; tuning is being in nature.

nature When tuning two frequencies in just intonation, the sensation that the performers receive is of being contained in a complex singularity. The individual, played frequencies surrender their identities to a whole that displays an infinite array of resultant frequencies. Frequencies branch out and multiply audibly far beyond the point at which constituent members could be counted or catalogued reliably; and the experienced entity is a single vertical sonority. When tuning three or four frequencies in just intonation,

It is an experience of nature, however, that is instigated by human action, a kind of reaction of natural processes set in motion by human agency. As such, tuning requires exactly appropriate degrees of volition and observation.

Observation merges with the act of measuring, calibrating, gauging, mediating. There is no intervention, no alteration of nature; particularly played on acoustic instruments, it is a partnership which matches the complexity of the experience with commensurate exactitude, sensitivity and integrity. The demands are enormous, and ego and self-delusion have no place.

observing The position of the observer, particularly the observer in nature, is familiar throughout

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Young’s work. In the early Five Small Pieces for String Quartet (On Remembering a Naiad) (1956), it is still a romantic, imagined, pastoral observer: evocations of the quasi-personal aspects of a tree-spirit (“A Twig”, “A Leaf”, “A Gnarl” etc.) are framed as fleeting impressions, interspersed with lingering silences. The Compositions 1960 posit various extreme states of observation: watching a butterfly, watching a piano eat and drink, watching a fire, watching the audience watching the performers, sitting quietly in darkness. The piece for Richard Huelsenbeck refrains from evoking a phenomenon in nature, asserting in fact that the little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean are the piece. In Poem for Chairs, Tables and Benches etc. (or other sound sources) (1961), the sounds extracted from furniture being dragged across the floor are carefully rendered audible and observed, and not deployed in dramatic, comical or theatrical fashion. Generally Young is not interested in imitation or evocation; he is interested in creating a situation, through an action or through sound, that is itself the object of observation.

Observation merges with measurement in the line compositions of 1961, which were realized

by Young in the form of exact linear measurements using land surveying equipment. arabic numeral (any integer) (to H. F.) (1960) is in essence an attempt at making time measurements by articulating exact intervals of elapsed time. As the act of measuring becomes an integral part of the act of observing, the presence of the observer becomes tangible. Observation

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is not indifferent; the observed is not remote, nor whimsically noted. The observer and the observed merge in an intense engagement of mind and spirit. It is not enough to draw the straight line, one must follow it. This is a very exact formulation of the act of tuning.

details An array of resultant frequencies contains: the series of partials produced by each individual frequency; the sum and difference tones caused by the simultaneous sounding of the two fundamental frequencies; and the sum and difference tones caused by the simultaneous sounding of certain more prominent partials of individual frequencies. (Theoretically, the branching out of sum and difference tones produced by sum and difference tones of partials or of lower order sum and difference tones may occur, but further partials of partials or of sum and difference tones will not occur, as partials themselves, as well as sum and difference tones, are sinusoidal waveforms. Sinusoids produce sum and difference tones, but not partials.)

Parallel series of partials emerging from two individual frequencies create an interesting set of relationships. Which partials are prominently projected is conditional upon the specific instrument and, to a lesser degree, upon the room in which it is played. Which of these will be heard by a given performer (or listener) seems also to be somewhat subjective. When two series of partials are audible in parallel, and

the fundamental frequencies are well tuned, all of the partials will relate across these two series as whole number ratios. However, the ratios they form will not all be consonant or beat-free. When a fundamental ratio of 9:8 is sounded, for example, the third partial of 9 and the fifth partial of 8 will stand in the ratio of 40:27 (80:54), very slightly smaller than the consonant 3:2 (81:54). This is one of the aggravating factors in tuning 9:8, and is perceived as a quick whirring noise with a pleasant bell-like timbre. A mitigating factor, on the other hand, is a prominently audible ninth partial of 8, which presents a clear reference for the tuning of the fundamental 9. In certain circumstances, when mitigating partials are clearly audible, the performer focuses entirely on the alignment of partials across series, listening away from fundamental frequencies yet tuning them actively on the basis of reference partials.

Sum and difference tones can be helpful in tuning as well; when two fundamentals are justly tuned, the sum and difference tones relate harmonically to the fundamental frequencies and their audible partials, and a mutual reinforcement occurs. The performer perceives this as confirmation of a correct tuning. To a certain extent one could say that partials, since they occur already when one individual frequency is sounding, can serve as an advance guide to the tuning of an additional fundamental; whereas, sum and difference tones, resulting only from the simultaneous sounding of two fundamentals, can offer a post hoc reassurance when they ring harmoniously and periodically

with all of the other components in the resultant array.

sources, materials Young sees his entire compositional output as a single continuous work. It is interesting to note his ongoing engagement with earlier works as they are updated, reconsidered and re-envisioned. Nothing is ever considered final or closed; the output is a whole, and the whole is continuously evolving and changing. The rather anomalous situation in which a particular just intonation tuning is retroactively applied to Trio for Strings, a work which predates Young’s familiarity with the system of just intonation by at least four years, is less surprising against this background. And inasmuch as the act of tuning becomes the exclusive focus of his preoccupation with sound and nature as of the early 1960’s, the refashioning of Trio is that much more logical.

But what is most interesting is to note that, while the correct tuning was by no means obvious, and indeed evaded discovery for many years, once found it proved to require no alteration of the score as it exists, and no significant concessions in the tuning. It is a nearly perfect fit, and reveals a substantive continuity in Young’s output which even Young himself might not have suspected.

This results from a number of features of the work in its original form. The absence of major and minor thirds and sixths facilitates a tuning

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based on multiples of 3 with 17. The intervals favored, fifths, fourths, major seconds and the 18:17 semitone, closely resemble, when tuned justly, their equal temperament relatives. The presence of so-called invariants - pitch constellations that do not change when subjected to procedures such as transposition, retrograde and inversion - serves to maintain a limited pool of pitch identities throughout the work. But most of all, the pervasive derivation of all pitch identities from the Dream Chords defines the local tunings of all constellations as they occur.

It is becoming clear that, while the work makes use of a 12-tone row in stringent observation of the method of Schoenberg and Webern, the Dream Chords actually supplant the row as germinal, form-generating source material.

This is inevitable. The row is still bound up with a melodic, sequential mode of hearing; the Dream Chords, and whatever larger structures they may be subsets of, propose a mode of hearing in which ordered time has no place.

adjacencies The principle of adjacent values is another form-giving factor in Trio. The pervasive use of the 18:17:16 cluster is an example of adjacent, or neighboring frequencies; this scaling of frequency is mirrored in a scaling of adjacent dynamic values, such that constellations are always shaded in separate, adjacent dynamics for each note, for example ppp, pp, p, or ppppp, pppp, ppp. What is conveyed is a sense of a filling-in of gaps, a desire for completeness,

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and a nearness of elements, positioned so that they are invariably near enough to be touching.

When frequencies are this close, the ear performs a sort of scrambling operation since it cannot accurately reproduce both frequencies in such close proximity; a type of periodic, harmonious beating occurs which we perceive as a humming or buzzing sensation.

In La Monte’s much later sound environments with large chords built on prime number ratios, the phenomenon of twin primes emerges, pairs of primes that are only one numeral removed from each other (such as 31:29). In a curious but revealing mirroring of this concern, the names La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, when stated as the initials LY-MZ, represent alternating adjacent positions in the alphabet, remarkably enough delineating the last two letters of the first half of the alphabet (L-M) and the last two letters of the second half of the alphabet (Y-Z). The continued, uninterrupted shared presence of La Monte and Marian over the more than forty years of their relationship is probably an unprecedented lived realization of the principle of adjacency.

The interest in prime numbers rests on the fact that each prime introduces a new array of partials, with no duplication of partial content at all. The conjunction of parallel arrays close in the proximity of their fundamentals, but remote in partial content, creates a special and highly complex model for adjacency, something like the close interplay of extremely individuated elements. The quality introduced in the Dream Chord by the

value 17 is defined by its being a prime.

personal These rambling paragraphs reflect perfectly the ongoing and perpetually incomplete nature of my engagement with Trio for Strings. Trio has accompanied my relationship with La Monte and Marian from the beginning, and will probably continue to. My first encounter with La Monte and Marian centered on Trio for Strings.

It was a telephone conversation with them in August of 1986, very lengthy, from a public telephone on the campus of Marlboro College in Vermont, and I felt we had become friends by the end of that conversation. I performed Trio in May of 1987, and after a long and thorough period of work on The Four Dreams of China with various groups in Europe, in the late ‘90’s I began working on Trio again, performing the long duration exposition section with musicians in Germany and California and the full work in Belgium. Little by little what seemed impossible in my first performance in 1987 appeared gradually less impossible, and I proposed adjustments and ideas that hinted at ways of getting closer to the essential intent of the piece. The revelation of the tuning for Trio was a source of great satisfaction to me, as it brought into focus the style of playing in just intonation, which I had learned completely from La Monte, in the context of this extraordinary early work, which until then had seemed more separate from his major, later works.

The coincidence of my appointment at UC San

Diego in 2000 brought me into contact with younger musicians whose enthusiasm and intelligence frankly exceeded by far that found in many even very accomplished professional free-lance and working musicians; the fact that I was able to join up with Gascia Ouzounian, Reynard Rott and Erik Ulman, all exceptional artists in their own, different ways, as well as superb instrumentalists by any standard, has brought the possibility of a more perfect realization of Trio much closer. Our work together has been arduous, but also satisfying in an almost unique way. There is a shared sense of attempting something that is perhaps impossible, but of taking pleasure in daring the limits of the possible.

excavating It was obvious for some time that the individual constellations of two, three and four notes, the Dream Chords and their excerpts, were to be tuned according to the ratios established for The Four Dreams of China. Which notes in a given constellation correspond to which Dream Chord values was also clear, as long as one was tuning a particular constellation independently of others. Just intonation demands, however, that all pitch identities, over the compass of the entire piece, outline whole number multiples of the same fundamental. In the case of a 12-tone composition, by definition chromatic and seemingly inseparable from equal temperament’s tonal mobility, the question emerged as one of how to link the modulating constellations with one another in just ratios. The desire to

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hear the entire work as a singularity, in which over the passage of time integrally related frequency ratios would produce integrally related arrays of resultant frequencies in a single, enormously rich virtual structure, guided the process of finding a tuning.

In its narrowest and most practical form, the problem was determining which ratios would govern the relationships between constellations. Not surprisingly, the key was discovered hiding within the texture of the Dream Chords.

Looking closely at the score and listening to the constellations in my mind, I asked myself which single frequencies in any two constellations would I focus on were I attempting to tune one to the other. After establishing for each constellation this hypothetical focal, or tuning frequency, I observed that these focal frequencies themselves formed a Dream Chord, a soggetto cavato or hidden theme embedded one by one in the individual Dream Chords in sequence. By applying the voice-leading rules for melodic motion established for the procession of frequencies in The Four Dreams of China to the procession of constellations via these individual focal frequencies in the exposition section of Trio, I noted to my astonishment that the extrapolated, melodic Dream Chord made up of these focal frequencies indeed followed exactly the melodic rules established twenty-odd years later for The Four Dreams of China. If these embedded frequencies were then tuned in the ratios of the Dream Chord, and all individual constellations tuned locally as Dream Chords or excerpts thereof, then all twelve pitches in the initial statement of the row fell into place as

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multiples of a single fundamental. The ongoing fate of the row being the permutation of the initially established frequency identities, finding the ratios for the remainder of the piece was a matter of simple calculation.

I find it personally of interest that this insight emerged specifically from a practical exercise in listening, and more generally from the practice of playing and performing this music, and not through theoretical research.

dreamed dream The second statement of the full Dream Chord is raised a 17:16 semitone above the first and the last. It is the same Dream Chord, as defined by its internal ratios, but multiplied by 17. The value of 17 in the Dream Chord is its shadowy, luminous member, the yin complement to the more yang-like 16 and 18. It is what lends the Dream Chord its dreamlikeness. The Dream Chord in its second full statement, entering fully the 17 region, becomes a kind of shadow Dream Chord, a dream of a dream. It is entirely fitting that the foundational members of this statement of the Dream Chord, 6 and 8, are fragile artificial harmonics on the lowest string of the cellos. The fact that Young chose this articulation in the original form is a further demonstration of his intuitive understanding of the expressive nature of the tuning even years before he was aware of the possibility of a tuning. Traditionally there is a close relationship between dreams and pre-knowledge.

Copyright Š 2005 Charles Curtis

Biographies La Monte Young La Monte Young began to pioneer the concept of extended time durations in 1957 and for over 50 years contributed extensively to the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems in his performance works and the periodic composite sound waveform environments of the Dream House collaborations formulated in 1962 with Marian Zazeela; presentations of his work in the U.S. and Europe, as well as his theoretical writings gradually had a wide-ranging influence on contemporary music, art and philosophy, including Minimalism, concept art, Fluxus, performance art and conceptual art. “During the summer of 1958 [Young] composed the Trio for Strings–-a landmark in the history of 20th century music and the virtual fountainhead of American musical minimalism,” (K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists, 1996).

Musician magazine stated, “As the acknowledged father of minimalism and guru emeritus to the British art-rock school, his influence is pervasive,” and in 1985 the Los Angeles Herald Examiner wrote, “for the past quarter of a century he has been the most influential composer in America. Maybe in the world.” In Minimalism:Origins, 1993, Edward Strickland added, “Young is now widely recognized as the originator of the most influential classical music style of the final third of the twentieth century.”

In L.A. in the ‘50s Young played jazz saxophone, leading a group with Billy Higgins, Dennis Budimir and Don Cherry. He also played with Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Terry Jennings, Don Friedman and Tiger Echols. At Yoko Ono’s studio in 1960 he was director of the first New York loft concert series. He was the editor of An Anthology (NY 1963), which with his Compositions 1960 became a primary influence on concept art and the Fluxus movement. In 1962 Young founded his group The Theatre of Eternal Music and embarked on The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964- ), a large work involving improvisation within strict predetermined guidelines. Young played sopranino saxophone and sang with the group. Jennings, Dennis Johnson, Terry Riley, Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, John Cale, Jon Gibson, David Rosenboom, Jon Hassell and Lee Konitz are among those who worked in this group under Young’s direction.

With Marian Zazeela in the early ‘60s, Young formulated the concept of a Dream House, a permanent space with sound and light environments in which a work would be played continuously. Young and Zazeela have presented works in sound and light worldwide, from music and light box sculptures to large-scale environmental installations, culminating in two Dia Art Foundation realizations: the 6-year continuous 6-story Harrison Street Dream House (NYC

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1979-85) and the 1-year environment (22nd Street NYC 1989-90) within which Young presented The Lower Map of The Eleven’s Division in The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119 with the Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band. This 23-piece chamber orchestra was the largest Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble to appear in concert to date. Young has since presented Dream House sound environments at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); Espace Donguy, Paris (1990); Ruine der Künste, Berlin (1992); Pompidou Center, Paris (19941995 and 2004-2005); Musée Art Contemporain Lyon (1999) and the MELA Foundation Dream House: Sound and Light, which opened at MELA Foundation, New York in 1993 and has continued through present.

Young and Zazeela helped bring renowned master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath to the U.S. in 1970 and became his first Western disciples, studying with him for twenty-six years in the traditional gurukula manner of living with and serving the guru. They taught the Kirana style and performed with Pandit Pran Nath in hundreds of concerts in India, Iran, Europe and the United States. In June 2002, Ustad Hafizullah Khan Sahib, the Khalifa of the Kirana Gharana and son of Pandit Pran Nath’s teacher, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan Sahib, conferred upon Young the distinction of becoming the first Western vocalist to receive the title of Khan Sahib. Described by Mark Swed in his October 2009 L.A. Times Blog as “pure vibratory magic,” Young’s Just Alap Raga Ensemble, founded in

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2002 with Zazeela and their senior raga and visual arts disciple Jung Hee Choi, has become his primary performance vehicle.

The 1974 Rome live world premiere of Young’s magnum opus The Well-Tuned Piano (1964-73-81-present), was celebrated by a commission for him to sign the Bösendorfer piano, which remains permanently in the special tuning. Gramavision’s full-length recording of the continuously evolving 5-hour-plus work has been acclaimed by critics to be “the most important and beautiful new work recorded in the 1980s,” “one of the great monuments of modern culture” and “the most important piano music composed by an American since the Concord Sonata.” At the 1987 MELA Foundation La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective Young played the work for a continuous 6 hours and 24 minutes.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensembles led by Ben Neill and Charles Curtis presented numerous performances in the U.S. and Europe of The Melodic Versions (1984) of The Four Dreams of China (1962), one of Young’s most important early minimal works, from which in 1991 Gramavision released a CD of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.

In 1990 Young formed The Forever Bad Blues Band, which has performed extensively in Germany, Austria, Holland, Italy and the U.S., presenting two to three-hour continuous concerts of Young’s Dorian Blues, with Young, keyboard, Jon Catler, just intonation and fretless guitar, Brad

Catler, bass, Jonathan Kane, drums, and Marian Zazeela, light design. In 1993 Gramavision released the 2-CD set, La Monte Young, The Forever Bad Blues Band, Just Stompin’/Live at the Kitchen.

For La Beauté, the celebration of the Year 2000, the French government invited Young and Zazeela to create a four-month, large-scale Dream House installation featuring the continuous DVD projection of the 1987 six-hour 24-minute performance of their collaborative masterwork, The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights, set in a site-specific light environment created by Zazeela. Shown daily and visited by more than 200,000 people, the installation was headlined by L’Express: “La Monte Young: Le Son du Siècle.” From May through October 2001, Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, presented the German premiere of the DVD Dream House installation, continuing from 2002 through the present as a long-term installation with the addition in 2007 of the European premiere of an electronically generated continuous periodic composite sound waveform environment of The Magic Opening Chord from The Well-Tuned Piano. In MarchApril 2002, MaerzMusik Festival of the Berliner Festspiele premiered the DVD installation of The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights set in Zazeela’s light design for the monumental Berlin Staatsbank. Just Dreams released the DVD of The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights (JD002) in 2001, described by The Village Voice as “The most important piano work of the late 20th century.”

In 2003, under commission from four European organizations, Young and Zazeela created Just Charles & Cello in The Romantic Chord in a setting of Abstract #1 from Quadrilateral Phase Angle Traversals with Dream Light, for solo cello, pre-recorded cello drones and light design.

The full evening work was composed specifically for cellist Charles Curtis. He premiered it during 2003-04 in Paris, Dijon, Lyon, Berlin and the Kunst im Regenbogenstadl Dream House.

In 2005 the American avant-premiere was presented as part of the La Monte Young 70th Birthday Celebration in three concerts at the MELA Dream House, New York. In May 2008, Curtis presented the Italian premiere at the Angelica Festival in Bologna.

In 2005, the world premiere video installation of The Just Alap Raga Ensemble performing Young’s composition Raga Sundara (ektal vilampit khayal) set in Raga Yaman Kalyan was added to the long-term Regenbogenstadl Dream House. The 2005 La Monte Young 70th Birthday Celebration also included the avant-premiere performance at Kunst im Regenbogenstadl and the world premiere performances at MELA Foundation, New York of the Just Intonation Version (1984-2001-2005) of the Trio for Strings (1958) by The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble led by Charles Curtis, as well as two concerts of the ongoing avant-premiere of Young’s Raga Sundara by The Just Alap Raga Ensemble at MELA Foundation. Featuring extended alap sections and sustained vocal drones in just intonation over tamburas, The Just Alap Raga Ensemble is now Young’s primary compositional and

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performance vehicle. He has presented annual concert series of the group at the MELA Dream House from 2002 to present, including two world premiere performances in March 2009 in the Young Zazeela Dream House sound and light environment installed at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia. The video of the March 21st Just Alap Raga Ensemble concert from the Guggenheim Dream House featuring Young, Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi and Da’ud Constant, voices; Jon Catler, sustainer electric guitar; Charles Curtis, cello; and Naren Budhkar, tabla, was installed permanently at Kunst im Regenbogenstadl to open their 2009 season, replacing the video of the 2005 Raga Sundara performance.

Over the years Kunst im Regenbogenstadl has hosted cellist Charles Curtis with The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble in performances of several of The Four Dreams of China, including the world premiere of The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer in 2008, culminating in the world premiere cycle of all four of The Four Dreams of China over a three-day weekend in July 2011.

In 2012, Young and The Just Alap Raga Ensemble performed five Pandit Pran Nath Memorial Tribute Tour concerts in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Polling, Bavaria Dream Houses with live video streaming to the Angelika Festival, Bologna and Fondazione Mudima, Milan.

In July 2015, Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble gave the world

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premiere of the original full-length version of the Trio for Strings in Regenbogenstadl Polling Dram House and in September 2015, the American premiere in New York at the La Monte Young Marian Zazeela Jung Hee Choi Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House.

In 2015, the Dia Art Foundation acquired a unique version of the La Monte Young Marian Zazeela Jung Hee Choi Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House, which was open to the general public from June 13, 2015 to October 24, 2015. Young and Choi presented for the first time their sound environments in simultaneity: the La Monte Young The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119 and the Jung Hee Choi TONECYCLE BASE 30 HZ, 2:3:7, The Linear Superposition Of 77 Sine Wave Frequencies Set In Ratios Based On The Harmonics 2, 3 And 7 Imperceptibly Ascending Toward Fixed Frequencies And Then Descending Toward The Starting Frequencies, Infinitely Revolving As In Circles, In Parallel And Various Rates Of Similar Motion To Create Continuous Slow Phase Shift With Long Beat Cycles.

Marian Zazeela Marian Zazeela is one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a medium of expression and perhaps the first to compose recurring motivic and thematic statements and permutations with light over time as in music. Over more than five decades Zazeela has exhibited a unique iconographic vision in media encompassing painting, calligraphic drawing, graphics, film, light performance, sculpture and environment. Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, she created an original visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with sculptural forms to generate seemingly three-dimensional colored shadows in radiant vibrational fields. Light and scale are manipulated in such a way that the colored shadows, in their apparent corporeality, become indistinguishable from the sculptural forms, enveloping the viewer in the continual interplay of reality and illusion. “While the shadows on the wall change shape, the fixed geometry that produces them yields a uniform intensity of colour. This luminous shadow is, paradoxically, more present, constant and solid in appearance than the object that produces it….This phenomenal reversal demonstrates that the relationship between the physical and the perceptual is far more subtle and malleable than is commonly understood,” (Ted Krueger, Interior Atmospheres (Architectural Design; Wiley, Profile No 193, Vol 78, No 3; pp. 12-15; May-June 2008). Zazeela’s

work has taken the directions of performance in Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, sculpture in the series Still Light and neon Dream House Variations I-IV, environment in Dusk/Dawn Adaptation, Magenta Day / Magenta Night and her major work Light, and video projection in Quadrilateral Phase Angle Traversals.

As artistic director of The Theatre of Eternal Music, she creates the works that form the innovative visual components of Dream House, a sound and light work in which she collaborates with composer La Monte Young.

Zazeela has presented Dream Houses, light installations, performances and calligraphic drawing exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Major installations include the 2009 Guggenheim Museum exhibition, The Third Mind, American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989; the 2005 Lyon Biennale; Tate Liverpool; Pompidou Center, Paris; Ruine der Künste, Berlin; 44th Venice Biennale; Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf; MELA Foundation’s “La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective,” New York City; and Köln Kunstverein. She has received grants from the NEA, EAT, CAPS, Lannan and Cassandra Foundations. In 2009 she was the recipient with Young of the first Yoko Ono COURAGE Award in the arts to honor their having “never strayed from giving their uniquely creative efforts in Art to the world.”

Under a commission from the Dia Art

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Foundation (1979-85), Zazeela and Young collaborated in a 6 year continuous Dream House presentation set in the 6-story Harrison Street building in New York City, featuring multiple interrelated sound and light environments, exhibitions, performances, research and listening facilities, and archives. Arts Magazine described the centerpiece of this installation: “There is a retreat to reverie as if one were staring up into the summer night sky. The Magenta Lights is experienced as a meteorological or astronomical event, a changing color display above one’s head, like an art equivalent of the Northern Lights.” And Artforum wrote: “Zazeela transforms material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual encounter a spiritual experience. The Magenta Lights is an environmental piece in every sense of the word. What Zazeela has represented is the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality.”

Zazeela’s work has been significantly influential. Her abstract calligraphy was the primary influence on the calligraphy of the great poet and founding drummer of The Theatre of Eternal Music and the Velvet Underground, Angus MacLise. The visionary tradition of her curvilinear graphite on black and dot-style calligraphic drawings has also been carried on and taken to a highly imaginative level in the pencil and pinhole drawings of her senior visual arts and raga disciple, Jung Hee Choi. Zazeela’s Ornamental Lightyears Tracery has been credited

by Glenn Branca in Forced Exposure #16, 1990, and by David Sprague in Your Flesh # 28, 1993,

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to have been the direct influence on Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

From 1961 to 1962, Zazeela worked extensively with legendary filmmaker Jack Smith. She was the featured model in The Beautiful Book (dead language press, 1962) and appeared in Smith’s revolutionary Flaming Creatures, which was written for her and for which she also created the calligraphy for the film titles and credits. In 1964, Zazeela was filmed for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (Andy Warhol Screen Tests, Harry N. Abrams, 2006) and selected to be one of the models included in his Thirteen Most Beautiful Women series.

Zazeela began singing with Young in 1962 as a founding member of The Theatre of Eternal Music, and performed as vocalist in almost every concert of the ensemble to date. In 1970, she became one of the first Western disciples of renowned master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and has since performed and taught the Kirana style of Indian classical music. She accompanied Pandit Pran Nath in hundreds of concerts throughout the world and continues to perform in The Just Alap Raga Ensemble, which she founded with Young and Choi in 2002.

Zazeela’s one-year sound and light environment collaboration with Young, The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119 / Time Light Symmetry (Dia Art Foundation, 22nd Street, NYC 1989-90) was acclaimed by Village Voice critic Kyle Gann as “some of the strangest and

most forward-looking art New York has to offer.” Her 1990 Donguy Gallery, Paris exhibition of light works, purchased by the French Cultural Ministry National Foundation of Contemporary Art (FNAC) for their permanent collection, was exhibited in 1999 on the entire top floor of the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, and in 2004-2005 at the Pompidou Centre in the exhibition Sons et Lumières. Zazeela’s current long-term installation, Imagic Light, forms a part of the Dream House Sound and Light Environment, which has been presented at MELA Foundation, New York since 1993. Sound and Light: La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela, published by Bucknell University Press in 1996, provides an in-depth collection of primary source materials on her work.

At the invitation of the French government for La Beauté exhibition celebrating the Year 2000, Young and Zazeela created a four-month Dream House in St. Joseph Chapel in Avignon.

The installation featured the continuous DVD projection of the 1987 six-hour 24-minute performance of their collaborative masterwork, The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights, in a site-specific light environment created by Zazeela. The art center, Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Bavaria, presented a comprehensive solo exhibition of Zazeela’s drawings from May through October 2000, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog including essays, photographs, documentation and reproductions of 71 works. From May through October 2001, Kunst im Regenbogenstadl initiated a long-term light installation designed by Zazeela, featuring The

Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights DVD projection, two new sculptures from her Still Light series, an installation of Magenta Day / Magenta Night and her neon work, Dream House Variation III. The installation has continued through the present with the inclusion of a new video projection work, S symmetry V.1 from Quadrilateral Phase Angle Traversals, based on her Word Portraits series, as well as the video installation of the March 21, 2009 concert from the Guggenheim Dream House of The Just Alap Raga Ensemble performing Young’s Raga Sundara in Zazeela’s Imagic Light II. In 2010, in celebration of the 1000 year anniversary of the village of Polling, a large new entrance gallery space was added in Regenbogenstadl featuring two symmetrically placed pairs of Zazeela’s signature mobiles in a configuration of The Magenta Lights with a sound environment of The Opening Chord from The Well-Tuned Piano.

In 2012, Zazeela created Dream House installations and performed with The Just Alap Raga Ensemble in five Pandit Pran Nath Memorial Tribute Tour concerts in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Polling, Bavaria, with live video streaming of the Berlin concerts to the Angelika Festival, Bologna and Fondazione Mudima, Milan.

The Village Voice listed the MELA Church Street Dream House as the Best Art Installation in New York 2014, “A charge for the mind as much as for the eye and ear, the Dream House feels like a gift to our beleaguered city, where headspace is the most precious real estate of all.”

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In 2015, the Dia Art Foundation acquired a unique version of the La Monte Young Marian Zazeela Jung Hee Choi Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House, which was open to the general public from June 13, 2015 to October 24, 2015. This site-specific installation featured five light works by Zazeela; Neon, Dream House Variation IV (2009); Sculpture, Ruine Window 1992 II (2015) from Still Light; Sculpture, Open Rectangle II (2015) from Still Light; Installation, Imagic Light III (2015) from Light; Environment, Magenta Day / Magenta Night 545 West 22nd Street Skylights and Window (2015). The Village Voice wrote about her mesmerizing light works, “Zazeela’s works play light, shadow, and color — the elements essential to form and its

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perception — off of one another. I spent a great deal of time looking in particular at Imagic Light III (2015), two thin curls of white aluminum suspended from the ceiling. Illuminated by two theatrical lights, one red and the other blue, the curls take on those hues while at the same time creating colored shadows on the wall behind them. Up close, the piece’s quiet dazzle is a meditation on light and color. Seen from a distance, however, the shadows appear to take on a material presence, and the eye has to flex itself a little differently to distinguish the artwork from its cast silhouettes.” (August 25, 2015)

The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble In 2014 Ben Neil, Stephen Burns and Marco Blaauw came together to form an ensemble for performing the 8 trumpet version of La Monte Young’s “The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.”

In the early 1990’s, Ben Neil and Stephen Burns performed and recorded the piece in close collaboration with the composer. Wanting to revive the work and to bring performances to Europe, Marco Blaauw has selected high profile trumpeters, all specializing contemporary music.

In January 2015, they had the first working sessions with La Monte Young and Miriam Zazeela in their New York Dream House, gaining deep insight in the work and performance practice.

In the future, this formation will continue to concentrate on performing and sharing La Monte Young’s groundbreaking work for audiences around the world.

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Ben Neill

Stephen Burns (1959)

Composer/performer Ben Neill is the inventor of the mutantrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument, and is widely recognized as a musical innovator through his recordings, performances and installations. His electronic opera The Demo, created with composer/ performer Mikel Rouse, was premiered in April 2015 at Stanford University’s Bing Concert Hall.

Neill has recorded nine CDs of his music on the Universal/ Verve, Thirsty Ear, Astralwerks, Six Degrees, Ramseur, New Tone and Ear-Rational labels.

Performances include BAM Next Wave Festival 2010, Lincoln Center, Cite de la Musique Paris, Moogfest, Spoleto Festival, Umbria Jazz, Bang On A Can Festival, ICA London, Istanbul Jazz Festival, Vienna Jazz Festival, and the Edinburgh Festival, to name a few. He has worked closely with many musical innovators including John Cage, LaMonte Young, John Cale, Pauline Oliveros, Rhys Chatham, DJ Spooky, David Berhman, Mimi Goese, Page Hamilton, Nicolas Collins, and David Rothenberg. ITSOFOMO, his collaborative piece with the late artist David Wojnarowicz, has been presented widely in venues such as The Tate Modern London, The Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and The New Museum New York.

The trumpet has been used since the dawn of civilization to proclaimed victory, pride, and joy, when some hunter cut the horn off a beast they’d slain and blew through it “I love creating sounds that are vocal and expressive. As a musician my goal is to create powerful contexts, which inspire listeners to take an emotional adventure.” Stephen Burns has been soloist with orchestras on 5 continents and given recitals, master classes, and multimedia performances incorporating dance, video, art and electronics.

He has performed at the White House, NBC’s “Today Show” and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Recently he has been guest artist at the Aspen Music Festival and the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW. Mr. Burns is the founder and artistic director of the Fulcrum Point New Music Project in Chicago championing the music of Schuller, Stockhausen, Turnage, JacobT.V. and Zappa. He has recorded on Delos, Dorian, ASV, MHS, Kleos, and Naxos labels. Passionate about golf and tennis, Mr. Burns practices Tibetan Buddhist meditation, contemplation, and the enjoyment of fine food & wine. Stephen Burns is a Yamaha performing artist.

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Marco Blaauw Why the trumpet? “I’ve always had in mind the image of a troubadour, spreading the news through music. I wanted to do that too - with my trumpet. An important focus of my work has been to further develop the instrument and its playing technique, and to initiate new repertoire.” Marco Blaauw has an international career as a soloist, and is a member of Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne, Germany. Blaauw works in close collaboration with both the established and younger composers of our time. Many works have been especially written for Blaauw, including compositions by Peter Eötvös, Georg Friedrich Haas, Wolfgang Rihm, Rebecca Saunders and John Zorn.

Blaauw worked intensely with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Flying over the orchestra in a gimbaled cage, he played the leading role in Stockhausen’s MICHAELs REISE. He presented the premier of HARMONIES for trumpet for the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall and has premiered many solo roles from the opera cycle LICHT. In 2015, he started working with La Monte Young and the Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble on the melodic version of “The

Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.” In the coming years, he will produce many concerts throughout Europe to continue performing the version for 8 trumpets.

Marco Blaauw’s work is widely documented through radio, television and CD recordings. He started a series of solo CD’s in 2005, the sixth of which, Angels, was awarded the “Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik 2014.” Blaauw has been intensely active as a teacher, starting with the Stockhausen Courses, International Darmstadt Summer Courses and Brass Academy, Luzern University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale, international master classes and most recently the Stockhausen master’s program at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.

As a composer, Blaauw was awarded the 2016 Karl Sczuka Prize (support grant) for his first radio play, “deathangel.”

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Nathan Plante

Markus Schwind

Nathan Plante, from California, has been living and working in Berlin and Europe since 2004.

After successfully completing his Bachelor of Music degree in Trumpet Performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, he moved to Berlin in order to continue his studies at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler with Bill Forman. Since graduating in 2007 Nathan has become very active in the German modern music scene both as a soloist and as an ensemble player. He regularly performs with ensemble mosaik, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, musikFabrik NRW in Köln and Klangforumwien.

He is a founding member of Ensemble Apparat.

As a soloist Nathan has premiered new works

by Liza Lim, Gerhard Stäbler, Helmut Zapf and several others.

studied trumpet and music pedagogy with Malte Burba in Mainz and Guy Touvron in Paris. He furthered his studies of contemporary chamber music with Peter Eötvös and Markus Stockhausen at the Cologne University of Music. Since 1998, he has been a guest with some of the most prestigious international ensembles, working with Anima Eterna Brügge (historical instruments), Ensemble Modern, ensemble recherche, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Musikfabrik and the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin, under the direction of Pierre Boulez, Sylvain Cambreling, Heinz Holliger, Ingo Metzmacher, Emilio Pomarico and Hans Zender.

Schwind has worked with the composers John Adams, Mauricio Kagel, György Kúrtag, Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Furthermore, he is particularly interested in interdisciplinary projects with dance or film: for example „Wolf “ by Alain Platel, „Potemin“ by the Pet Shop Boys, and „I am a mistake“ by the Belgian artist and choreographer Jan Fabre.

Schwind‘s solo CD, „Paths - Klangwege“, in cooperation with the organist Martin Bambauer, was produced in cooperation with IFO classics.

Other of his CD productions can be found on EMI, Wergo, ECM and Deutsche Gramophone.

Since 2003, Markus Schwind has been a member of the artistically self-governing ensemble ascolta.

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Christine Chapman

Bob Koertshuis (1968)

Raised in the coastline woods of western Michigan, Christine Chapman has traveled far and wide to pursue her passion for music. In 1990, after finishing her musical studies at the University of Michigan and Indiana University, she broke out of the rural heartland of America for an orchestra job on the still fresh border between East and West Germany. The desire to gain a bit of work experience before returning to the States has since turned into a quarter of a century of exploration and adventure.

started playing the trumpet when he was 9 years old. From that moment on he knew: it would be his passion and love for life. He was named principal trumpet of the Arnhem Philharmonic in 1995. As a freelancer, he plays in all the major orchestras of the Netherlands, including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic and Radio Orchestra, in addition to other international orchestras of repute. During his career, he has worked with many of the world‘s finest conductors, such as Bernard Haitink, Zubin Mehta, Mariss Jansons, Lorin Maazel, Mstislav Rostropovich, Christoph Eschenbach, Eliahu Inbal and Yannick Seguin.

He teaches at the Prins Claus Conservatory in Groningen, as well as leading workshops and masterclasses.

As a member of Ensemble Musikfabrik, Christine Chapman has had the opportunity to collaborate directly with many of today‘s greatest composers, premiering and performing works

by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Eötvös, Rebecca Saunders and Georg Friedrich Haas, among others. The experience of performing „outside of the box“, such as with the music of Harry Partch, Sun Ra, Mouse of Mars - and of course La Monte Young - is the main impetus of her work. „Trying to see through the technicalities of playing to bring out the soul of the music; that is what is so exciting for me.”

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Matthew Conley As an active performer of contemporary music, trumpet Matthew Conley performs frequently with ensembles such as musikFabrik (Köln), Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt am Main), Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, OENM (Salzburg), among others. He is a founding member of the Berlin-based Ensemble Apparat, a brass quintet dedicated to the expansion of contemporary brass repertoire which, together with Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble Adapter, and the Sonar Quartet, forms the Ensemblekollektiv Berlin.

Matthew appeared as soloist on Matthias Pintscher’s sonic eclipse at the 2011 cresc…

Biennale für Moderne Musik in Frankfurt am Main and the 2012 Slowind Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He was a prizewinner at the 2011 Stockhausen Courses for his performance of OBERLIPPENTANZ für piccolo-trompete, and

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has subsequently been invited by the Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik to perform the piece on many occasions. In the summers of 2010, 2012, and 2013 he participated in the Lucerne Festival Academy under the artistic direction of Pierre Boulez and Peter Eötvös and was the 2010/2011 stipendiary of the Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie, based in Frankfurt am Main. Matthew holds a B.M. from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. In 2010 he completed a Master’s degree in Solo Performance at McGill University, where he studied with Edward Carroll. Additionally, Matthew has worked intensively with Markus Stockhausen and studied four consecutive summers at the Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale.