A Conversation with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Jung Hee Choi

La Monte Young’s hugely influential work began in the ’50s, studying under Karlheinz Stockhausen. He is often credited as the very first minimalist composer, and his name is inextricable from drone music. Brian Eno once called him “the daddy of us all,” and it makes sense: Young is the starting point for the Velvet Underground, Philip Glass and so many more.

In a public lecture at the Red Bull Music Academy Festival New York 2015, Young, joined by his longtime partner Marian Zazeela and their disciple Jung Hee Choi, sat down with Alan Licht to discuss their collaborative work with the Dream House projects and their journey towards a unique musical approach that includes jazz, the downtown scene and Indian classical music.

Alan Licht

I don’t know how much of an introduction I need to make about who La Monte is and the work that he and Marian and Jung Hee have done over the past five, going on six decades. But we do know that La Monte is the first person to start making music with exclusively sustained tones, and this marks a real shift away from melody in Western classical music and he’s the real progenitor of that. And then later other composers in the field started doing what was later termed minimalism and there was a direct connection personally between La Monte and some of those people, and his influence is felt very strongly there. And his influence is also felt very strongly in the alternative rock music from the ’60s onwards because some of the people who originally played with La Monte went on to play in certain rock bands, and also were carrying over certain ideas from La Monte’s music into there.

La Monte has also been extremely engaged in Indian classical music and a lot of the music that he does now is working within his own kind of version of raga form. And I think we could start to talk a little bit about what’s going on at the Dia Art Foundation opening in June, which is a new Dream House and a series of performances because that’s, in a way, the key to talking about a lot of the work that La Monte has been doing over the past few decades.

La Monte Young

Thank you Alan. About the idea of sustained tones, it came to me like a vision in the ’50s that sustained tones were really necessary to allow music to evolve to a higher level. I had been listening to Japanese gagaku, that’s court music, imperial court music, and I had been listening to the Ali Akbar Khan recording that came out in the mid-’50s with Yehudi Menuhin announcing. There were two ragas, raga “Sindhu Bhairavi” and raga “Pilu” and he also introduced the tabla player and the tanpura and for the first time in my life I heard a tanpura alone. And you’ve heard our tanpuras with our tuning, which is significantly improved from the little kiddie way that they recorded that tanpura, but that tanpura had an enormous effect on me. And I felt that it was one of the most mysterious and incredible sounds I had ever heard.

There’s a story about a white man who went to India early on and he heard some guy sitting there playing one note. He said, “How come you’re playing one note all the time?” The guy said, “You know you Westerners are always looking for your notes. I found mine.” And I think it’s his sense that you don’t have to go somewhere, you don’t have to impress anyone, but you get involved with the frequencies and it becomes a vehicle for meditation. There are many types of meditation. It’s an ancient art. It has existed in India and China. Bodhidharma took zen to India and Shaolin monks and their kung fu practices but they were already very serious and meditation is ancient, very ancient.

Through meditation, you can achieve another aspect of existence. We can think of the Dream House as a way in which we can find another environment that can influence our lives. Imagine generations being born in the Dream House, children born there, knowing almost nothing else, or they can go outside if they want, they can do whatever they please. But the fact that they were born in the Dream House, that they lived there for lifetimes, and their parents lived there and their grandparents lived there. It would allow a new way of thought processing and it would allow people to transcend beyond the kind of life that we live. We know that in our lives, entertainment is important to some. We all seek some kind of entertainment. What entertains one, might not entertain another.

When I did the loft concerts at Yoko Ono’s loft in 1960 at 112 Chamber Street, I selected the artists and Yoko let me select, do whatever I wanted basically, and I had a sign on the door, “This is not entertainment.” You see, I grew up in jazz and I grew up in classical music. And my first teacher was my father. He started teaching me cowboy songs and then he had me study when I was two years old with his sister Norma, my aunt Norma who was a rodeo singer. And she started teaching me cowboy songs. She was very good. As a young girl, maybe 12, 13, 14 years old, she was singing at the rodeos, breaking people’s hearts with these cowboy songs.

So, that was one of the first songs I ever learned and “Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie” and “Red River Valley.” And cowboy songs are very, very touching and many of them are modal. They grow out of Scotch-Irish music and Scotch-Irish music is extremely modal. We performed at the Barbican theatre in London back in the ’80s. After the performance, they had a bagpipe player perform in our honor. And it was extremely beautiful and I started talking to him about the modes in bagpipe playing and where did it all come from. And a lot of it is lost in time. Nobody knows where the drones really came from, but we do know that they are more prevalent in Indian classical music than anywhere else. And the shō in Japanese imperial court music took a very strong role with the same tones and harmony. You know, we find the same instruments, the sheng in Chinese music and we find the saenghwang in Korean music.

The Japanese changed it in their own way. It’s very… They had the idea that sustained tones had to do with spirituality. And I was meditating in my bedroom, I lived in my grandma’s house in the ’50s and thinking about, it was very common for everybody to think about the spectrum that Stockhausen analyzed of rhythm up to frequency. That rhythm gradually changes into what we hear as pitch. And I was thinking about it and I realized that the frequencies can be a vehicle for a type of spirituality. We can define spirituality, or maybe we can’t, but it’s not necessarily having to do with religion. It’s having to do with leaving the body and letting the body be the body, and the body very much likes rhythms, likes to dance, likes to run, likes to march, but eventually, the mind, at least some minds, seek something else. And frequency ratios, which is where every numerator and every denominator can be represented by some whole number, represent a new world that had already been investigated by the Chinese and the Greeks and who else?

Jung Hee Choi

Egyptians and Confucius.

La Monte Young

It was an ancient idea that the whole number frequency ratios were important and gradually I pointed out in some of my theoretical writings that only whole number frequency ratios produce composite wave forms that are periodic. The brain analyzes information of a periodic nature better than any other kind. If you give it radical noise, it doesn’t know what to make of it and, in fact, it’s not too happy with it, and they’ve done tests on animals, they’d drive them crazy with noise. But with pure harmonic frequency ratios, you can establish profound psychological states. They always used to talk about the relationship of modes to the moods and this was something I became extremely interested in. It was very appealing to me. It’s what’s going on in Indian classical music and it’s what gone on in a great deal of Asian music. And once I had sine waves available to me and frequency counters in my ear and oscilloscopes, I was able to put whole number ratios on an oscilloscope with Lissajous patterns.

And from that, I was able to use patterns that, eventually, no one had ever set up before and no one had heard before. And these became like a teacher to me of what these ratios were about. No one had ever heard them before. I had not, I had imagined some of them. And some ratios are in the tanpura, but eventually that’s the straight harmonic series with the integers. Everything in my music since about, I guess I started working in just intonation in the ’60s, I composed “The Well-Tuned Piano” in ’64 and the Theatre of Eternal Music was working with just intonation before that, and Marian and I got together in ’62. We’ve been together for about 53 years and we began to work on serious musical relationships.

Alan Licht

I hope people have already experienced the Dream House on Church Street but for people who haven’t, the Dream House, and there have been several different iterations of the Dream House, is a room space where sustained tones are sounding continuously. And there’s also a light installation by Marian going on. And the two are very much tied together and one of the most interesting things I think about the Dream House is that you’ve come to term them “a time installation measured in sound and light.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

La Monte Young

Yeah, well it’s the idea that it’s a sound in a light environment and then we have a subtitle title that it’s a…

Marian Zazeela

A time installation measured by a series... A time installation measured by a series of frequencies in sound and light.

La Monte Young

Yeah. Frequencies in sound and light. So the idea was that the frequencies are continuous. You know, tuning is a function of time. When astronomers want to measure relationships between planets and stars and solar systems, they get a better, more precise measurement if it takes place over thousands and millions of years. Well, we can say there was nobody there then but there was. Somebody, sometime. And they were able to put information together based on what they believe were the facts a long, long time ago and what the facts are now and what the facts appear that they’re going to be in the future. And you know you can buy a couple of oscilloscopes and put a Lissajous pattern on the screen. A Lissajous pattern is a two-dimensional and sometimes three-dimensional pattern that can move. It moves at the frequencies that are not absolutely stable and when the frequencies are very stable it looks fixed.

But you can also then spend more money and get a frequency counter. A digital frequency counter allows you to count frequencies beyond what you can do with the geometry of an oscilloscope and eventually I found that I was learning to hear things that I had never heard before and that I was, as a composer, selecting the information that I thought was important to bring to the world and let the world experience it. So a Dream House, you know, musicians are always looking for a place to play. Back in the ’50s, I used to go to jazz clubs and listen to everybody and I used to play in sessions. One day Lee said to me, “You know Warne Marsh is planning to buy a club.” Well, I didn’t realize what it really meant then, and suddenly I realized, it was like a Dream House for them. They had a place that they could play if he bought the club.

You know, Billy Higgins, back in the ’50s, he was my drummer and he’s the greatest drummer I ever heard, I guess. Later I played with the great Angus MacLise who’s a totally different style, but Billy was so impressed with my saxophone playing that he used to get us jobs here and there around town and set up recording sessions. We used to play at a place called Opus One downtown, way downtown. And they offered us a dollar a night and all the beer we could drink. So they would bring the beer constantly and we were drinking beer but we never got the dollar. This is a musician’s life.

One time we went to pick up Jon Catler, who’s an incredible blues guitar player, after he had played at a club, and I can’t remember why we were picking him up, but we were picking him up and he was standing at the bar and saying, “I’m not leaving until you give me my money.” And the guy behind the cash register was saying, “Oh I can’t open the cash register when the boss isn’t here.” Jon said, “I’m not going anywhere.” This went on for a while and finally the guy opened the money and gave him his 50 dollars. 50 dollars is nothing, but musicians have to play for nothing in order to even eke out a living. It’s a hard life but it’s a life of beauty because the musicians are totally involved with the music and they hope to get a little bit of money to buy a sandwich. Tell us about it Alan, you’re a musician.

Alan Licht

It’s true. Let’s see, I was asking more about the idea of time in relation to your work, because you’ve also said that your medium is time.

La Monte Young

Yeah, well, time is my medium. You know most people are worried about the time. Gotta get here, gotta get there, gotta make an appointment, gotta get to school, gotta get out of school. But if you can divorce yourself from that, disassociate yourself... You know, I did graduate work at Berkeley for two years and I won some grants and I left school. After two years at Berkeley, I came to New York in 1960 and I never went back to school again and suddenly I began to live on my own time. And I found out that I was working longer and sleeping longer. This built up over a long time until we were maybe awake for 28, 29, 31 hours and we were sleeping for… Well, right now, we sleep every other day, the whole day. And we work a long time on the day that we’re awake.

When we met our guru Pandit Pran Nath. It was said that if you lived with him it was like being in a cage with a lion, and living with Pandit Pran Nath was not too different. He could be nice if he wanted to, but he could be very, very strict and, you know, it’s not politically correct to hit the students anymore. But they produced great masters who do things that, you know, might not have happened.

I’ve seen these rich kids growing up and hitting their parents. What are they learning? They’re not learning anything. Maybe it’s politically correct for them to beat up on their parents but, you know, I was never allowed to do that. I became who I am. So, time is everything and really the first part of my life was all part of a spin trying to buy the time. Different people want to buy things. They want to spend their money on different things. Some people want to buy cars, some people want to buy women, some people want to buy drugs, and some people want to buy equipment, and some people want to buy time. Maybe I’m the only one who ever wanted to buy time, but there are other people who want to buy time. They want to take a vacation. That’s time.

Jung Hee Choi

So, the concept of time in Dream House installation was used in different context. Both sound and light, electromagnetism, can be measured as frequencies and their wave lengths are manifestations of their own sound and light. So in that sense, time installation measured by continuous installation of sound and light stays in that context.

La Monte Young

Well, it’s interesting that both sound and light are in the electromagnetic frequency range but sound is measured by the body completely differently than light. It so happens that sound is actually assimilated by the body in vibrational structure. Frequencies of mid to low range come up to the neurological system and come up to the cerebral cortex and more or less counts out what these frequencies are. And for the higher frequencies, that’s received differently. The cochlear membrane has frequency sensors that respond to more generalized areas. It’s not quite as precise as the low frequencies are. But the mind learns how to put it all together and when you hear all other frequency ratios sustained in sine waves and spend your life working on it, you begin to understand that you’re really hearing these ratios and it makes a whole lot of difference that they produce composite wave forms that are periodic.

A composite wave form is quite simply the wave form produced by two frequencies, or three frequencies, or four frequencies. You draw a new pattern and, you can all understand this I’m sure, but the new pattern is a very complex pattern and depending on how you analyze it, it can be analyzed down to its very basic frequency components with Fourier analysis. And eventually, you can determine that it’s periodic or it’s not periodic. If it’s not periodic, then a non-periodic frequency never really beats itself ever. You would have to have an infinity of lifetimes to measure a non-periodic frequency relationship between two frequencies. But frequency ratios that are periodic can be assimilated fairly quickly by the mind, especially the similar ones like the octave.

You know, we all know the octave. Two to one. And the perfect fifth, three to two. And perfect fourth, four to three. And the septimal seventh, seven to two, seven to four. So these are ratios that the mind learns to assimilate.

The study of sound is a very complex process but it’s a lot of fun in the same way that people that want to be musicians, they don’t get paid, but they work because they are in love with music and they are crazy about music. And they go on doing it year after year even though they’re not seeing any financial rewards. I used to go down to the LA Conservatory of Music, that’s where my saxophone teacher was. He was one of the great saxophone players of all time, William Green. He wasn’t so well known, but everyone in LA knew who he was and as soon as I got to John Marshall… John Marshall High School where I went to school was like a hotbed of jazz. There was jazz everywhere, people were talking jazz. The first day I went to school, I was standing on the porch of the band bungalow when a girl came up to me and put her hand on my cock and said, “Why don’t you come and join our Dixieland band?” And I said, “What? Where is it?” You know. Turned out, her boyfriend was leading the band around behind another bungalow and I went back and I started learning about Dixieland, which I didn’t really know anything about at that point. And then when first period opened... There was this incredible trombone player in band. His name was Gordo and he was in tenth grade and he would come to school every morning drinking a quart of beer in class. He made the band teacher cry and he had already been on the road when he was coming to the tenth grade for the first time. And he had a scholarship to study with the first trombonist of LA’s Philharmonic, Mark Zeller. And he drove the teacher crazy because he was uncontrollable because he [was] so good. When he’d sit up and play something, he sounded like he had just stepped out of Stan Kenton’s band.

And, you know Stan Kenton had the best brass players in the world. Nobody ever played the way they played. So high school was just constantly milling with people playing jazz and talking about jazz. I was just this hillbilly from Utah. I had just come back. I had lived in LA in the grade school when I went to Utah, when I was eleven years old. And I lived on my uncle Thornton’s celery farm for four years and I practiced a lot and my uncle Thornton had been my father’s saxophone teacher. He had a swing band in LA in the ’30s and he gave my… He gave me his saxophone music.

But after being in Utah for four years, the whole family told dad, “We want to go back to LA.” Went back to LA and that’s how I got into John Marshall High School. And the way I met Billy Higgins is I was playing with a trio and my friend said one day, “You know there’s this place way downtown called the Snakepit.” So, sounded good, it’s a place we could play. You know, young jazz musicians are always looking for a place to play sessions. So, we went down to the Snakepit and we were the only white guys in the place. And we look around and here’s some guys we’d never heard of, Billy Higgins and Don Cherry and an alto player named George Newman, and they just sounded incredible. They were the same age as us, about 17 years old. And then we went on and played a set. After that, they asked us if we could get together and play a session. So we went out to our trumpet player’s house in the Valley and had a session there with Billy Higgins and Don Cherry and Don Friedman and our trumpet player Steve Rosen and me.

After that, Billy Higgins and I did a lot of playing together and Don Cherry. And I grew up in jazz and Billy introduced me to the Willie Powell Big Blues Band. So Willie Powell had this band that only played blues and he put me in front of the band to play solos in front of the band. And it was really a great band. It had five Mexican guitar players who all wanted to play blues in E. That’s all they wanted to play, blues in E? And OK, I had to sharpen up, C-sharp for saxophone, and so I had to sharpen up my saxophone playing in C-sharp but, you know, sooner rather than later I was playing blues in E. And it was a great blues band. It was a lot of fun.

That’s where I first met Terry Jennings live. Terry Jennings was a jazz phenomenon. He was somebody that I discovered and he was at the first loft concert that I presented in Yoko Ono’s loft in 1960. Terry Jennings went to the same high school as me, John Marshall. I graduated and he went into the tenth grade. In the tenth grade, he already sounded like he had been playing his whole life and when I talked to his mother and father, they were school music teachers, they said, “You know, Terry was picking his own records out of the collection when he was two years old. He was playing Beethoven for us when he was four years old. He took the John Cage Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano out of the library when he was 12 years old. When he was 13 and 14, he was writing his own arrangements for the junior high school orchestra so they could feature him and he could play in front of the orchestra.”

He was one of the most amazing players I ever heard, an amazing musician. But unfortunately, his life was a tragedy. He got mixed up with drugs too early and he ended up face down in a mud puddle in the ’80s. And it was really a great loss. It was a great loss for me because he was one of my most important discoveries and I presented him in New York at Yoko’s loft and I presented him to Ben Patterson for his series that Rodney Keith sponsored in the Village. How many people have ever heard Terry Jennings? Oh, one person raised their hand. Incredible. All right, well I wanted to tell you he’s one of the greatest musicians I ever played with, including Billy Higgins and Don Cherry.

But this problem was a lifetime problem for him and eventually wiped him out. And I recommend don’t do drugs. Say no to drugs. No matter what stories you’ve heard. Say no to drugs.

Alan Licht

Obviously the Dream House is this continuous ongoing environment, but we should also point out that a lot of your works have had extreme time durations. “The Well-Tuned Piano” went on for six and a half hours. You were just talking about blues and I remember hearing about one sound installation you did that lasted 12 days and that followed the form of a 12 bar blues and the chord change, instead of the one chord lasting maybe four bars, it lasted four days, and then changed to the four chord which lasted a day, and then went back to the long chord. And even the “Trio for Strings,” the exposition of that, for the ’50s, it took, what, 10 minutes to introduce the first three notes?

La Monte Young

Well, the exposition probably in the ’50s, yeah, maybe it took 20 minutes. But...

Alan Licht

Which would have been an eternity in the ’50s I think. And in fact your teacher at the time told you that you were writing music like you were an 80-year old man, which is what you are now.

La Monte Young

Yeah. I finally made it. He said I was writing like with blinders and he said, “Nobody wants to hear this kind of music.” And I said, “You know, some people want to hear it,” and he said I should be writing like a young man with climaxes going here and there, and louder here and softer there. And I said, “You know, that’s not the only way.” And he was a very good composer but very traditional and traditional to the degree that he could not get out of it, and he could not understand that there was another way.

I had been listening to very static music. You know, Webern and Schoenberg. Schoenberg created a very important work, Five Pieces for Orchestra, in the early 1900s, 1913 maybe. And the middle piece called “Summer Morning By A Lake” is very static. There was very little like it in music ever before, except one or two Schoenberg piano pieces. Webern heard this and for the rest of his life, all of his music was like that. Schoenberg said, “Well, this came to me like in a dream.” It was like a dream, but he never did it again. For Webern, it became a path to a new beginning and a new world. And often this is the case. One person discovers it and thinks, “Well, that was alright but I’ve got to do something else now.” Another person discovers it and says, “Whoa, I can’t live without this.”

The Dream House is a place, the place that Billy Higgins and I were looking for maybe, it’s a place where you can have sound permanently. Musicians are always looking for a place to play. Some places will pay them, some places will just let them play, but as it is, a huge amount of energy goes into setting up and breaking down. This breaking down energy is very, very positive and Heiner Friedrich was the first person that I was able to convince that a Dream House should be permanent, that this breaking it down was just, we were going to break down a Dream House I had done in his Wooster Street gallery back in the ’60s. Alright. I told him, “I’m not coming anymore.” He said, “Why?” “It breaks my heart to see this thing taken down.” I didn’t believe him, but it made an impression on him. Later on, he had the idea that we should do longer Dream Houses and nobody else ever understood it and if they did understand it, who wants to pay for it? You got to buy a building. That’s the bottom-line. You have to buy a building and then you got to spend money on the building. What? Just so La Monte Young can have a place to play? And Marian Zazeela can set up her lights?

You know, Kurt Munkacsi is Phil Glass’s sound engineer and he used to run the Looking Glass Studio and he said, “You know, you got what you want,” and we got what we wanted. You wanted to have a Dream House and you worked for that and you worked for it endlessly and finally you got it. And they wanted something else. And, once you have a place that’s permanent, then you can do very, very creative work. I said to one of my students, when I started the Church Street Dream House, I said, “You know, I can do whatever I want here. I can change it in a year if I want.” He said, “Change it? That’s what everybody does.” You know, people are looking for variation, variety. Very few people have the understanding that you get into something in depth, you have to stick with it. Tuning is a function of time and if you can tune the intervals so that they’re more and more perfect, over years, decades, centuries, and so on, you’re living in a different world. And I’ve always sought a different world and I was tormented by the money that was lost and the energy when you take a place apart again and again. Then you have to set it up again. You know, setting up a Dream House takes a few months. Tearing it apart only takes a few days but it’s a very unhappy experience.

Alan Licht

You know, there’s also, besides just being a permanent place, there’s also the static quality of the sound itself and also the light works. I mean, when you’re looking… Marian has these mobiles in the Dream House and if you look at them, they don’t seem to be moving at all, but if you turn away and then you look again and you see the shadow on the wall, you realize it’s been turning very, very slowly the whole time. And it’s similar with the sine tones, because when you come in you hear what just seems to be this unchanging blast of sound, but then as you turn your head, you’re realizing you’re hearing different harmonics that you didn’t hear before. And as you walk around the space, you’re kind of experiencing it in a different way. So it’s a static environment that still cannot be experienced the same way twice, even within… Whether you go there 200 times, or within even a 10 or 15-minute span.

And in a way it reminds me a little bit of Walter De Maria’s lightning field, which was also sponsored by Heiner Friedrich, because the lightning field, if people know or don’t know what that is, was a big piece of land in New Mexico that the Dia Art Foundation purchased for Walter De Maria to do this work. And it’s I think about a mile square and it’s notated in a way by these large steel poles. And you can’t see it during certain times of day because of the position of the sun. So, if you get up at the crack of dawn or you’re there in the late afternoon, then the piece becomes visible. You can see almost, there’s maybe a dozen poles in a line, they’re all 200 feet apart from each other. And at these certain times of day, you can see pretty clearly the full line in any direction. But, during the middle of the day, you can’t see anything. You can see one or two of them, at a time. When you have the experience of going there at daybreak, because of the way the sun is hitting the poles, they’re constantly changing. There’s this light reflection on the pole but it’s different every time you look because of the earth’s movement around the sun. ¹¹Licht further clarifies the comparison between the Lighning Field and the Dream House: “Both can never be experienced the same way twice. Both seem to be static, but they’re also constantly in motion – the Lightning Field because of the movement of the sun and how it reflects on the poles, the Dream House because of the movement of the mobiles and the perceptual shifts of harmonics as the visitor moves through the space.”

So that was another thing, and I know that you and Walter go way back. You knew each other in California, you both moved to New York at the same time.

La Monte Young

I was probably the main influence on Walter. You know, these lightning...

Alan Licht

Well, Walter would say that also probably.

La Monte Young

Yes, I think he would. And these lightning fields were highly influenced by me but Walter ended up doing incredible work. He was one of the greatest artists of all time and I very, we all very much like his work. And this idea that something can last for a long time… Heiner and at that time his wife was Philippa de Menil who became Sheikh Fariha and she has her mosque downtown, Masjid al-Farah, many of you have probably been there. She’s a very wonderful person and she comes to most of our concerts and Dream Houses. And she understood the importance of what Heiner understood and they got us our first long-term Dream House at 6 Harrison Street, which lasted for six years. And there were financial reversals and problems and we lost it. It was a tragedy for us because we put six years of our lives into it wholeheartedly and, they just couldn’t work it out.

Marian Zazeela

It’s a very special space.

Alan Licht

About 25 years ago, I think you also had an installation at Dia, a different Dream House, and back then you were doing performances with a large group of about 23 people where you were reinforcing different tones in the installation itself.

La Monte Young

It’s called the Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band, and it was really a lot of fun. You know, I’m very interested in harmonies and chords and it was a great group. We had five trumpet players and four trombones, two of them were bass trombones, two tubas and four voices, three French horns. I mean, it was really a dream ensemble. But gradually over time, you can do much more precise work with a smaller, more knowledgeable ensemble and the ragas that we’re singing with this ensemble, first we sang “Yaman Kalyan” for many years and then we switched to raga “Darbari.” And ideally, you only teach raga “Darbari” to disciples because it has extraordinary nuances and embellishments that it takes years to learn. What is a disciple, in these days, you know? Many people can’t imagine that in Indian classical music they have disciples. But you have to remember, at one time, there were no public schools. Absolutely, China, India, even America. No public schools. You had to become an apprentice of somebody and stick with it. In some mediums, such as Indian classical music, you literally had to become a disciple, which meant you were going to follow the master for your whole life and serve the master and learn, well, music.

Pandit Pran Nath once, he taught raga at Delhi University, he said, “You cannot learn raga in school. There’s just not enough time.” Learning one raga can take years, to really learn it, and only the more talented can manage it even. Terry Riley and Marian and I studied with Pandit Pran Nath together. Well, Marian and I lived with him for 26 years. More or less 50 percent of the time, I’ll qualify it, because sometimes he went on tour. And usually he took us with him, sometimes we had to stay home and do other work. He wanted us, you know you’re not allowed to practice in front of your teacher. Can’t disturb him. Want to practice? You have to separate one way or another. He said that when he lived with his teacher, he never got any sleep because he couldn’t practice in front of his teacher so he had to go into the jungle at night and practice all night, get back in time to make his master’s tea in the morning. And then he had to be very nice and keep quiet and obedient.

One time, just to show you how strict these old masters were, he was practicing singing and playing tanpura in front of the fireplace. His teacher was, Mustafa, was smoking his hookah. I’m sure it had nothing more than tobacco. And Pandit Pran Nath made a wrong note. He took these hot tongs and grabbed his ear. You know, it was a way of learning. And Pandit Pran Nath said he was so appreciative of what his teacher gave to him. He made him learn. You didn’t think of doing mutiny with your teacher, you only thought of serving your teacher and trying to learn something. You know, raga’s a very complex art form. It’s been handed down possibly for thousands of years. It’s lost in the midst of time. We know about it going back to the 1200s and before, but it didn’t come from nowhere.

Jung Hee Choi

Well, it is said that there are many crews and there is no disciple now, even in India. The tradition is definitely dying off and I accompanied La Monte and Marian for the last 15 years and Terry Riley once joked that La Monte and Marian were probably the last ones who have a disciple on earth.

La Monte Young

You know, nobody wants to face up to it, but you’re so grateful when you have one good disciple. Somebody who says, “I want to do this,” and they don’t say, “I want to run away and I’m tired of it. And I’m going to go do my own work now, goodbye.” Raga study is very rewarding but only to a few and Jung Hee is not only a very talented raga disciple, she practices a lot, but she is a very extremely genius visual artist as well and a composer. And she’s a polymath and yet... Pandit Pran Nath once said to me, “I have always felt that I’m a student.” This is the attitude, you take this attitude, and you can never stop learning. You always improve, you’ll get better. She has that attitude. It’s the attitude we tried to have and I recommend it highly to those who want to do something with their lives.

Alan Licht

And Pran Nath’s teacher, I think, after a certain time only practiced raga “Darbari,” right? That was, every day he would practice it, every single day, but it was only one raga.

La Monte Young

Yeah, that’s right. It’s an extraordinarily profound raga and somebody said to him, while he was practicing two ragas, raga “Todi” in the morning, which is also very profound, has very unusual pitches, and raga “Darbari” at night. Somebody said to him, “Khan, how come you’re only practicing these two ragas?” He said, “You know, if the sun would shine all day, I would only practice one of them.” So, you know, they were very adherent to the idea of morning ragas, afternoon ragas, evening ragas, midnight ragas, late night ragas, early morning ragas.

Alan Licht

Also, the same teacher, who I’m a big fan of, also forbid anyone to record any of his concerts. There’s only one recording that survives, from a radio broadcast. Yeah. So if people think you’re particular about recording, they should check out this guy.

La Monte Young

What did you say? Would you repeat it again?

Alan Licht

Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan.

La Monte Young

Yeah.

Alan Licht

Never permitted recording of his concerts.

La Monte Young

No. He didn’t even record it. Thank god, somebody hid a microphone under a carpet and we had this one-hour recording of the “Darbari” which is out of this world. And otherwise, you would have never realized. Pandit Pran Nath said he was possibly the greatest singer of all time. You know, when you hear stories about Indian singers, Tansen was one of the nine jewels of Akbar’s court. Akbar was the emperor of India and the greatest patron of the arts in India of all time. So, when Tansen sang, if he sang a rainy season raga on a hot summer day, they say that the clouds came and the rain fell. And, one day Akbar said to him, “You know Tansen, you must be the greatest singer of all time.” “Oh no, I’m nothing, you should hear my teacher.” And, “Who’s your teacher?” He said, “Swami Haridas,” and he said, “Well, where is he? How can I hear him?” He said, “And whose court does he sing?” he said. He said, “He only sings in the court of god.”

And so, Akbar and Tansen conspired to find a way to go to Swami Haridas’ cave and get him to sing for them. So, Akbar disguised himself as a tanpura player and carried Tansen’s tanpura. Traditionally, disciples carried the tanpura, playing the tanpura. Nowadays, we have recordings of tanpuras and the disciple carries the recording of the tanpura. But, so Swami Haridas had extraordinary, what do you call them? Powers, he could… What’s it called?

Jung Hee Choi

Premonition?

La Monte Young

Yeah he could… Premonition, everything. But, there’s a word for it. You all know what it is. He immediately knew they were coming and he said, “You know, this is very bad for the king of India to pretend to be Tansen’s disciple and coming to the hut of a holy man to play a trick on him.” He knew they were coming. I’ll tell you a story about Swami Haridas. One day, he heard a voice saying, “Here I am. Come and dig me up.” It turned out it was a very beautiful statue of Krishna with jewels all over her, and it was buried in the ground someplace. He heard the call and he told people you go over here and you dig this up, and there it was. And now it’s in Vrindavan, which is where Swami Haridas lived and it’s in a little temple and they keep the curtains closed all day long and then once a day they just open the curtains for a few minutes. It’s very beautiful.

So he had extraordinary… What’s the word? Anyway, psychological powers. He knew that they were coming and he thought it was not good that they were coming to play a trick on him. Anyway, they get to their cave and Tansen says, “Oh master, why don’t you sing something for us?” And he says, “I’m not in the mood.” And so, time goes on and finally Tansen blatantly sings something and purposely makes a mistake. Swami Haridas gets very angry and he says, “You know, singing in the courts is ruining you. You’re really finished.” And he sang the raga the way it should be. Akbar heard it and he went into a trance. When he came out of the trance, Swami Haridas was gone and he said to Tansen, “Where did he go?” And he said, “Now that you’ve found his cave, he’s left and he’ll never come back.”

These people were not seeking fame. He didn’t want patronage from Akbar. He wanted to be left alone so he could do his practices. He had many good disciples who came to study with him and, to him, that’s all he wanted. And this attitude is practically lost in our time of commercialism. It’s rare that you find someone that says, I just want to do my art. You know, in China in the old days, artists didn’t put their name on the painting, or they put a pseudonym. And it’s an idea that something is much more important than the money we earn. OK, I try to earn money, he tries to earn money, you try to earn money, and so does she. And you have to have it to get by, but some people try to avoid it very seriously. And they try to avoid people. You know, very few people ever let me do what I wanted to do in music. The first person who really encouraged me deeply was Marian.

You know, when I was at UCLA, when I was at LA City College, Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg’s disciple, stood me up. And I wrote a composition for his seminar and for a musical, he stood me up in front of the whole music department and he said, “He’s a composer.” Now from Leonard Stein, that was big because Schoenberg had told him he was not a composer. He was a pianist and a great player, but he shouldn’t try to write music. So, this was a great start and when I got to UCLA, Dr. Robert Stevenson was an extraordinary musicologist on music south of the border and Spain. He took me through the whole music department and said, “He’s fantastic, you know.” And when I applied for a Woodrow Wilson, he took my letter, retyped it, took it to the head of the Woodrow Wilson committee and said, “I don’t care what anybody else writes about him, you give him the grant.”

A few people did something worthwhile with their lives because they believed in me. And I will always appreciate it and that is necessary to go on, because I didn’t ever figure out how to be a commercial musician. OK, you may say now, I’ve learned how to earn money from the Dia Art Foundation, but it was very unusual that I managed to.

Alan Licht

Well, I also wanted to ask you actually about your relationship to the audience because very early on, you know, you were doing these pieces a lot of times, you would basically have the audience sitting in pitch blackness.

La Monte Young

Yeah.

Alan Licht

In some things and some cases, you would have the audience, you would start a performance with the audience still outside and it would be already in progress when people were allowed in. Especially with the high volume that you use, especially in the ’60s and throughout, there’s been this idea of trying to envelope the audience in sound and how to be this very immersive experience. How do you see your relationship to the audience now?

La Monte Young

My relationship to the audience has changed over time and at first, I was sort of playing with them a little bit. You know, I went to Berkeley for two years of graduate work. At that time, Berkeley academically was number two in the US, next to Harvard. We worked hard and when I wrote these 1960 compositions I wrote very conceptual narratives. For example, in one composition, we built a fire in front of the audience and let the audience watch it and listen to it. And in another composition, we turned a butterfly, or a group of butterflies loose in the audience. Later on, one group of performers recorded with microphones and recorded the butterflies’ wings.

But also, I recorded pieces where the audience didn’t know what was going on. Either we told them or we didn’t tell them that this composition is starting and it’ll be over in 13 minutes, or it’ll be over X time. And in 1960, number 6, I invited the audience to come on stage and let the performers go into the audience and watch the audience. I had various ideas about changing the roles and allowing other things to happen but, I have to admit, I was doing this advertently because very few people can understand complex music. My music is some of the most complex and profound music that ever was created and a lot of those guys at Berkeley were just academic professors. Some of them were very good and very nice and very helpful to me. But a number of them are what we call armchair composers and they didn’t do anything with their lives, except teach at Berkeley.

OK, in some countries, being a schoolteacher is big. In Asia, if you’re a schoolteacher at a university, you’ve made it. That’s… No one expects anything more. But in America, something else is expected. You’re expected to do all kinds of things, and also you have to measure yourself against pop stars even though you don’t want to be a pop star. So, for me, I was a teaching assistant at Berkeley for two semesters and most people think I’m an extremely good teacher. I have many private students right now. I do love to teach and I love to perform a lot more. And it’s an ongoing process. I hope to die onstage rather than in a hospital bed waiting for somebody to come and visit me who never comes. And I think that it’s the story of my life to sing onstage and die there. Hopefully, in a very ecstatic state rather than, ‘Oh, I got old and I was too old to go onstage again and I have to lie around the house.’ I’ve already lied around the house so that was no big deal. But let me hear you talk, or you talk. Say something.

See, they take advantage of me. They make me work.

Marian Zazeela

But you actually like to talk. I don’t necessarily like to talk so, I’m happy for you to take over.

Alan Licht

But there’s a different relationship with an audience at a raga concert than there would be at other kinds of concerts probably. You can’t point your feet at the performers.

La Monte Young

Absolutely. Yeah, you can’t point your feet at the stage and you can’t lie down. Gotta sit up and pay attention and listen. It’s very much like meditation. Raga singers have devoted their whole life to a very strict upbringing and practicing.

Marian Zazeela

It’s a very big subject. There are so many ragas that you just, there’s no way you can learn all of them and even to learn one or two takes a tremendous amount of concentration and practice. So, they’re right to have set it up that way. There’s no other way to convey that material.

La Monte Young

Otherwise, if you don’t treat them with great respect, it shows that you’re not respecting them and they can see that you don’t know what you’re doing there. You know, I found that when I was younger we did free concerts and the audiences were very rowdy. When they started paying for the concerts, then they began to behave. And they have to have a sense this is very, very serious. You know, I’ve been on a stage since I was four years old. I was tap dancing and singing at the Ridge Theatre in Montpelier, Idaho, when I was four or five years old. And then I moved to LA and my dad got me a saxophone when I was seven. And it went on as you know. What else?

Alan Licht

Well, one of your quotes was that you tried to get inside the sound and I think that’s what you’re trying to get the audience to do as well.

La Monte Young

Yes. Once you get inside the sound, you’ve really left this world and the degree to which you can do it, you have transcended the physical reality of this world. In advanced meditation, you learn to discipline your body. You let the body sit there in control in front of the shrine or wherever you meditate and you let your, basically your imagination is your soul, and you let your soul leave the body and do whatever you want it to do. In raga singing, you can only do that to a certain degree because you have to control your body the whole time you’re singing raga. So, raga is considered the fifth type of meditation and it’s called Nāda yoga and it’s not at all the same as meditation where you don’t have to prove that you’re really accomplishing anything. When you’re singing raga, everyone knows instantly you’re either great or you shouldn’t be there. Whereas in meditation where, you know, some people ask the Zen master to hit them to keep them up, and some people don’t.

And what do you want out your meditation? Do you want to learn something more? Zen meditation is very different from Hindu meditation and Shiva type meditation. You know, there’s just so many types of meditation but some say, “All paths lead to the same place.” Others say, “There’s only one place and many names.” You can talk about this. You. You’re an expert on this.

Jung Hee Choi

It’s an interesting concept, going inside of sound. Actually one of the oldest sacred texts in India, Rigveda, they said that sound is the space and they are enveloped by sound. So obviously, La Monte didn’t know about this concept when he was first conceived the concept of the Dream House in 1962. But this permanent installation, sound and light installation, has some different meaning and provides the context to the audience to experience the permanent structure of the natural numbers, the positive integers. The harmonic series is the natural, physical model of the numbers and Dream House light installation give you the space that you can come back and experience the structure of the number.

Alan Licht

There’s a story about Morton Feldman meeting Stockhausen. Do you know this story? And Stockhausen asked him, you know, “What’s your philosophy like? How do you come up with these pieces?” And Morton Feldman said, “Well, I try not to push the sounds around.” And Stockhausen replied, “Not even just a little bit?” That’s something else that you’ve said, is that you try to let the sounds be what they are.

La Monte Young

Well, you know, Morton Feldman and I did a very long interview conducted by Francesco Pellizzi. It’s published and in this interview, Morton expressed the opinion that he thought improvisation was not composition. And I made a very strong argument that improvisation was composition in real time and that, you know, you had to be very accomplished with sound in order to improvise and compose in real time. And I like Morton’s music a lot, but that’s my opinion. It is composition and I can do it. I do love improvising and I like to improvise. In fact, I like to improvise much more than I like to write music.

Jung Hee Choi

Writing music for the man in the street.

La Monte Young

Oh. She knows this story. It’s a very good story. So, one of Feldman’s teacher was Stefan Wolpe and so... remind me, I know the story.

Jung Hee Choi

He was a kind of socialist and told...

La Monte Young

Stefan Wolpe.

Marian Zazeela

Stefan Wolpe was a socialist.

Jung Hee Choi

Told him that you have to write music for the man on the street.

La Monte Young

OK. Morton Feldman says, “Yeah I see it,” and he went over and he looked out the window and there was Jackson Pollock walking by. It is necessary to write music for people, there’s no doubt about it. But you don’t have to go down to their level, you have to bring them up to your level. You have to give them something that changes their whole life. They’ll be thankful and grateful for it later on. Just because they don’t understand first time around. You know, I hear a lot of music that is very complex at first, but people will eventually be very grateful if you give them the best you have to offer.

Alan Licht

You had mentioned improvisation just now and we should probably point out that quite a lot of your work actually involves improvisation, even with the other side of it being the things that you’ve worked out very theoretically in terms of, you know, frequency ratios and so on and so forth. There’s the other side of you, as the performer, which is very much tied into improvisation.

La Monte Young

Yeah, well, this is a very important subject. For example, in Indian classical music... Pandit Pran Nath said to me, “OK, the first 12 years is voice culturing and after 20 or 30 years I can put you on stage.” I’m thinking, “What?” You know, this sounds like hard work. And, it turns out, because he really thought we were very talented. We had accompanied him at almost every concert so I was learning fast and Marian was learning fast. And Terry was playing toms sometimes. So, the way you learn Indian classical music, a raga, you learn all the details of the raga by memory and you don’t start improvising with them until many years later.

Jung and I had been studying for many years and we were working on one or two, three, four ragas, learning all the elements, learning the phrases, learning the main notes, learning the secondary notes, learning the composition. And one day, she said to me, “When are we going improvise?” And I said, you know, “We’re going to do it.” And we do improvise a lot. But you begin with all these fixed elements and this is the difference… I was a very good jazz player and Billy Higgins was very annoyed that I stopped playing. And, pre-jazz you don’t have to know nothing, but to play the way I played and to play the way Don Cherry plays, play the way Miles Davis plays, and Charlie Parker, you have to know everything. And you know all of these elements in a very disciplined way.

You know, when Charlie Parker first… How many people know the story of the first time Charlie Parker went to his jam session? OK, this is a very enlightening story. He went to a jam session, he was just a young guy. They laughed him off the stand and hit him with a cymbal, threw a cymbal at him. He went home and cried. He practiced for a year. He came back and he was the great Charlie Parker. You know, he had overlooked something and whatever it was, that something had to be remedied and he had to take care of it and he had to do the practice. Discipline leads to freedom. After you really know what you’re doing, you can become very free with it.

You know, when they did the recording of Charlie Parker with strings… How many people know this story? One? Maybe not. Listen, you know the recordings. Mitch Miller put them together. He produced them and he wrote string arrangements of a lot of tunes that he knew Charlie Parker knew. On the day of the recording session, Charlie Parker was nowhere to be found. They had to go find Charlie Parker. And they got him, they brought him in. He didn’t have a horn, they had to get his horn out of hock, then they got a horn. The orchestra started to plan and Charlie Parker started to play over it and those are the recordings. He didn’t rehearse at all. He knew the tunes, he heard what they were doing, and he played. And this level of mastery is what’s required to be somebody other than the guy sitting on the street corner playing for food. It’s a totally different level. And Charlie Parker was so great, that everybody played like him.

And eventually Lee came along and didn’t play like him and Charlie Parker thanked him. He said, “Thank you man for not playing the way I play.” And Charlie Parker was so great that people thought that they had to take the drugs he took, they thought they had to drink the alcohol he drank, they thought they needed to lead the lifestyle he led. Hocked their horns, never have a horn. That was all wrong. What was right was that Charlie Parker was a genius and he practiced hard and that’s what they had to do to ever play like Charlie Parker.

Those of you who don’t know, Charlie Parker was the greatest jazz musician of all time, beyond compare, and the only people whose improvisations compare with him, are, I would say, Indian classical improvisers. Maybe some other Egyptian singers and other very, very serious art forms from the East.

Marian Zazeela

We agree.

La Monte Young

Too much agreement. I want more counterpoint, harmony, lights, environments.

Alan Licht

Well, [John] Cage was also not a big fan of improvisation.

La Monte Young

You know, Cage was a great thinker, he was a great writer, he was a great speaker, but, and he did have musical talent, although maybe Schoenberg discouraged him. He took Schoenberg’s classes at UCLA. But, you know, OK, you can go through life saying, “OK, the sounds on the street is the kind of music I want to hear.” No problem, that’s up to you. These sounds are not the music I want to hear. I want to hear the sounds that I create. “The Well-Tuned Piano” is a very complex, pre-composed structure that I improvised with and the same is true for our approach to the ragas that we sing with the Just Alap Raga Ensemble. We’ve introduced harmony to raga and we’ve introduced counterpoint.

This type of creativity is what I’ve lived my life for, to try to do and Marian’s work with light is phenomenal. She did the same thing with light that I did with sound, even though she’s not talking about it. Jung Hee came to study with us because of the work of Marian Zazeela. She didn’t care about La Monte Young, she’d never heard of La Monte Young. She came to the Dream House because she saw Marian Zazeela’s work with light, with colored shadows and realized that nobody had ever done this. Pandit Pran Nath said that she was a genius and an angel and a never-before, never equaled. Well, I can talk endlessly.

Alan Licht

One other thing I wanted to talk about, which I’ve always been interested by, is that you sort of excluded certain intervals from your music. Something like a major third, which we all would recognize from like every pop song ever written in a major key, appears nowhere in any of your works probably from the late ’50s onward.

La Monte Young

Alan is referring to the idea that in some of my music I referred, I avoided the ratio five and its multiples. And what I did was really rather conventional. You know, if you look at any musical language that’s been set up, certain frequencies, ratios have been avoided. And the reason I avoided five is it became everywhere in Western classical music. You know, in the old days of Pérotin and Léonin, when they were writing organum at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, they weren’t using major thirds. Gradually, and more in the Baroque period and a lot in the classical period and the Romantic period, the major third came in. That’s the ratio of five and its multiples.

And I realize to make a definitive sound in a definitive language, if it would allow people to understand the analogy, and to hear a totally new musical language, that I would do well to leave out five. Some of the ragas that we practice have five in them, raga “Yaman Kalyan,” and it’s very beautiful and I understand five. Five is everywhere in cowboy music. I grew up on it. But, I demonstrated that you can make very raga music without five. And you can do the same with any intervals.

Yuji Takahashi was a Japanese composer who was very talented. He could play the Boulez “Piano Sonata No. 2” and the Stockhausen Klavierstücke just like the way David Tudor plays them. And he wrote a piece dedicated to me in which he avoided the ratio of two. He left out the octave. It had three and seven and five, but no octaves. And it demonstrated something that we can predict, you can make music with different limitations and you can have different sets of intervals and they will have their own sound and their own language. And I was very touched that he wrote a piece like that.

Very few people have ever worked on that level. Most people are just writing songs, you know? I had a very nice young man. His parents said to me, “He’s very talented.” So I asked him, he had never heard of Charlie Parker. So what’s he writing, what’s he writing, you guys know what he’s writing? Did you hear him? Maybe you didn’t hear him talk. He’s writing, I guess, some kind of pop music that I don’t know about.

Jung Hee Choi

La Monte is probably the first composer using numbers as the compositional means and he developed…

La Monte Young

Well, remember Harry Partch? Harry Partch.

Jung Hee Choi

Yes, well, not including all the just intonation composers. But he developed an extensive system of classification of frequencies in the ’60s called Two Categories of…

Marian Zazeela

Two Systems of…

Jung Hee Choi

Two Systems of Eleven Categories. That is, it’s a classification of tones. Basically, established an algorithm of the ratios that decide to exclude number five and so that not only the frequencies but their combination tones can also exclude five. This work has not been published, but he used this system for the later Dream music. And I asked him, “Why you dislike not to use this system anymore,” and he said... La Monte?

La Monte Young

Well, the reason I stopped using it... first of all, I didn’t stop using it forever, but I stopped using it for, say, a few decades. And I became a more romantic feeling about music. I just wanted to play the intervals I wanted to hear and I didn’t want to worry about whether they fit into my Two Systems of Eleven Set of... Two Systems of Eleven Sets of...

Jung Hee Choi

Eleven Categories.

La Monte Young

Of Eleven Categories. And, you know, I realized that I have the right to change my mind. I have the right to create my own system. I have the right to create my own music. And you have to come out of the orthodoxy of society. You know, the academy is going to tie you down, they’re going to say you have to write this harmony and this counterpoint and the other. But once you know what you’re doing, you should do what you know and not try to stay there with what society offers you. You should first learn what society offers you inside and out. You should become a master of what society offers you and then you can fly.

You know, in Indian classical music they have a terminology for how to improvise. There are three types of improvising. The introduction of the tones. One. Two. Combination permutation. Three. Swimming like a fish and flying like a bird. You have to learn the basics, the exposition of the tones. Combination permutation. That is throughout music. First, you may not realize it, but it’s everywhere.