There is popular music—literally, the music of the people—and then there’s music of the academy. The line is not impermeable either way.
Read the last Popdose on 'Inside Pee-Wee's Playhouse.'
Jazz, once a music of the people, is now mostly an academic art form, and orchestral works by academic composers like Henryk Gorecki or Arvo Pärt can still cross over to popular success. But there is still a useful distinction to be drawn.
And as with any academy, the world of “serious” music has schools within schools. In this schema, La Monte Young inhabits the innermost of inner rooms. And yet Young’s influence is far-reaching, thanks to disciples like Brian Eno and the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, who brought his drone-based, numerology-obsessed methods into the pop world. He is the great lacuna of new music—heard of, perhaps, but seldom heard.
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The composer and theorist, subject of Jeremy Grimshaw’s new study Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young, comes honestly by both his renown and his obscurity. He allows few public performances of his works, and very little of his output is available commercially, either in scores or in recorded form.
About the only way to experience Young’s rigorous, math-heavy compositional style is to travel to the Tribeca loft building that houses Young’s residence and studio, and take the stairs to the third-floor landing from which one enters the Dream House, the full-sensory immersive environment of synthesized drones, incense and visuals created by Young’s wife and partner, light artist Marian Zazeela.
There’s an element of pilgrimage here (you even have to remove your shoes when entering the installation), and that’s no coincidence. Young’s works are steeped in ritual and mythic resonances drawn from sources ranging from his upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to the Chinese Buddhism that engaged him in the 1960s, to the eclectic Hinduism of his guru and teacher, Pandit Pran Nath.
Plenty of composers have tried to make music that evokes the religious experience, of course. But Grimshaw argues—convincingly—that Young’s aim is higher than that. Through psychoacoustical techniques and precise mathematical ratios in tuning, he seeks to create music that actually constitutes a religious experience in itself.
Grimshaw, a professor of music at Brigham Young University, is equally at home with the more outré points of Mormon theology and with the complicated musicological and mathematical concepts around which Young’s works are organized. There is a lot of technical material in Draw a Straight Line, and at times Grimshaw, perhaps unavoidably, lapses into the tics of scholarly writing, most glaringly the dreaded predundancy (i.e., “In this chapter I will demonstrate…”).
He is hampered, too, by his subject’s control-freak tendencies. Young gave Grimshaw unprecedented access to his archives and promised him permission to reproduce scores and correspondence, only to withdraw that permission unexpectedly—leaving Grimshaw to rely on paraphrases. Despite the limitations and the jargon on which he is forced to rely, Grimshaw manages to demystify Young’s techniques and process to a great degree.
What is abundantly clear is that Young’s fusing of music and the divine is, for him, a very serious undertaking indeed. While predecessors like John Cage and contemporaries like Terry Riley maintained a sense of playfulness in their deconstruction of musical norms, Young seems from the start to have been keen to discourage anyone from discerning any sense of humor in his compositions.
Even in his Fluxus-influenced pieces of the early 1960s—in which a performer is instructed to push his piano through a brick wall, or to attempt to feed his instrument hay and water—are presented with a fundamental seriousness of intent (indeed, Young used to include a printed notice on his concert programs: THE PURPOSE OF THESE CONCERTS IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT). He takes his principles seriously enough to incorporate them into his day-to-day routine. The recorded drone of an Indian tamboura sounds in Young and Zazeela’s living quarters 24/7. Not that they keep to a 24-hour day, of course; for nearly 40 years the pair have maintained a 33-hour wake/sleep cycle of their own devising.
Grimshaw is a fine storyteller, when he’s got a story to tell. His accounts of Young’s early adventures in New York, and of his own interactions with Young (he lived briefly in a studio apartment adjoining the Young archives while researching the book, and occasionally assisted with the operation of the Dream House installation), are by turns funny and illuminating. But make no mistake: With its pages of tables and diagrams of harmonics and tuning systems, Draw a Straight Line can be, at times, tough sledding for the general reader, especially when compared to more populist works like Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise, which—without recourse to technical analysis—convey the flavor of the music in lucid, sensual prose.
The sections on Young’s monumental solo work The Well-Tuned Piano suffer the most in this regard. Grimshaw’s math is all present and correct, but the reader us left with very little idea of how the work sounds—the slow unfolding of notes, unearthly sonorities accumulating like clouds over the course of performances that might last five hours or more as Young explored the reaches of a custom Bösendorfer concert grand retuned to his own eccentric specifications, the conflux of the tuning’s inexorable logic with the luminous possibilities of Young’s improvisation.
All that aside, by giving providing context for his ideas and techniques, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It does make Young and his work more approachable for the listener—provided that the listener is willing to make the approach. Young himself remains as uninterested in compromise as ever. His eventual withdrawal from full cooperation with Grimshaw’s project suggests that if he is interested in being understood, it is only on the terms that he chooses. La Monte means “the mountain,” after all. And the mountain does not come to you—you must go to the mountain.
Jack Feerick is a critic-at-large for Popdose.
