Somewhere in Bern, Idaho there is a humming step down transformer that changed the course of American classical music. The humming sound is called “lamination rattle” among the electrically inclined – a 60-cycle buzz that in some cases sounds like a particularly insistent Tuvan throat singing. The story goes that La Monte Young, enfant terrible of the 60’s musical avant-garde, was entranced by the sound as a boy, and by the time he reached his mid-20s, his interest in the plaintive drone led to a series of pieces that are some of the most reductive musical art ever composed. Composition 1960 #7 is the notes B and F# held “for a very long time.” The complete score of Composition 1960 #10 is “Draw a straight line and follow it.” The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (1962) consists of 4 oddly tuned notes played literally in imitation of Young’s early memories in Bern and Montpelier:
“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)… I used to 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 grandfather managed… 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.”
What was important about La Monte Young’s work in the early 60s is that it necessarily changed the focal distance of the listener; sounds that were normally passed over as irrelevant, or heard only in the context of a musical pattern became important in themselves: the surface details of timbre, overtones, beating, and tuning discrepancies. The subjective experience of time was also changed in a way that belies easy description, and seems dependent on this apparent lack of musical change. The aesthetics of La Monte Young became a blank slate to American composers, a chance to start over and break from the overwrought and needlessly complex European tradition then in vogue. Philip Corner, Harold Budd, and Charlemagne Palestine were early adopters of the new “minimalist” style, as were the now more well-known Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. (The latter three composers developed it into what could more accurately be called “repetitive” music.) Although La Monte Young is rarely heard in concert or in recordings – everything is out of print and difficult to find – his influence is everywhere.
David Kant, whose work formed the first half of the concert at The Wulf in downtown Los Angeles, is clearly inspired by this early 60s minimalism. The first piece performed, Variations for Functions and Partitions of Time, Variation VIII,was simply 2 different notes sampled from a piano and reiterated by a laptop for 10 minutes or so. The laptop repeated the piano tones steadily, beginning at different points in the sample so that there were subtle variations in the timbre of the pitch. The second work was Harmony #, which consisted of an ensemble playing different notes together, i.e., a “harmony,” for some length of time, followed by a Fluxus-like performance where, one by one, the performers went up to the music stand and notated what I believe is the chord for the next ensemble to play. During the latter half of Harmony #, the audience waited patiently in silence for some sound to come out of the ensemble of piano, guitar, harmonium, and sax. The work was funny, assuming you can laugh at your own frustrated expectations. It was a kind of mercenary take on Cage’s 4’33’’ – same thing minus the Zen, and something got written.
Casey Thomas Anderson’s Snow was a more tuneful work for an ensemble of radios, female voice, viola, guitar, bass, trombone, and sax. A single pitch acted as a formal marker between mostly tonal ensemble playing; a dissonant chord or interval would evolve slowly out of the single pitch into pretty tonal meanderings and back. Mistuned radio sounds were a kind of white noise background and seemingly alien transmissions interspersed between minimalist esoterica. The work had a pleasing shape, though the performance itself felt unsure, as entrances and exits of the performers often seemed tentative. It could have used a few more rehearsals.
For most audiences these works are pretentious fraud. The music will be seen as unintentional satire, the excesses of an aesthetically bankrupt art scene claiming some kind of transcendent value for a few sounds bordered by silence. And that’s a fair point of view. But I would suggest it is much simpler than that. It is the pleasure of listening to the often-missed details of music, played quietly in a loft off of 7th among mostly sympathetic listeners. The Wulf is excellent.
