Kunst
im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Bavaria, Germany
presents
La
Monte Young Marian Zazeela
n
Video Installation World Premiere
Charles
Curtis Naren Budhkar Da'ud Constant La Monte Young Jung Hee Choi
Marian Zazeela
La
Monte Young, "05
II 05 PM NYC"
Raga Sundara,
ektal
vilampit khayal set in Raga Yaman Kalyan
n
The
Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights DVD
Installation
Reopening DVD screening Sunday, May 1, 2005, 1 pm
Continuing Sundays 1 - 8 pm through October, 2005
n
La Monte Young
Trio for Strings (1958)
Just Intonation Version (1984-2001) Avant-Premiere
The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble
Led by Charles Curtis
Live Concert
Saturday, July 23, 8 pm
In celebration of La Monte Young's 70th Year, Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Bavaria, Germany is presenting the video installation world premiere of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela with The Just Alap Raga Ensemble performing a new composition by La Monte Young, Raga Sundara, an ektal vilampit khayal set in the Northern Indian classical Raga Yaman Kalyan, opening Saturday, April 30, 2005, at 5 pm, continuing every Saturday at 3 pm through October 2005. This Evening Raga Concert in the contemporary Kirana Style of North Indian Classical Music was recorded live in the MELA Foundation Church Street Dream House on February 5, 2005 in a memorial tribute honoring Pandit Pran Nath's Guru, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan Sahib, the greatest master of the Kirana gharana during his lifetime.
Raga
Sundara
was composed by La Monte Young under a commission from the Individual Artists
Program of the New York State Council on the Arts. The
Just Alap Raga Ensemble includes
La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, voices, accompanied by Jung Hee Choi and
Da'ud Constant, voices, Charles Curtis, cello, Naren Budhkar, tabla, and The
Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath performed by La Monte Young and Marian
Zazeela on the pre-recorded Just Dreams CD.
Pandit
Pran Nath has said, "Alap is the essence of Raga. When the drut
[faster tempo] begins, the Raga is finished." With the Just Alap
ensemble, La Monte Young applies his own compositional approach to traditional
raga performance, form and technique: a pranam (bow) of gratitude in
reciprocation for the influence on his music, since the mid-fifties, of the
unique, slow, unmetered timeless alap, and for one of the most ancient and
evolved vocal traditions extant today. Featuring extended alap sections
and sustained vocal drones in just intonation over tamburas, Young and Zazeela
premiered this ensemble on August 22, 2002 in a memorial tribute to the late
sarangi master, Ustad Hafizullah Khan, Khalifa of the Kirana Gharana and son of Ustad
Abdul Wahid Khan Sahib.
Over
the succeeding years of The Just Alap Raga Ensemble concerts, Young introduced
vocal and instrumental drones in two-, three-, four-, and five-part harmony, and
even counterpoint, over the tambura drones in the pre-composition part of the
alap. However, in Raga
Sundara, Young
introduced two-part harmony into his composition.
This is the first time two-part harmony has been used in the genre of
pre-composed Indian classical composition.
The Ensemble introduces the harmony part in the mukra (pick up) to sam (the first beat of the rhythmic cycle)
after they have introduced Pa (Sol) above opening middle Sa (Do) in the 'Sthayi (first) section of the composition.
After they introduce the Antara (second) section of the composition, they return to
the 'Sthayi
with two-part harmony through the entire composition.
When the Antara
is presented a second time, it is also presented in two-part harmony.
Yaman
Kalyan is an evening
raga to be sung shortly after the sun has set.
Raga Yaman is the auspicious raga for opening a concert or a
concert series. It is a very
important didactic raga and one of the first ragas that every student learns.
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 have taught the Kirana style and performed with Pandit Pran in
hundreds of concerts in India, Iran, Europe and the United States.
Young and Zazeela have continued to perform,
culminating in the concerts with their Just Alap Raga Ensemble.
In June 2002, Young was conferred the title of Khan Sahib by Ustad
Hafizullah Khan Sahib.
The Well-Tuned Piano
has been acclaimed as "one of the great monuments of modern culture" (Los
Angeles Herald Examiner, 1987) and "the most important piano music
composed by an American since the Concord Sonata" (Chicago Reader,
1987) and "the king of all just-intonation piano recordings" (Pulse!,
2001). Art Forum (1981) described The Magenta Lights as "an
environmental piece in every sense of the word. What Zazeela has represented is
the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality. [She] transforms
material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual
encounter a spiritual experience."
The six-and-one-half hour continuous
performance of the Young and Zazeela collaborative masterwork was videotaped on
May 10, 1987 during the La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective presented by
MELA Foundation in New York City. It
was first encoded to a single DVD-9 for its world premiere showing at La Beaute
international exposition in Avignon as part of the French celebration of the
Year 2000. This DVD installation at
Avignon's St. Joseph Church, shown daily and visited by more than 200,000
people during the four-month exhibition, was headlined by L'Express:
"La Monte Young: Le Son du Siecle."
From March 10 to April 7, 2002, the Berliner Festspiele MaerzMusik
presented an installation created in a site-specific light environment by
Zazeela at the monumental landmark Staatsbank, with two full screenings of the
DVD daily. From July through
September 2003, the Italian premiere of the DVD installation The
Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights (87 V 10 6:43:00 PM - 87 V 11 01:07:45 AM
NYC) in a site-specific light environment of Zazeela's Magenta Day /
Magenta Night took place daily in the extraordinary 14th century medieval
Castel Sant'Elmo, Naples, as part of the Morra Foundation 30-Year
Retrospective Festival exhibition celebrating the Living Theatre / Labyrinths
of the Imaginary.
In 1964,
Young began to compose his magnum opus, The
Well-Tuned Piano (1964-73-81-87-present) and recorded four different
realizations of the work on magnetic tape, some of which he presented in
concert. The 1974 live world premiere of The Well-Tuned Piano at Galleria L'Attico in Rome was celebrated
by a commission for him to sign the Bosendorfer piano, which remains
permanently in the special tuning. The
work subsequently became a major focus of Young's compositional activity and
he continued to develop new sections and sub-sections that had not appeared in
previous performances. As a result,
each performance consists of a unique, spontaneous, independent composition,
separately titled according to the date, time and city of the concert.
Through improvisation, Young juxtaposes and interweaves the
pre-established materials into a unified realization with beginning and end,
complete in itself, but also a subset of the greater whole, The
Well-Tuned Piano. Over the
years, Young performed the work live in Germany, Italy and New York 65 times.
The May 10, 1987 New York City performa nce, which is the subject of the
DVD documentary, was the last live performance to date.
The 55 original Betacam and 3/4-inch
source tapes from the two cameras that recorded the performance in 1987 were
transferred to digiBeta and combined with the original stereo digital audio
under the artists' supervision. In a technological triumph, the digiBeta
masters were then encoded to a single DVD-9 master, utilizing a process that had
only become possible in the year 2000.
In Luister Magazine, The
Netherlands, September 2001, Rene Seghers wrote of the DVD and Regenbogenstadl
installation: "At will, La Monte Young's music can feel like raining, a
rainbow or a sunbeam, but behind mystically charged titles like The Tortoise,
His Dreams and Journeys, The Magic Harmonic Rainforest Chord, etc., there is
always a human face. ...The
Well-Tuned Piano reflects the healthy mysticism of everyday life and is -as
far as I am concerned- one of the most impressive piano works of the twentieth
century."
Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, founded in
1998 by Uli Schaegger and Heike Friedrich in a large, beautifully renovated
barn, has been the site of several long-term exhibitions. In 2000, a major
exhibition of Marian Zazeela Drawings was accompanied by the publication
of a comprehensive catalog of her work. A
mural of a rainbow was found on the facade of the barn before the renovation,
inspiring the name Regenbogenstadl, which translates as "Rainbow Barn." Legends tell that a pot of gold is buried at the end of the
rainbow and Celtic gold coins were actually found buried in the vicinity of
Polling. The monastery of Polling
(one hour south of Munich) is 1250 years old and noted for its historic church
and annual classical music concert series in the restored Bibliotekssaal.
The First Limited Edition of the
video of The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights in DVD-9 format has
been released on the Just Dreams label. For
those who know the out-of-print Gramavision 5-hour, 5-CD release of the 1981
performance of The Well-Tuned Piano, the Just Dreams 401-minute DVD of
the entire 1987 performance is the inevitable complement.
The continually expanding composition now includes more musical material
than even La Monte Young can play in one setting.
Together, the 1981 release and the 1987 video provide a much more
comprehensive perspective of the scope and complexity of the work.
Produced with no region coding restriction, this DVD may be played on any
machine in the world. Young has
said, "This DVD captures the most important aspect of my work in composition and
performance that I have succeeded in recording to date. It is the yardstick
against which all of my other work must be compared."
WIRE Magazine wrote in May 2003, "Another important aspect which makes
this DVD superior to the original CD, is that Marian Zazeela's Magenta
Lights installation can be viewed in all its subtly changing glory.
Rather than being an accompaniment to the music, Zazeela's work becomes
an integral part of The Well-Tuned Piano, a solar powered light show that
provides a sense of time passing as the shadows lengthen from early evening into
night. Young continues to expand
The Well-Tuned Piano, but this DVD acts as the definitive version of this
remarkable musical and visual achievement."
La Monte Young
pioneered the concept of extended time durations for over 47 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 with Marian
Zazeela, and has had a wide-ranging influence on contemporary music, art and
philosophy. "For the past quarter of a century he has been the most
influential composer in America. Maybe in the world." (Los Angeles
Herald Examiner, 1985). "As the acknowledged father of minimalism and
guru emeritus to the British art-rock school, his influence is pervasive" (Musician
magazine, 1986). "Young is now widely recognized as the originator of the most
influential classical music style of the final third of the twentieth
century." (Strickland, Minimalism:Origins, 1993).
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. 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.
Marian Zazeela is
one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a medium of expression.
Over four decades Zazeela has exhibited a unique iconographic vision in media
encompassing painting, calligraphic drawing, graphics, film, light projection,
sculpture and environment. Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and
sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, she developed a new
visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with
sculptural forms to create 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. Her work has taken the direction of performance in Ornamental
Lightyears Tracery, sculpture in the series Still Light and neon
works, environment in Dusk / Dawn Adaptation, Magenta Day / Magenta Night and
her major work Light, and projection in Quadrilateral Phase Angle
Traversals.
Imagic
Light and
The Magenta Lights are realizations of Light in which the inherent properties of colored light mixtures are
used as a medium for the transfer of information concerning the position and
relation of objects in space. Installations
of Light consist of precisely
positioned pairs of colored lights focused on symmetrically arrayed pairs of
white aluminum mobile sculptures in different patterns created according to the
structural properties of each environment, causing the projection of colored
shadows on the ceiling or walls of a room.
Each mobile reflects the color of that portion of the spectrum
represented by the light source focused directly on it, while the colors of the
shadows cast by each mobile appear as the complement of the projected color
mixed with the color of the paired light source focused on the adjacent mobile,
all tempered by the eye's adaptation to the overall color field.
As the mobiles turn in space,
reacting to movement and temperature changes in the environment, their shadows
continuously display the resultant forms created by the angles and the distances
of the light sources to the mobiles. The
overall pattern of shadows gradually shifts through many transformations,
including, at times, the perfectly symmetrical alliance of all the component
parts.
As artistic director of The Theatre of Eternal Music, Zazeela creates the visual components of Dream House, a sound and light work in which she collaborates with La Monte Young. Zazeela and Young have presented Dream Houses, light installations, performances and exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including La Beaute Avignon, MAC Lyon, Pompidou Center, Paris; Ruine der Kunste, Berlin; 44th Venice Biennale; Galerie Hans Mayer, Dusseldorf; Dia Art Foundation, New York City; MELA Foundation's "La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective," New York City; Koln Kunstverein; Documenta 5 Kassel; Galerie Heiner Friedrich Koln and Munchen. On view in New York, the continuous environment Dream House: Seven+Eight Years of Sound and Light, maintained by MELA at its 275 Church Street exhibition space, is open to the public Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 pm - midnight, annually from Fall Equinox through Summer Solstice.