Just Dreams announces the release of Pandit Pran Nath: Midnight / Raga Malkauns. more...

The DVD Installation of The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights (87 V 10 6:43:00 PM – 87 V 11 01:07:45 AM NYC) by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela is reopened at Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Bavaria, Germany, with the addition of the European premiere of an electronically generated continuous periodic composite sound waveform environment of The Magic Opening Chord from The Well-Tuned Piano, from May 4, 2002 through October 27, 2002. The installation is set in a site-specific light environment created by Zazeela, which includes two sculptures from Zazeela’s Still Light series, and her neon sculpture, Dream House Variation III.

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."

In this special installation at Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, the frequencies of The Opening Chord are generated as six sine waves in the large gallery, and the frequencies of The Magic Chord as eight sine waves in the inner sculpture gallery. As one walks from the large gallery toward the sculpture gallery, one gradually hears the two chords mixing together to become the fourteen frequencies of The Magic Opening Chord. When deep within the sculpture gallery, it is possible to hear The Magic Chord alone, and with a slight shift of position, frequencies from The Opening Chord may come floating in from the large gallery. Gradually, the visitor can create his/her own melodies and chordal progressions by moving among the standing wave forms that are created in the space.

The exhibition is open from May 4 through October 27, 2002 every Saturday and Sunday from 1:00 to 8:00 pm, and by appointment. The sound environment of The Magic Opening Chord from The Well-Tuned Piano may be experienced on Sunday from 10 am to 12 noon during May, June and September. The DVD screening will begin each day at 1:00 pm and continue without interruption until 7:40 pm, at Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Georg-Rückert-Strasse 1, 82398 Polling bei Weilheim, Germany, Telephone +49 881 417 718, Fax +49 881 417 719; www.regenbogenstadl.de.

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 Beauté 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 Siècle.” 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.

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: “Young’s music contains certainly some religious/sacred elements, but along with big issues such as innocence, guilt, penance, death, fear, contemplation, hope and love, it also deals with more daily sensations as hearing, seeing, eating, drinking, walking or talking. 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: after five-and-half hours La Monte bends his toes, is moving around on his seat more frequently and tries his utmost not to fall dead on the floor from pure exhaustion. 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.”

Presented in conjunction with the installation of The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights at Regenbogenstadl, Just Dreams, Inc. has announced the Advance Preview Limited Edition of 296 proofs of the video in DVD-9 format, available initially from MELA Foundation and Kunst im Regenbogenstadl. 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. After viewing the installation in Avignon, Sandy McCroskey wrote, “The Well-Tuned Piano video does have to be seen to be believed.” 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. Additionally, for the first time, listeners can see and hear the work in the Zazeela environment in which it was created.”

La Monte Young pioneered the concept of extended time durations for over 40 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).

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, of sculpture in the series Still Light and neon works, and of environment in Dusk / Dawn Adaptation, Magenta Day / Magenta Night and her major work Light.

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 Beauté Avignon, MAC Lyon, Pompidou Center, Paris; Ruine der Künste, Berlin; 44th Venice Biennale; Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf; Dia Center for the Arts, New York City; MELA Foundation's "La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective," New York City; Köln Kunstverein; Documenta 5 Kassel; Galerie Heiner Friedrich Köln and München. Currently 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, 2:00 pm - midnight, annually from Fall Equinox through Summer Solstice.

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 façade 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.

Trio for Strings (1958) Sextet Version (1984)

May 3, 2002, 8 pm
Concertgebouw
Brugge, Belgium

Performance directed by Charles Curtis, cello
with Arne Deforce, cello, François Deppe, cello,
Danel Quartet, violins and cello

Brugge 2002 “American Air” Festival is presenting the Belgian premiere of the Sextet Version of the Trio for Strings on May 3, 2002, in the Concertgebouw Chamber Music Hall, Brugge at 8 pm. Charles Curtis will direct and perform with a sextet ensemble comprised of four cellos and two violins drawn from members of the Ictus Ensemble and Danel Quartet. Brugge is one of the Cultural Cities of Europe for 2002.

The Trio for Strings is the first work Young composed which is comprised almost entirely of long sustained tones, and it is probably his most important early musical statement. This work has been widely credited by critics, musicologists and art historians with the initiation of a new direction in music and art, since no one had ever before made a work that was composed completely of sustained tones. It is an extremely difficult work to perform, requiring special performance practices to master the skill of sustaining long tones and intervals. Young has created this Sextet Version in part to produce a realization of the work that can be more perfectly in tune and more sustained in character than the original trio version.

American Air is a new music festival within the program of Brugge 2002 Cultural Capital of Europe, co-curatored by Lukas Pairon and Jean-Luc Plouvier of the Ictus Ensemble.

For more information about the Brugge 2002 and the American Air Festival, see www.ictus.be.

Press Comment on Trio for Strings by La Monte Young

“The Trio for Strings is undoubtedly Young’s most important composition of this period, and the work which firmly establishes his place as the first composer to discover a truly minimalist language and to develop it in a totally individual way.” -- Keith Potter, “Four Musical Minimalists,” Cambridge University Press, 2000, P. 40.

“During the summer of 1958 [Young] composed his first mature composition, the Trio for Strings – a landmark in the history of twentieth century music and the virtual fountainhead of American musical minimalism.” -- K. Robert Schwarz, “Minimalists,” Phaidon Press, 1996, P. 23.

“Despite its Serial underpinnings, nothing like Young’s Trio for Strings had ever been heard in Western music, a piece constructed exclusively of sustained tones and silences. …Young is now widely recognized as the originator of the most influential classical musical style of the final third of the twentieth century.” -- Edward Strickland, “Minimalism:Origins,” Indiana University Press, 1993, P. 121, 122.

“A revolution in Twentieth Century music occurred in 1958, when La Monte Young wrote the Trio for Strings. This Serial piece, with its silences and long tones, paved the way for music based on tonality, drone and infinite time spans, brushing aside elaborate formal development in favor of the contemplation of pure sound.” -- David Paul, Seconds Magazine, No. 50, New York City, 1999, P. 33.

“These long, static notes, dyads, and chords mark the origin of Young’s concern with sustained intervals, and their structure reveals his compositional archetypes. …This is a skeleton for the sine-tone installations of the late 1980s and 1990s, in which he experiments with overtones closely surrounding the octave over a low drone. …Notice the virtually symmetrical disposition of durations, entrances, and exits, found in 12 of the 29 gestures. Since our conscious experience of time moves unidirectionally forward, such symmetry is perceptually outside-time.” -- Kyle Gann, “The Outer Edge of Consonance,” in Sound and Light: La Monte Young Marian Zazeela, Bucknell Review, Vol. XL, No. 1, Lewisburg, 1996, P. 155.

“What La Monte introduced was this concept of not having to press ahead to create interest. He would wait for the music to take its own course. You start a long tone, that tone has its own life until it extinguishes, and then the next one starts. So it was this kind of Oriental patience that he introduced into the music which created a static form. Even his piano playing and his saxophone playing, even if it was fast, always dealt with repeating the same notes over and over again. So the form is always standing like some kind of a mountain – like La Monte, the mountain – and not creating a real varied form. I think that without that there could have been no In C, because In C is a static piece in that same tradition.” --Terry Riley, Talking Music, William Duckworth, Schirmer Books,

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - April 3, 2002

A special octet version (1984) of La Monte Young's Trio for Strings from 1958 will be presented in an Avant-Premiere performance by OSSIA on Sunday, April 21, 8:00 pm, in the MELA Foundation Dream House light environment at 275 Church Street, New York City. more...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - February 24, 2002

The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights
DVD Installation in Staatsbank Berlin

The Berlin 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) by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela will open in a site-specific light environment created by Zazeela at the Staatsbank, Französische Straße, on March 10, 2002 from 3:00 pm to 10:00 pm, during the Berliner Festspiele MaerzMusik. From March 11 through April 7, the installation will continue and the DVD will be projected daily from 12.00 noon to 6:30 pm and from 6:30 pm to 1:00 am.

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 Beauté international exposition in Avignon as part of the French celebration of the Year 2000. From May through October 2001, Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, presented the German premiere of the DVD installation in an exhibition including two sculptures from Zazeela’s Still Light series and her neon sculpture, Dream House Variation III.

The Well-Tuned Piano has been acclaimed as "one of the great monuments of modern culture" (Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 1987) "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 DVD installation at St. Joseph Church in Avignon, shown daily and visited by more than 200,000 people during the four-month La Beauté exhibition, was headlined by L’Express: “La Monte Young: Le Son du Siècle.” The Regenbogenstadl installation of the DVD will reopen from May through October 2002 with the addition of the European premiere of an electronically generated continuous periodic composite sound waveform environment of The Magic Opening Chord from The Well-Tuned Piano.

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 2001, Just Dreams, Inc. announced the release of the Advance Preview Limited Edition of 296 proofs of the video in DVD-9 format. Previously available only from MELA Foundation, New York and Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, a number of copies will be offered in Berlin in conjunction with the MaerzMusik DVD installation. For those who know the out-of-print Gramavision 5-hour, 5-CD release of the 1981 performance of The Well-Tuned Piano, this 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 Gramavision release and the 1987 Just Dreams DVD 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. After viewing the installation in Avignon, Sandy McCroskey wrote, “The Well-Tuned Piano video does have to be seen to be believed.” 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. Additionally, for the first time, listeners can see and hear the work in the Zazeela environment in which it was created.”

La Monte Young has pioneered the concept of extended time durations for nearly 45 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).

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, of sculpture in the series Still Light and neon works, and of environment in Dusk / Dawn Adaptation, Magenta Day / Magenta Night and her major work Light.

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 Beauté Avignon, MAC Lyon, Pompidou Center, Paris; Ruine der Künste, Berlin; 44th Venice Biennale; Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf; Dia Center for the Arts, New York City; MELA Foundation's "La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective," New York City; Köln Kunstverein; Documenta 5 Kassel; Galerie Heiner Friedrich Köln and München; The Metropolitan Museum, New York. Currently 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, 2:00 pm - midnight, annually from Fall Equinox through Summer Solstice.

# # # # # # # # # #

Call for Volunteer Monitors for the Dream House 10/29/2001...more

M  E  L A   F  O  U  N D  A   T I O N,  I N C.
275 Church Street New York, NY 10013 212-925-8270
Fax: 212-226-7802 Email: mail@melafoundation.org
www.melafoundation.org

September 16, 2001

We want to thank all of the many friends who are calling and emailing to find out if we are okay in the wake of the horrifically diabolical attack on the world as we knew it. As many of you who have visited the Dream House know, MELA Foundation at 275 Church Street is only 12 blocks north of the World Trade Center at Church and Vesey Streets. Thanks to God's grace, we are fine and despite the destruction so nearby, this tiny haven of harmonic vibrations had all necessities - water, gas, electricity, cable TV, telephone, email, fax etc. - and no need to be evacuated. It does get progressively worse each block south of us. We know of friends being evacuated from Duane Street only four blocks below us, so we feel even more blessed that we are so unscathed.

We had been out at 6:00 am Tuesday, September 11 to vote in the mayoral primary, wandered through Chinatown, came home, trimmed back our bonsai tree, then began to prepare some food. We were in the back of the loft when Marian heard a strange loud boom and may have seen a flash but could see nothing out the back window. When we turned around it was already on CNN and then the tragedy unfolded. La Monte actually saw the second tower burst into flames from the front window. We saw the buildings collapse and the streets below were suddenly filled with people running up Church Street from downtown.

Very little has changed right here at Church and White Streets except that it is now a staging area for national guardsmen, rescue and construction workers, authorized vehicles, supplies, and as an alternate traffic artery from the disaster site. They are working night and day to get power and phone service to the Wall Street area, which they hope to open on Monday, so now there are bright lights at night out in front of our building, the sound of portable generators humming, and the street being dug up a few blocks below to run the new lines.

This is also for now a so-called "frozen" area of lower Manhattan and it is necessary to show a picture ID and have a reason of work or residency to be permitted to cross the police barrier at Canal Street. The line of demarcation runs west from Broadway, so Church Street is not open to normal pedestrian activity. Hopefully, this will change in a few days, but it is causing us to consider the possibility that we may have to delay the reopening of the Dream House, originally scheduled for next Saturday, September 22nd from 2:00 pm to Midnight.

We hope to reopen the Dream House as soon as possible so that there will be a small place in the midst of this devastation where people can come and find an environment of peace and harmony.

Please keep in touch with MELA's website www.melafoundation.org to find out when the Dream House will reopen for the 2001-2002 season.

We offer our prayers for all who have suffered through this event and pray that the world will eventually find love and understanding as a better way to resolve our differences.

La Monte Young      Marian Zazeela

Dream House to Reopen on Fall Equinox 9/22/2001 ...more

new Dream House press release 9/1/2001...more

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 21, 2001

 
Just Dreams Announces Release of La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela DVD of The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights

Marian Zazeela Light Environment for DVD Installation
"The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights"
Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling bei Weilheim May 5 - October 28, 2001
Photo © Georg Stahl 2001

The 6-hour 24-minute 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 last May through September at La Beauté international exposition in Avignon as part of the French celebration of the Year 2000. 

For those who know the out-of-print Gramavision 5-hour, 5-CD release of the 1981 performance of The Well-Tuned Piano, this 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.

Please make check or money order payable to MELA Foundation, Inc., and mail to MELA Foundation, Inc., 275 Church Street, New York, N.Y. 10013. Or pay by credit card through PayPal.

or

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For PayPal orders, please include additional 4% of total cost
to cover fees to MELA. Thank you.

The catalog of Marian Zazeela's comprehensive drawings exhibition published by Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Bavaria, is now available from MELA Foundation. The first comprehensive study of her drawings, this hardcover book features 71 full-color reproductions of Zazeela's drawings spanning 1962 through 1991, with her written analysis. It includes essays on her work by Henry Flynt and Uli Schaegger, as well as photographs, biographical documentation and inventory of the exhibition. Among the reproductions are many of the original drawings for her posters, flyers and record covers of La Monte Young's music, early abstract calligraphy, and works from her Portraits series, and Glyphs series. The catalog cover was printed with characteristic black-on-black calligraphy and drawing, in the style of Zazeela's many graphite-on-black works.

Available in both French/English and German/English editions, the catalog may be ordered from MELA Foundation by mail, online from the MELA store or purchased at the MELA Dream House.
 

Marian Zazeela Drawings	$44.00 ($39.00 MELA Members)
Signed by the artist	$72.00 ($63.00 MELA Members)

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MELA Foundation, Inc.
275 Church Street
New York, NY 10013
212-925-8270 tel
212-226-7802 fax
mail@melafoundation.org

For Marian Zazeela Drawings catalog sales in the United States, or for signed copies of the catalog, contact MELA foundation.

European inquiries should contact the distributor directly: HEROLD Verlagsauslieferung GmbH Kolpingring 4 D-82041 Oberhaching Germany tel: +49 89 613871-0 fax: +49 89 613871-20 email: HEROLD-Oberhaching@t-online.de

For La Monte Young's latest essay, Notes on The Theatre of Eternal Music & The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, download in Adobe PDF format new 7/21/2000.