NOTE: Robert Morris Gong for La Monte Young (1963) will be displayed in the Dream House as part of the environment on Wednesday, January 15. To prepare for the scheduled concerts, the Dream House installation will close on January 16 and reopen at 2pm on January 22.

Join us for the final live concert of our extraordinary four-concert series, celebrating both the 89th birthday of La Monte Young (born October 14, 1935) and the 31st consecutive year of the MELA Dream House Sound and Light environment. This program will feature two live performances, each utilizing the metallic bodies of the original instruments designed and built for Young by his early close collaborators, artists Walter De Maria (1935-2013) and Robert Morris (1931-2018).

89 and 31 are both prime numbers, and prime numbers (as manifested in the musical domain by numerically expressible frequency relationships among two or more "well-tuned" sounds) have been an elemental source of inspiration for Young throughout his career as a composer.

The music on the four programs emerges from the historically crucial period during the middle of the twentieth century (coinciding with La Monte Young's years as a student and budding master) when certain like-minded musicians—trained in the Western tradition but working under a novel aesthetic aegis famously expressed by Edgard Varèse as "the liberation of sound" and by John Cage as "letting sounds be themselves"—first began to move beyond the limits of a fixed-pitch scale system, to recognize and explore the musical properties inherent in everyday sounds (in other words, "noises").

The series also celebrates the spirit of shared purpose and collaboration in that ecosystem, made tangible in the fruits of creative relationships that are sometimes mentor-to-student (as between Richard Maxfield and La Monte Young or between Young and Jung Hee Choi) and sometimes peer-to-peer (as with Young and his fellow avant-garde travelers Robert Morris, and Walter De Maria). By no means is that history over, however: While each concert is an "event" in the conventional sense, we can—as we contemplate the contributions, influences, reactions, and counter-reactions of these independent artists at independent moments in time—gain a palpable sense of history as a living organism, unfolding over periods of years or even decades.

JUNG HEE CHOI
Seven (2024)
on
Walter De Maria
Instrument for
La Monte Young (1966)

Avant-Première
Performed by Jung Hee Choi
using Walter De Maria's sculptural Instrument for La Monte Young (1966),
with pre-recorded digital sound montage and real-time digital processing
on an algorithm by Jung Hee Choi.
Digital processing programmed by Mason Mann.

This avant-première performance will showcase a period instrument and a new set of associations, with Jung Hee Choi performing solo on the Instrument for La Monte Young, an audible sculpture designed and built in 1966 by Young's early close colleague, Walter De Maria (1935-2013). Consisting of an oblong rectangular metal box encasing a rolling metal ball and with contact microphones to amplify the resonant sonorities generated by the ball as it moves back and forth, De Maria's Instrument was directly inspired by Young's intense interest in the properties and potentials of friction as a musical phenomenon. In her piece (entitled Seven for its focus on the seventh harmonic and for its use of the number seven as a constant function to extend the duration of microsounds as the primary thematic and formal element), Choi will route the tactile sounds of the Instrument through a modern digital processor governed by an algorithm of her own devising.

LA MONTE YOUNG
Studies in the Bowed Disc (1963)
on
Robert Morris
Gong for
La Monte Young (1963)

Performed by La Monte Young and Jung Hee Choi
using the gong designed and constructed by Robert Morris (1963)

In this program, history will be present both in the person of composer-performer La Monte Young and in the metallic body of the original four-foot diameter gong designed and built for Young by artist Robert Morris (1931-2018). Young wrote Studies in the Bowed Disc in 1963 specifically for this instrument, and the work's many iterations since then include the recording 23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM The Volga Delta (published originally as side B of the celebrated "Black Record" and recently re-released on the Superior Viaduct label), which Young and Marian Zazeela performed together using double-bass bows to set the vibrations in motion. The latest 2025 realization will once again be a duo, with Young and Jung Hee Choi commanding the two bows.

La Monte Young pioneered the concept of extended time durations in 1957 and for over 60 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 formulated in 1962 with Marian Zazeela. Presentations of his work in the U.S. and Europe, as well as his theoretical writings gradually had a wide-ranging influence on contemporary music, art and philosophy, including Minimalism, concept art, Fluxus, performance art and conceptual art. 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, 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, a large work involving improvisation within strict predetermined guidelines. Young and Zazeela helped bring renowned master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath to the U.S. in 1970 and became his first Western disciples. Described by Mark Swed in his October 2009 Los Angeles Times blog as "pure vibratory magic," Young's Just Alap Raga Ensemble, founded in 2002 with Zazeela and their senior disciple Jung Hee Choi, has become his primary performance vehicle. "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). "La Monte Young: Le Son du Siècle." (L'Express L'An 2000 Supplement, 1999).

Jung Hee Choi is an artist/musician and has presented Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest (2007– ), a series of environmental compositions with light, evolving light-point patterns, drawing, incense, performance, and sound. Her work has been presented in the United States, Europe, and Asia including FRAC Franche-Comté, France; Berliner Festspiele, Bundeskunsthalle, Germany; Galerie l'elac, Lausanne, Switzerland; Dia Art Foundation, Guggenheim Museum and MELA Foundation Dream Houses, NYC; FRESH Festival, Bangkok; Korea Experimental Arts Festival. Commissioned by MELA Foundation, her video sound performance and installation, RICE, was chosen as one of The 10 Best of 2003 in the December Artforum. The New York Times wrote about Choi's multimedia installation Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest IX at Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House, NYC, "With extended listening, what at first seemed mechanically repetitious turns out to be a complex interweaving of different, slowly oscillating pitches. If you give in to it while watching Ms. Choi's hallucinatory screen, you may find yourself in an altered state of consciousness, on the verge of some ineffable, transcendental revelation." Choi is the senior disciple of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. In 2002, she co-founded, with Young and Zazeela, The Just Alap Raga Ensemble and, in 2009, The Sundara Trio. Choi's electroacoustic and modal improvisation ensemble, The Sundara All Star Band, premiered in 2015. The members include Young, Zazeela, Choi, Jon Catler, Hansford Rowe and Naren Budhkar. The New York Times listed Choi's Tonecycle for Blues performed by her Sundara All Star Band as one of The Best Classical Music Performances of 2017. Choi's work is in the collection of the FRAC Franche-Comté and Dia Art Foundation. Since 2009, Choi's long-term multimedia installations have been presented both solo and simultaneously with Young and Zazeela's sound and light in the MELA Dream House, creating a continuous collaborative environment.

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MELA's programs are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and generous contributions from individuals and MELA Members.