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, 2005 - 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.