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

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 16, 2001 

The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights DVD Installation Opens in Germany 

The German 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 Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Bavaria on May 5, 2001 from 1:00 to 8:00 pm, continuing through October 28, 2001. The exhibition includes two new sculptures from Zazeela's Still Light series, and her neon sculpture, Dream House Variation III. 

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 last May through September at La Beauté international exposition in Avignon as part of the French celebration of the Year 2000. 

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). 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 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. 

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." Many 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 exhibition will be open from May 6 through October 28, 2001 every Saturday and Sunday from 1:00 to 8:00 pm, and by appointment. 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. 

In conjunction with the DVD installation of The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights at Regenbogenstadl, Just Dreams, Inc. announces the release of 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, 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. 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: 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.

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Also in 2001...

Marian Zazeela Drawings Catalog Now Available in U.S. more...

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Click HERE for La Monte Young's statement on Table Of Elements CD 74 "Day of Niagara" April 25, 1965.

Click HERE for his latest essay Notes on The Theatre of Eternal Music & The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys. NOTE - THIS IS AN ADOBE PDF DOCUMENT

 

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