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 2003 every Saturday from 3 - 6 pm and Sunday from 1 to 8 pm, and by special appointment at Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Georg-Rueckert-Strasse 1, 82398 Polling bei Weilheim, Germany, Telephone +49 881 417 718, Fax +49 881 417 719; www.regenbogenstadl.de/; mail: regenbogenstadl@t-online.de.

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 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.

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 Bösendorfer 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 performance, 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 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.

In 2001, Just Dreams, the new Young/Zazeela record label, released the Advance Preview Limited Edition of 296 proofs of the video in DVD-9 format. 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 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).

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.

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 and continue to perform with their own Raga Ensemble, Just Alap. In June 2002, Young was conferred the title of Khan Sahib by Ustad Hafizullah Khan Sahib, the Khalifa of the Kirana Gharana and son of Pandit Pran Nath's teacher, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan Sahib.

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.

The Magenta Lights is a realization 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 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. 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.

July to September, 2003

The exhibition, curated by Judith Malina, Hanon Reznikov, Lorenzo Mango and Giuseppe Morra, has been organised by the regional government of Campania as part of the Annali delle Arti project, directed by Achille Bonito Oliva and curated by Eduardo Cicelyn, and the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Napoletano together with the Fondazione Morra.

For the opening on July 3rd at 6pm Aldo Loris Rossi will present the section by Luigi Castellano / LUCA Immagini di un Segno ("Images of a Sign"). This will be followed at 8pm by an atmospheric piano concert on the Piazzale delle Armi, Suono Segno Gesto ("Sound Sign Gesture"), with the participation of the composers Daniele Lombardi, Sylvano Bussotti, Giancarlo Cardini and Maestro Antonio Ballista.

The exhibition aims to give an account of the extraordinary artistic and cultural phenomenon that is the Living Theatre, a name which itself shows the idea of a theatre which opens itself up to life, politics and change, without ever giving up its search into and experiments with new forms of language. That of the Living Theatre is an extraordinary adventure in theatre, art and life which, having begun in the 1950s under the auspices of Julian Beck and Judith Malina, spread throughout the entire second half of the twentieth century, marking that century notably and continuing to do so, as can be seen from the premiere in this occasion of Enigmi, their most recent show (September 27th, a world premiere).

The 14th century Angevin castle will be the beautiful setting for this journey into the fascinating world of the Living Theatre. The journey passes though a series of objects which bear witness to a creative process more than a simple act of documentation. The image of a labyrinth signifies an artistic itinerary made up of many different elements, different tensions, ideas and ideals, of creative pathways, of life choices. The exhibition is a reconstruction of the Living Theatre's journey in the form of a visual narrative, using materials from their archives (photos, newspaper articles, posters and programmes from their shows) accompanied by the projection of video materials and films made of some of the company's most important shows.

One particularly important part of the event is the first large-scale exhibition in Italy of Julian Beck's paintings. Painted in the 1940s and 50s, these pictures show the importance of Beck's work as an "action painter" which would later find an outlet in the theatre.

Alongside the Living Theatre material, other events will testify to the group's interdisciplinary nature and their desire to put together different intelligences and art forms. One section of the exhibition will document these movements, from that of the "happening" to body art, from to Viennese aktionism to conceptual art, all creating a kind of ideal background against which to read the Living Theatre's theatrical work. Since theatre is "alive", as the Living Theatre has taught us and continues to teach us, it obviously needs to have contacts, actions, events, moments in which art immediately creates action.

Works of artists including Baldo Diodato, Ugo Dossi, Al Hansen, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Gina Pane, Luca Maria Patella, Vettor Pisani, Robert Rauschenberg, Errico Ruotolo and Rudolf Schwarzkogler will be exhibited.

One of the octagonal rooms will be the setting for The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights, an atmospheric sound and light installation by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, with the DVD video-projection of a live concert lasting seven hours (Italian premiere).

The following works will be installed in some of the chambers of the castle: a homage to luigi castellano / LUCA, an installation by Hermann Nitsch, Beck / ett - a sound/video environment by Roberto Paci Dalò. Allan Kaprow will reconstruct the YARD Environment.

A 250-page bilingual Italian/English catalogue will also be published for the occasion, with essays by Achille Bonito Oliva, Matteo D'Ambrosio, Judith Malina, Lorenzo Mango, Jonas Mekas and Hanon Reznikov, illustrated in colour and including an audio CD containing a number of pieces of experimental music from the Alga Marghen label.

Homages to the Living Theatre:
evenings of poetry, music, cinema and performance

Monday Nights
Every Monday in July (7th, 14th and 21st) will feature participation of American and Italian poets such as Judith Malina, Hanon Reznikov, John Giorno, Ira Cohen, Agneta Falk and Jack Hirschman, Nanni Balestrini, Giovanni Fontana, Arrigo Lora Totino and Massimo Mori, who will read their own poems and texts by the Living Theatre, including Love & Politics.

Sunday July 20th: Elettra, a poetry-opera by Nanni Balestrini.

September 15th - 20th: Collective Creation workshop, a workshop aimed at creating a show which will include its participants who will define its themes, the text and the production with the help of Judith Malina and the Living Theatre company.

Saturday September 27th sees the world premiere of the new Living Theatre Company show Enigmi followed by one other performance on Sunday September 28th.

Programme of films by Italian and international film-makers (July 6th - 24th, Auditorium di Castel Sant'Elmo): Morning and afternoon screenings of films by Bernardo Bertolucci, Shirley Clarke, Ira Cohen, Martina Kudlacek, Alfredo Leonardi, Nam June Paik, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sheldon Rochlin, Jack Smith, Dirk Szuszies, all related to the thought of the Living Theatre, films by Jonas Mekas on the Living Theatre (Memories of Frankenstein., Mysteries, Street Songs, The Brig), as well as video documentation of plays and interviews relating to the company's work from the 1960s up to the present.

Concerts

Friday July 4th:
Caro John...omaggio a John Cage ("Dear John...a homage to John Cage") with the participation of composers Daniele Lombardi, Sylvano Bussotti, Giancarlo Cardini and Maestro Antonio Ballista, who will play Winter Music and 45 Minuti per Conferenziere.

Saturday July 5th:
Silvano Sylvano by Sylvano Bussotti.

Sunday July 13th:
La Musica in Flusso ("Music in Flux") by Philip Corner with the Laboratorio di Ricerca Musicale (Palermo) and the participation of the performer Phoebe Neville.

Tuesday July 15th:
Charlemagne Palestine & Tony Conrad (Italian premiere). Saturday July 19th:
A concert of spoken poetry by Gerhard Rühm and Monika Lichtenfeld.

Tuesday September 23rd:
Opera sinfonica by Hermann Nitsch with a 50 piece orchestra conducted by Maestro Andrea Cusumano.

Performances

LIVING THEATRE: LABYRINTHS OF THE IMAGINARY
(July 3rd - September 28th 2003)