CONCERT SERIES
IN CELEBRATION OF

LA MONTE YOUNG'S 89TH BIRTHDAY YEAR
THE MELA DREAM HOUSE'S 31ST YEAR

MELA Foundation Dream House
275 Church Street, 3rd Floor, New York

Season passes are available for $89 and include admission to each concert series.

Individual concert admission $49. MELA Members, Seniors, Student ID, $39. Limited seating. Advance reservations recommended.

• • •

MELA is pleased to announce a series of four concerts to celebrate both the 89th birthday of La Monte Young (born 14 October 1935) and the 31st consecutive year of the MELA Dream House sound and light environment at 275 Church Street, New York City. 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.

A season pass for this four-concert series will be available, and advance reservations will be required for pass holders. Individual tickets for each concert will also be available for purchase.

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.

Program 1
La Monte Young
Studies in the Bowed Disc (1963)
on
Robert Morris
Gong for La Monte Young
Performed by La Monte Young, Charles Curtis and Jung Hee Choi,
using the gong designed and constructed by Robert Morris (1963) November 2 and 3 at 7 pm →

In Program 1, that kind of 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 2024 realization will be a trio, with Young, Charles Curtis and Jung Hee Choi commanding the three bows.

Program 2
Jung Hee Choi
Composition
in the Style of
La Monte Young's
1960 Sustained Friction Sounds (2000)
Performed by Jung Hee Choi combined with
her multi-channel video installation, RICE
in a setting of Marian Zazeela, Imagic Light
November 10 at 7 pm →

Program 2 features Jung Hee Choi as both a sonic and visual artist, with her video piece RICE projected in a setting of Marian Zazeela, Imagic Light to a live solo performance of her Composition in the Style of La Monte Young’s 1960 Sustained Friction Sounds (2000). As the latter title implies, Choi is both celebrating her discipleship and carrying a tradition forward—in her own voice, as that tradition continues to evolve. The 2003 MELA presentation marked the first collaborative light environment created by Marian Zazeela and Choi. The most recent performance of the piece at the MELA Dream House was presented nineteen years ago on October 14, 2005, as part of the La Monte Young Seventieth-Birthday Celebration.

Program 3
Richard Maxfield
Perspectives
for
La Monte Young (1961-62)
Performed by La Monte Young and Jung Hee Choi
on stringed instruments
along with the tape montage by Maxfield and
special symmetrical forward-retrograde arrangement by Young
December 12 and 13 at 7 pm →

Program 3 takes the motif of collaboration further (in a dialog among artists that is, again, both simultaneous and cross-temporal) with a duo performance by Young and Choi of Perspectives for La Monte Young composed by Young’s own teacher, Richard Maxfield (1927-1969). A veritable Mobius strip of seeds and flowers, Perspectives consists first of friction sounds initially made acoustically by Young at the beginning of the 1960s, sounds which were then recorded, processed, and edited by Maxfield into a tape montage, which was then re-edited decades later by Young to serve (as was Maxfield’s plan all along) as an interlocutor to Young and Choi as they improvise frictional sounds in a live performance—for a fresh variant that has never been heard before.

Program 4
Jung Hee Choi
Seven (2024)
on
Walter De Maria
Instrument for La Monte Young (1966)
Composed and performed by Jung Hee Choi
using Walter De Maria's sculptural Instrument for La Monte Young
with real-time digital processing on an algorithm by Jung Hee Choi December 20 and 21 at 7 pm →

Program 4 will similarly showcase another period instrument and another 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 long-time 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 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.

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.