© Jung Hee Choi 2007
La Monte Young Marian Zazeela
Music and Light Box
(1967-1968)
March 27 - April 12, 2025
Thursday - Saturday
4 pm - 7 pm
MELA Foundation
275 Church Street, 3rd Floor, New York
T 917 603 9715
www.melafoundation.org
Admission: $10.00
In commemoration of the life of Marian Zazeela, MELA is pleased to announce a special, limited-time exhibition in the Dream House of a rare work, Music and Light Box (1967-1968) by Zazeela in collaboration with La Monte Young. Coinciding with the weeks spanning the anniversary of Marian’s passing through her birthday, the Music and Light Box will be on display in the MELA Dream House from March 27 to April 12, 2025. The exhibition will also feature a unique edition of Jung Hee Choi’s site-specific light environment tribute to Marian Zazeela, Color (Marian) in the East Gallery. To allow the intimate nature of this work to be appreciated, the ongoing Dream House sound and light works will be turned off during this period.
The Music and Light Box is one of the few music and light sculptures created by Young and Zazeela from the foundational plans conceived in 1964. Commissioned by the notable new music patron and the Music People photographer, Betty Freeman in 1967, the Box is an 18"x16"x16" sculpture constructed of plexiglas, litho film, painted acetate, an ultraviolet lighting system, electronic circuitry and audio speakers, mounted on a wooden base. This collaborative work is recognized as a precursor to their more expansive sound and light environment, Dream House, which made its debut in 1969 at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich. Young and Zazeela’s senior disciple Choi noted that:
Marian Zazeela is one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a medium of expression and perhaps the first to compose recurring motivic and thematic statements and permutations with light over time as in music. Over more than five decades Zazeela has exhibited a unique iconographic vision in media encompassing painting, calligraphic drawing, graphics, film, light performance, sculpture and environment. Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, she created an original visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with sculptural forms to generate 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. Zazeela began singing in 1962 with La Monte Young as a founding member of The Theatre of Eternal Music, and performed as vocalist in almost every concert of the ensemble to date, in addition to creating the visual components of Dream House, their collaborative sound and light work. Her major work, The Magenta Lights, has been described in Art Forum as representing “the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality. [She] transforms material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual encounter a spiritual experience." With Young in 1970, she brought Pandit Pran Nath to the U.S. and became one of his first Western disciples. She has since performed and taught the Kirana style of Indian classical music and accompanied Pandit Pran Nath in hundreds of concerts throughout the world. Zazeela’s distinctive calligraphic style appears on many of Pran Nath’s concert posters and recordings. Zazeela’s Ornamental Lightyears Tracery has been credited by Glenn Branca in Forced Exposure #16, 1990, and by David Sprague in Your Flesh # 28, 1993, to have been the direct influence on Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Village Voice listed the [Church Street] Dream House as the Best Art Installation in New York 2014, “A charge for the mind as much as for the eye and ear, the Dream House feels like a gift to our beleaguered city, where headspace is the most precious real estate of all.” Zazeela continued to perform as a vocalist until 2018 in The Just Alap Raga Ensemble and The Sundara All Star Band, which she founded with Young and Jung Hee Choi. In 2021 Zazeela was honored as one of the 14 artists to receive the prestigious Anonymous Was A Woman Award in recognition of her significant contributions. Zazeela’s rarely-seen master works on paper were featured at Dia:Beacon from 2019 to 2022, and most recently at Zazeela’s graphic work and abstract calligraphic drawings, spanning from 1962 through 2003, were on view at Artists Space in New York until May 11, 2024.
La Monte Young began to pioneer 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. “During the summer of 1958 [Young] composed the Trio for Strings–-a landmark in the history of 20th century music and the virtual fountainhead of American musical minimalism,” (K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists, 1996). 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).
The Music and Light Box is one of the few music and light sculptures created by Young and Zazeela from the foundational plans conceived in 1964. Commissioned by the notable new music patron and the Music People photographer, Betty Freeman in 1967, the Box is an 18"x16"x16" sculpture constructed of plexiglas, litho film, painted acetate, an ultraviolet lighting system, electronic circuitry and audio speakers, mounted on a wooden base. This collaborative work is recognized as a precursor to their more expansive sound and light environment, Dream House, which made its debut in 1969 at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich. Young and Zazeela’s senior disciple Choi noted that:
This self-contained work is not merely an art object; it embodies an early form of Young and Zazeela's sound and light environment. When activated, this work reveals the full effects of a Dream House experience. The dimensions of time and space are shaped by a pair of sine wave frequencies, 960 Hz and 945 Hz, in a ratio of 64:63, conceived in relation to the 60 Hz AC power line frequency in the U.S. The sound generated by the electronic circuitry built into the sculpture produces geometric standing wave patterns in the environment, allowing observers to experience sound nodes (minima) and antinodes (maxima) interwoven by this harmonic ratio. Zazeela's mesmerizing calligraphic modular series, Design D (1966), translates into colored light patterns through octalateral symmetry. Variations of this design also served as the motif for her slide projection series, Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, performed during the early Dream House presentations. The interplay of sound and light unfolds entrancing patterns in spacetime, inviting an inward journey into a ‘drone state of mind.’Charles Curtis, a leading avant-garde cellist and close collaborator of Young and Zazeela, affirms a comparable perspective in his essay, “Incomprehensible Space (OASE 78: Immersed. Sound and Architecture, NAi Publishers, 2009):
One is tempted to think of Music and Light Box as an architectural model of the full-fledged Dream House. One looks down, from the outside, at what one will eventually, once it is built, get inside of. At the same time, in its orientation, and in the manner in which its energy engages the beholder, it is the Dream House inverted: sound and light are inside and coming out, whereas in Dream House the beholder is contained within sound and light. But it is not a preliminary model for Dream House; in fact, Dream House existed as a continuous environment in Young and Zazeela’s private living space for a number of years before the conception of Music and Light Box. It is a variation of Dream House, and it is striking to observe that despite the single-point-location of the sound source as compared to the broader diffusion of sound in Dream House, it is not the source of the sound the listener is aware of, but the space around a listener which is articulated by the sound. Thus, even as a variation of Dream House, the experience for the participant is essentially the same.The Music and Light Box was first exhibited in January 1968 at the Pasadena Art Museum. From November 1968 through February 1969 it was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as part of "The Machine As Seen At The End Of The Mechanical Age" curated by Pontus Hulten. With "The Machine" exhibition it subsequently toured in 1969 to Rice University Institute for the Arts, Houston, and the San Francisco Museum of Art. From 1970 the work was on display in the Beverly Hills home of Betty Freeman. In 1983, through the generosity of Ms. Freeman, the sculpture was returned to Young and Zazeela to be installed at their Dia 6 Harrison Street Dream House, where it was on view until the installation ended in 1985. The European premiere exhibition of the Music and Light Box was presented by WDR Köln Rheinisches Musikfest at the Hans Mayer Gallery, Dusseldorf in May 1988. The sculpture traveled back to California in 1999 when it was installed in the exhibition, “Searchlight: Consciousness at the Millennium” at the CCAC Institute in San Francisco. It was later displayed as part of the "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era" exhibition organized by Tate Liverpool, May 27 – Sept 25, 2005 and toured to the Kunsthalle Schirn Frankfurt from November 2, 2005 – February 12, 2006, Kunsthalle Wien from May 5 – September 3, 2006 and Whitney Museum of American Art from May 24 – Sept 16, 2007.
Marian Zazeela is one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a medium of expression and perhaps the first to compose recurring motivic and thematic statements and permutations with light over time as in music. Over more than five decades Zazeela has exhibited a unique iconographic vision in media encompassing painting, calligraphic drawing, graphics, film, light performance, sculpture and environment. Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, she created an original visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with sculptural forms to generate 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. Zazeela began singing in 1962 with La Monte Young as a founding member of The Theatre of Eternal Music, and performed as vocalist in almost every concert of the ensemble to date, in addition to creating the visual components of Dream House, their collaborative sound and light work. Her major work, The Magenta Lights, has been described in Art Forum as representing “the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality. [She] transforms material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual encounter a spiritual experience." With Young in 1970, she brought Pandit Pran Nath to the U.S. and became one of his first Western disciples. She has since performed and taught the Kirana style of Indian classical music and accompanied Pandit Pran Nath in hundreds of concerts throughout the world. Zazeela’s distinctive calligraphic style appears on many of Pran Nath’s concert posters and recordings. Zazeela’s Ornamental Lightyears Tracery has been credited by Glenn Branca in Forced Exposure #16, 1990, and by David Sprague in Your Flesh # 28, 1993, to have been the direct influence on Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Village Voice listed the [Church Street] Dream House as the Best Art Installation in New York 2014, “A charge for the mind as much as for the eye and ear, the Dream House feels like a gift to our beleaguered city, where headspace is the most precious real estate of all.” Zazeela continued to perform as a vocalist until 2018 in The Just Alap Raga Ensemble and The Sundara All Star Band, which she founded with Young and Jung Hee Choi. In 2021 Zazeela was honored as one of the 14 artists to receive the prestigious Anonymous Was A Woman Award in recognition of her significant contributions. Zazeela’s rarely-seen master works on paper were featured at Dia:Beacon from 2019 to 2022, and most recently at Zazeela’s graphic work and abstract calligraphic drawings, spanning from 1962 through 2003, were on view at Artists Space in New York until May 11, 2024.
La Monte Young began to pioneer 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. “During the summer of 1958 [Young] composed the Trio for Strings–-a landmark in the history of 20th century music and the virtual fountainhead of American musical minimalism,” (K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists, 1996). 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).