Sunday, January 13, 2008

La Monte Young

There's always so much to learn.
I'd never heard of La Monte Young until I wrote the last post, so of course I had to do a little search on him.
For a start, he's the composer of The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers as they were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong, Illuminated by the Sawmill, the Green Sawtooth Ocelot and the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.
He's a minimalist, like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, though appears to have little in common with them.
He's the founder of The Theatre of Eternal Music, where musicians are supposed to be playing all day and night long. It hasn't always functioned, as funding is a bit of an issue. He's also into Eastern philosophy, which may account in part for the long-winded title quoted above.
As always with people of strange ideas, he has followers. At this point I don't envisage myself being one of them.

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