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La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best known for his exploration of sustained tones, beginning with his 1958 composition ''Trio for Strings.'' His compositions have called into question the nature and definition of music, most prominently in the text scores of his '' Compositions 1960''. While few of his recordings remain in print, his work has inspired prominent musicians across various genres, including avant-garde, rock, and ambient music. Young played jazz saxophone and studied composition in California during the 1950s, and subsequently moved to New York in 1960, where he was a central figure in the downtown music and Fluxus art scenes.Jeremy Grimshaw, ''Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young''. Oxford University Press, 2012 He the ...
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New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the List of United States cities by population density, most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York (state), New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area, urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous Megacity, megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global city, global Culture of New ...
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Rock Music
Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as " rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles in the mid-1960s and later, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom.W. E. Studwell and D. F. Lonergan, ''The Classic Rock and Roll Reader: Rock Music from its Beginnings to the mid-1970s'' (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), p.xi It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, a style that drew directly from the blues and rhythm and blues genres of African-American music and from country music. Rock also drew strongly from a number of other genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical, and other musical styles. For instrumentation, rock has centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar, drums, and one or more singers. Usually, rock is song-based music with a time signature using a verse–chorus form, ...
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Hindustani Classical Music
Hindustani classical music is the classical music of northern regions of the Indian subcontinent. It may also be called North Indian classical music or, in Hindustani, ''shastriya sangeet'' (). It is played in instruments like the violin, sitar and sarod. Its origins from the 12th century CE, when it diverged from Carnatic music, the classical tradition in South India. Hindustani classical music arose in the Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb, a period of great influence of Perso-Arabic arts in the subcontinent, especially the Northern parts. This music combines the Indian classical music tradition with Perso-Arab musical knowledge, resulting in a unique tradition of gharana system of music education. History Around the 12th century, Hindustani classical music diverged from what eventually came to be identified as Carnatic classical music.The central notion in both systems is that of a melodic musical mode or '' raga'', sung to a rhythmic cycle or '' tala''. It is melodic music, with no ...
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The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of ''The Guardian'' in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of ''The Guardian'' free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for ''The Guardian'' the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main news ...
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The Well-Tuned Piano
''The Well-Tuned Piano'' is an ongoing, improvisatory, solo piano work by composer La Monte Young. Begun in 1964, Young has never considered the composition or performance "finished", and he has performed incarnations of it several times since its debut in 1974. The composition utilizes a piano tuned in just intonation. A typical performance lasts five to six hours. Young's wife, the artist Marian Zazeela, has contributed the lighting work ''The Magenta Lights'' to these performances. A 1987 performance of the piece was released on DVD in 2000. ''The Guardian'' described it as "one of the great achievements of 20th-century music." Inspiration and influence Young gives credit to Dennis Johnson, a former schoolmate and composer from UCLA, for inspiring ''The Well-Tuned Piano''. Johnson wrote an extensive, improvisatory, solo piano piece titled ''November'' in 1959, a few years before Young began working on ''The Well-Tuned Piano''. Although the piece is said to be as long as six ...
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Dream House (installation)
''Dream House'' is a sound and light installation, and occasional performance venue, created by minimalist composer La Monte Young and multimedia artist Marian Zazeela. The installation features Young's continuous sine wave drones and Zazeela's magenta lighting and design. Since its conception in the 1960s, several versions of the Dream House have existed in various locations; a current version housed above Young and Zazeela's Church Street loft in Tribeca dates back to 1993. Media The environment pairs Young's continuous sine wave composition and Zazeela's lighting work. Early iterations of Young's sound installation were sections from his larger work ''The Turtle, His Dreams and Journeys'' (1966–present); recent iterations feature a composition with a 107-word title that begins “The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time” and consists of 32 sine wave tones produced on a Rayna synthesizer with precise microtonal capabilities; the frequency relationships can be experienced dif ...
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John Cale
John Davies Cale (born 9 March 1942) is a Welsh musician, composer, singer, songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the American rock band the Velvet Underground. Over his six-decade career, Cale has worked in various styles across rock, drone, classical, avant-garde and electronic music. He studied music at Goldsmiths College, University of London, before relocating in 1963 to New York City's downtown music scene, where he performed as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music and formed the Velvet Underground. Since leaving the band in 1968, Cale has released sixteen solo studio albums, including the widely acclaimed '' Paris 1919'' (1973) and '' Music for a New Society'' (1982). Cale has also acquired a reputation as an adventurous record producer, working on the debut albums of several innovative artists, including the Stooges and Patti Smith. Early life and career John Davies Cale was born on 9 March 1942 in the mining village of Garnant in the valley ...
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Tony Conrad
Anthony Schmalz Conrad (March 7, 1940 – April 9, 2016) was an American video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher, and writer. Active in a variety of media since the early 1960s, he was a pioneer of both drone music and structural film. As a musician, he was an important figure in the New York minimal music, minimalist scene of the early 1960s, during which time he performed as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music (along with John Cale, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and others). He became recognized as a filmmaker for his 1966 film ''The Flicker''. He performed and collaborated with a wide range of artists over the course of his career. Biography Early life Conrad was born in Concord, New Hampshire to Mary Elizabeth Parfitt and Arthur Emil Conrad but raised in Baldwin, Maryland and Northern Virginia. His father worked with Everett Warner during World War II in designing dazzle camouflage for the US Navy. Conrad's high school violin lesso ...
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Theatre Of Eternal Music
The Theatre of Eternal Music (later sometimes called The Dream Syndicate) was an avant-garde musical group formed by La Monte Young in New York City in 1962. The core of the group consisted of Young (voice, saxophone), Tony Conrad (violin), Marian Zazeela (voice, lighting), and John Cale (viola), with additional participants including Angus MacLise, Terry Riley, Billy Name, Terry Jennings, Jon Hassell, Alex Dea, and Jon Gibson (minimalist musician), Jon Gibson. The group's self-described "dream music" explored drone (music), drones and just intonation, pure harmonic intervals, employing sustained tones and electric amplifier, amplification in lengthy, all-night performances. Archival recordings of the group's influential 1960s performances remain in the possession of Young, but none have ever seen official release. A dispute over compositional credit between Young and other members (namely Conrad and Cale) resulted in Young's refusal to release any of the material. Nonetheless, ...
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Drone Music
Drone music, drone-based music, or simply drone, is a minimalist genre that emphasizes the use of sustained sounds, notes, or tone clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece. La Monte Young, one of its 1960s originators, defined it in 2000 as "the sustained tone branch of minimalism". Overview Music which contains drones and is rhythmically still or very slow, called "drone music",For information on early and other uses of drones in music around the world, see for example (American Musicological Society, ''JAMS'' (''Journal of the American Musicological Society''), 1959, p255 "Remarks such as those on drone effects produced by double pipes with an unequal number of holes provoke thoughts about the mystery of drone music in antiquity and about primitive polyphony.") or (Barry S. Brook & al., ''Perspectives in Musicology'', W. W. Norton, 1972, , p85 "My third example of the f ...
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Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books by decree in 1586, it is the second oldest university press after Cambridge University Press. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics known as the Delegates of the Press, who are appointed by the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. The Delegates of the Press are led by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University Press has had a similar governance structure since the 17th century. The press is located on Walton Street, Oxford, opposite Somerville College, in the inner suburb of Jericho. For the last 500 years, OUP has primarily focused on the publication of pedagogical texts and ...
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Downtown Music
Downtown music is a subdivision of American music, closely related to experimental music, which developed in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s. History The scene the term describes began in 1960, when Yoko Ono, one of the early Fluxus artists, opened her loft at 112 Chambers Street, in a part of Lower Manhattan later named Tribeca, to be used as a performance space for a series curated by La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield. Prior to this, most classical music performances in New York City occurred "uptown" around the areas that the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center and Columbia University would soon occupy. Ono's gesture led to a new performance tradition of informal performances in nontraditional venues such as lofts and converted industrial spaces, involving music much more experimental than that of the more conventional modern classical series Uptown. Spaces in Manhattan that supported Downtown music from the 1960s on included the Judson Memorial Church, The Kitchen, Exper ...
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