The Kuckuck package with The Harp of New Albion!

It is a matter of retuning e.g. a piano from the common well-tempered tuning with twelve equally wide semitone intervals, which in fact is a compromise in order to be able to play in all the 24 major and minor keys. You retune to the pure, beatless intervals in the harmonic overtone series, but even there various systems are applicable. One result is that the degree of beats will change according to how far you move from the tonality that the instrument is tuned to. Superficially you could say that it sounds un-tuned in varying degrees when you make deviations in the tonalities. Simultaneously, the instrument can take on a rare clarity of sound when you stay in or close to the fundamental tone of the tuning

Beginning in 1962 La Monte Young experimented with absolute just intervals, in contrast with the temperate compromise tuning that we’ve utilized in the West since the Baroque, and which Bach was so happy with. The music that La Monte Young began then – some years into the 60s – required such a high degree of concentration and exact intonation that he founded a group for that purpose: The Theatre of Eternal Music. The music was often supplemented with lightings by La Monte Young’s wife, the visual and light artist Marian Zazeela.

In dedication to the Young Mountain of the East, La Monte – Awakener of Ancient Dreams

The Well-Tuned Piano, a realm of ecstasy flowing from the Divine through the visionary perception of the West’s foremost musical prophet, La Monte Young, whose lifelong pursuit of the elusive sound current unfolds from a log cabin in 1930’s Idaho, where as a child he was initiated by the songs of the wind and the harmonious humming of power lines across the great American plains. He has given us a work that, in its 20 short years of creation has not only brought the piano to new dimensions of tuning and performance, but whose every detail is crafted in such an original and profound manner as to make us feel that it is the product of a large unknown tradition, aged and mellowed over peaceful centuries of development and of whose Shamanic wisdom he is the sole heir. Imbued with the immeasurable patience of a Chinese sage, La Monte has savored the main themes of his life with an enviable love and concentration, meanwhile bringing us all closer to those treasures. His is a Music, ever giving in its particular essence of consistent purity, ever engaging ancient memories like a perfumed scent of Sandalwood. With the power of Gandharva he has branded these tones in such a way as to make them part of his permanent collection. Who, after experiencing a performance of THE TORTOISE, HIS DREAMS AND JOURNEYS, could ever return to the humming of the electrical systems about them without hearing these sounds as radiant performers in La Monte’s Eternal Orchestra? How can such a work as this exist? Miracles are rarely captured on vinyl, but here we have five hours of virtual perfection. We are brought to a world, at once familiar, yet ever new. This is truth. It is easy to tell when you hear it, the beautiful unforced truth. We know it because it is ever present, this truth, yet it can’t be caught and held for long. How did it come to La Monte Young? It is said that the Creator especially loves the poor. La Monte, born the son of a poor sheep herding family finally found his way to Music, the Great Refuge where life’s experience combining with a rare sensitivity and discriminating intelligence became fuel for the expression of the depths of his yearnings. And how beautifully the long hours of yearning are expressed here, sometimes in the gracefully placed turn of a poignant motif, sometimes in the Clouds, where scores of Mandolins from the Old Country pour out their hearts in a cosmic overview of life’s tragedy. Through what grace was this great tuning system unearthed? With his unerring sense of harmonic justice, La Monte has linked together sets of third and seventh partials into relationships that must have been begging for centuries for the birth of recognition. Riding on such a foundation of universal truth, La Monte is both pilot and passenger, totally free to enjoy an unhurried schedule through the themes and chordal areas of this Epic Ballade Here for the first time in history the piano is allowed to speak with its real voice, a note at time, a dyadic relationship at a time, each event seamlessly emerging from its previous form. Here for the first time we have a musician with a tenacious love for pure intervals sculpted with infinite care, one who allows these intervals to be themselves not only in static formations but also in families of playful combinations. Here, for the first time in Western music, we experience the full-blown metaphysical archetypes of the Far East that infuse the high classicism of Bali, Java, India and China, borne aloft on a separate ray, a genuine new breath of devotion. Here is understanding beyond nature as we know it, the usual model for music having been peeled away, the everpresent Radiance is revealed. Here, in the indescribable sound fabric of The Well-Tuned Piano we find the most ecstatic and powerful expression of La Monte Young’s life, the flawless braiding together of melodies of exquisite beauty and depth which carry us effortlessly on the wings of resonating harmonic relationships ever upwards into a jet stream of pure love. Our yearnings are satisfied, our restlessness vanishes: Oh, to remain here forever. This is a Holy Work.

La Monte and I met at Berkeley. I guess it was 1960 or –59… […] We were both graduate students there, and he was, of course, the weirdest guy there; the most strange and bizarre in his music and his ideas, and I was immediately attracted to what he was doing. […] You know, when you’re a student, every new thing that’s coming in is so devastating, when you discover what anybody’s ideas were, that you had never heard about, and they were different from the next person. You just go through these phases of being knocked over, and his idea – we were the same age – was also like that, you know; even more so, because actually I felt my whole life very close to what he has inspired; these long durations and his way of approaching the tones, getting really into the tones. I was going to composition seminars [according to Folke Rabe, Terry Riley studied with Robert Erickson]. Of course, La Monte never could fit in as well. […] Most of the people at the seminars just thought it was completely insane, but we started working together, and we did a lot of playing together, improvising and at that time just exploring acoustical sounds, because electronic music was just beginning to develop. At that time there were no synthesizers.

At that time I was not doing jazz. I was really into playing classical music. I was playing a lot of piano, playing a lot of, still at that time, Bach - and Webern and Schoenberg, Bartok, Debussy and the French people. […] I was very interested in piano, and La Monte and I used to play two pianos a lot together, at that time, […] kind of free improvisations.

[…] …when I met La Monte, which was around 1959, at UC Berkeley, I immediately was attracted to him and his music. You know, he was probably, in those days, […] like a young Erik Satie. He’s very charismatic, and he didn’t look or talk or write music like anybody around him, like any of his colleagues, and I was immediately attracted to this incredible uniqueness, and then when I started studying what he was doing, I thought it was something quite amazing that he had come to this point of view […], and he talked about stasis in music, and music that is vertical; it’s just standing there, it’s not really looking for a direction […]. That influenced me a lot, jut having that kind of concept, to think about, you know. […] You’d never be aware of that there was a row or anything like a melody or rhythm. Essentially, things were so spaced out, that they just became events. I often felt like participating in his music – and I played in a lot of his early music at UC Berkeley – was kind of like sitting around a spaceship waiting for the next planet to come by! There was so much time around all the events. My first musical experiences were listening to the radio, and I remember, as a child, listening for hours to popular music on the radio, and actually being moved to tears […]. My first experiences were trying to play those tunes on the piano. We didn’t have a piano, but if I went to somebody’s house who did, I would sit up on the bench and try to pick out the tunes I was hearing on the radio. The strange thing is, I never really learned to be a good reader of music, so I think all these things started driving me more and more towards improvisation, just playing music by ear, what they called by ear in those days […] I grew up in Northern California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. This is during World War II. My father was overseas, and my grandmother used to go down to get chickens and eggs at a chicken farm […]. The chicken farmer’s wife new a little bit of piano, and she gave me my first lessons, hehe! I used to ride home in the back of her Plymouth with a bunch of chickens tied up, ready for the slaughter! When I finished my Masters degree at UC Berkeley, […] I had been working, playing rag time piano at night at Cole Street Saloon in San Francisco, and managed to save enough money for us to go to Europe, and ended up working over there as a pianist for a traveling […] show that toured the strategic air command bases in Paris, so I played officers’ clubs and played for all the variety acts that […] were coming over from England, to play in Paris. I also drove the bus. Some of these trips were quite long. It would take us four hours to get there and four hours to get back. One time I was waiting for the acts to show up, and I was in Place Pigalle, which is where the agent was that I worked for, and I walked in a pool hall, and Chet Baker was in there playing pool, and I was just dumbfounded, you know, so I told Ken Dewey, who was living in Paris at that time, working with people from The Living Theater, and some of Anna Halprin’s […] dancers, and he was trying to put together a show for The Theater of Nations – this was about 1962 or 63 – so I told Ken that Chet Baker was in the pool hall, and why don’t we get him to be involved in The Theater of Nations project. That would be a great combination with The Living Theater, so we contacted Chet and he agreed to do it […] We had some recording sessions at the Florence Bernard Theater in Paris, which the French Radio had studios in, and Chet says: “So what shall we do?”, and I said… well… I’d been going to hear him play every night at […] a left bank jazz club […], so I knew pretty much what he was playing […], so I said: “Why don’t you play So What?” – this Miles Davis tune So What, and play it together as a group, and he had a nice group for doing this kind of thing. He didn’t have a piano, and the percussionist played timpani, and cymbals instead of a trap set, and he had a great bass player and a trombone player, so I had them improvise on So What together as a band, [and] then I said: “Now each play your solo separately with no accompaniment. Just play solos on it.” Then I put the whole thing together; re-assembled it electronically with the technique that later turned out to be the time-lag accumulation thing that I used in Poppy-No-Good, [which] I actually discovered in the studios there with the French engineer, and I used that in the Chet Baker piece too, which was called The Gift. First I said to this engineer: “You know, I’ve been working with something back in San Francisco” – It was like an echoplex – “It has kind of a long, looping echo. Can you create something like that for this project? I need this long, looping echo.” I just gave him this vague description, so he […] strung the tape between two tape recorders, and fed the signal back from the second one to the first so that it would recycle each time the tape went around. When I heard that I thought, this is really really magical, you know, and that technique actually became one of my obsessions for about five or six years, maybe even longer, up to the early Seventies.

The land that you live in has a very heavy impact on you; the rhythms of the land that you live in, and the way the sun affects you, and the ground and the trees. In this part of the world, in America, let’s say, in general, there is definitely a certain kind of energy, which is hard to avoid, [that] magnetizes us in a certain way. I think jazz developed in this country because of those energies, because of, well, first of all because of the black people who were transplanted here, and had to develop their culture again, because they were lifted out by the roots. […] They picked up that, and the land and everything, and developed the gospel, and that developed into a kind of improvised music, eventually […] jazz in a very broad form today. […] I certainly feel that some of the things about jazz; the flow and energy of the music, certainly has affected me.

John Coltrane
photograph: john thiele

There was this experience that I'd had, with musicians like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and especially John Coltrane, that you were at a very powerful event, like a shamanistic event, where there’s some kind of musical alchemy going on, where a person was so focused and so concentrated in his music, that he was transforming this atmosphere, so a jazz club would become a sacred space, and I remember several times hearing John Coltrane, and every time it was like that: he would bring such intense force to his performance, just in terms of the concentration, and demand that the listeners be there and respect the music. I always felt that was so much more powerful than things I’d experienced in piano recitals or string quartet recitals; things like that. […] The earlier performances I heard of him were at The Jazz Workshop. It used to be on Broadway and San Francisco, and he used to come there quite often; The Black Hawk, I heard him at The Black Hawk, and Miles also at The Black Hawk. These clubs are no longer, I think, either one of them, existing – and then I used to go to hear Coltrane in New York. I heard him just before he died, with a huge band, with two drummers and two bass players, and then he was really getting into a big wall of sound. It wasn’t like the old quartet or anything. He’s actually really gotten into sound texture.

To part II