...As John Cage and the academic serialists pursued their apparently contradictory aesthetics on the East Coast, another compositional wave was taking shape on the edge of the Pacific. Known as minimalism, it was led by La Monte Young, the only composer in the history of Western music who has so...

... with La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Low, and Yoko Ono in 1961, Fluxus. The primary evidence for this “mis-application” are Maciunas’s graphic charts and file cards, two paperwork formats that he worked with while designing prefabricated modular units and then redeployed while planning Fluxus concerts...

... Yule Doug Adorno Theodor Geist Hegel G W F other The Velvet Underground Lou Reed John Cale La Monte Young Maureen Tucker Sterling Morrison bohemianism alchemy hypnosis The breakthrough of the Velvet Underground came in 1966 as a result of the management and promotion of Andy Warhol, who...

...Chapter 6 looks at avant garde music from John Cage and David Tudor to La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and Alvin Lucier to theoretical work in musicology that has questioned the limits of a sound-based music. The chapter also discusses the Romantic trope of the aeolian lyre in Shelley...

... unfolded. Beginning with La Monte Young, the master of the drone, a few composers began to simplify their art in an effort to connect to the listening public. The percussion music presented herein exhibits many of the traits that define minimalism: the constant repetitive pulse, reduced forces, slowly...

.... In the manner of Cage, and with La Monte Young’s feel for the textures of individual tones, it arranges the activity of sounds outside traditional Euro-American musical conventions, and in a manner that can spark a kind of thoughtful reverie, thus bringing art into vital, possibly transformative contact...

...La Monte Young, generally regarded as the father of musical minimalism, is one of America’s most important contemporary composers--and one of the most elusive. Early on Young eschewed the conventional musical institutions of publishers, record labels, and venues, in order to create compositions...

... into a natural, open system organized by feedback relations. In this way their music took forms that created a human interface with other natural, open systems. Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley were the most important pioneers of this music. Young and Riley in particular were influenced...

...; Terry Riley and La Monte Young tuned pianos to just intervals. A younger generation includes Larry Polansky, Michael Harrison, David Doty, and myself. Unlike the European spectralists, the Americans sought not to imitate some natural paradigm, but to expand the materials of music and to achieve a more...

... for the activity of sounds, and closes with consideration of La Monte Young and Terry Riley. The chapter insists that this history, in its technological and compositional advances, makes the experiments on Music for Airports possible. Ongoing references to chapter 1’s observations concretize...